Scaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks

By Stefan Lammer, B. Gehlsen, Dirk Helbing. 2006

384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The urban road networks of the 20 largest German cities have been analysed, based on a detailed database providing the geographical positions as well as the travel-times for network sizes up to 37,000 nodes and 87,000 links. As the human driver recognises travel-times rather than distances, faster roads appear to be ‘shorter’ than slower ones. The resulting metric space has an effective dimension δ>2, which is a significant measure of the heterogeneity of road speeds. We found that traffic strongly concentrates on only a small fraction of the roads. The distribution of vehicular flows over the roads obeys a power law, indicating a clear hierarchical order of the roads. Studying the cellular structure of the areas enclosed by the roads, the distribution of cell sizes is scale invariant as well.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Global and Planetary Change, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/def887c2c61bab3b057e54833f8c49d4b567e81c

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Citations in the corpus

Street Centrality and the Location of Economic Activities in Barcelona (2012, background): “…of a spatial nature (Boccaletti et al., 2006) and the availability of extensive geographical datasets have led to a wealth of studies on the ‘architecture’ of street networks in cities (Masucci et al., 2009; Jiang, 2007; Jiang and Claramunt, 2004; Carvalho and Penn, 2004; Lämmer et al., 2006).”
Modeling the Growth of Transportation Networks: A Comprehensive Review (2009, background): “As the physics community became interested in surface transportation networks, however, it was recognized that they exhibit attributes that differ from scale free networks (Csanyi and Szendroi 2004; Gastner and Newman 2006; Jiang and Claramunt 2004; Lammer et al. 2006 ), largely due to the spatial ”
Elementary processes governing the evolution of road networks (2012, background): “(Germany)[30] and for a simple model of road networks [40], the cell area distribution P (A) is a power law”
Geospatial analysis requires a different way of thinking: the problem of spatial heterogeneity (2014, background): “…including, for example, street lengths and connectivity (Carvalho and Penn 2004, Jiang 2009), building heights (Batty et al. 2008), street blocks (Lämmer et al. 2006, Jiang and Liu 2012), population densities (Schaefer and Mahoney 2003, Kyriakidou et al. 2011), and airport sizes and connectivity…”