Book excerpt: "TRB's Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2391 consists of 14 pages that explore modeling and assessment of local perturbations; speed synchronization process of merging vehicles from the entrance ramp; estimation of arterial travel time from automatic number plate recognition data; data-fitted first-order traffic models and their second-order generalizations; the hysteresis and capacity drop phenomena in freeway networks. This issue of the TRR also examines travel time reliability; speed harmonization; connecting network-wide travel time reliability with the network fundamental diagram of traffic flow; the calibration of traffic flow models; a new consistency index; a macroscopic lane-changing model; microscopic traffic flow properties in emergency situations; a generalized macroscopic fundamental diagram for urban freeways; and an estimation of real-time traffic state along signalized arterial corridors." - publisher's note