Switch of critical percolation modes in dynamical city traffic

Percolation transition is widely observed in networks ranging from biology to engineering. While much attention has been paid on network topologies, studies rarely focus on critical percolation phenomena driven by network dynamics. Using extensive real data, we study the critical percolation properties of the dynamics of city traffic. We find that two modes of different critical percolation behavior appear in the same network topology under different traffic dynamics. Our study suggests that the critical percolation of city traffic has similar critical characteristics as small-world networks during non-rush hours or days-off, while it switches to the behavior of two-dimensional lattice percolation during rush hours in working days. We show that this difference can be interpreted by the fact that the road velocity on highways during non-rush hours or days-off is relative high representing effective long-range connections like in small-world networks. Our results might be useful for understanding and mitigating traffic congestion.