Scale-free resilience of real traffic jams

The concept of resilience can be realized in natural and engineering systems, representing the ability of a system to adapt and recover from various disturbances. Although resilience is a critical property needed for understanding and managing the risks and collapses of transportation systems, an accepted and useful definition of resilience for urban traffic as well as its statistical property under perturbations are still missing. Here, we define city traffic resilience based on the spatiotemporal clusters of congestion in real traffic and find that the resilience follows a scale-free distribution in 2D city road networks and 1D highways with different exponents but similar exponents on different days and in different cities. The traffic resilience is also revealed to have a scaling relation between the cluster size of the spatiotemporal jam and its recovery duration independent of microscopic details. Our findings of universal traffic resilience can provide an indication toward better understanding and designing of these complex engineering systems under internal and external disturbances.