It is shown that the desire for smooth and comfortable driving is directly
responsible for the occurrence of complex spatio-temporal structures
(``synchronized traffic'') in highway traffic. This desire goes beyond the
avoidance of accidents which so far has been the main focus of microscopic
modeling and which is mainly responsible for the other two phases observed
empirically, free flow and wide moving jams. These features have been
incorporated into a microscopic model based on stochastic cellular automata and
the results of computer simulations are compared with empirical data. The
simple structure of the model allows for very fast implementations of realistic
networks. The level of agreement with the empirical findings opens new
perspectives for reliable traffic forecasts.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, colour figures with reduced resolutio