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This paper presents a generalized second-order hydrodynamic traffic model. Its central piece is the expression for the relative velocity of the congestion (compression wave) propagation. We show that the well-known second-order models of Payne–Whitham, Aw–Rascal and Zhang are all special cases of the featured generalized model, and their properties are fully defined by how the relative velocity of the congestion is expressed. The proposed model is verified with traffic data from a segment of the Interstate 580 freeway in California, USA, collected by the California DOT’s Performance Measurement System (PeMS).