Scaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks

Stefan Lämmer, Björn Gehlsen and Dirk Helbing

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2006, vol. 363, issue 1, 89-95

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Urban road network; Graph topology; Power-law scaling; Travel-times; Vehicle traffic; Cellular structure; Effective dimension; Hierarchy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:363:y:2006:i:1:p:89-95

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2006.01.051

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