The Network of Commuters in London

TL;DR

This paper analyzes London's commuter network, revealing power-law in-degree distributions and exponential out-degree distributions, and introduces a lattice model to explain these empirical patterns.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of London's commuter network structure and proposes a simple model to explain the observed degree and strength distributions.

Findings

In-degree distribution follows a power law with exponent around -2.

Out-degree distribution is exponential.

The proposed lattice model captures the empirical distributions.

Abstract

We study the directed and weighted network in which the wards of London are vertices and two vertices are connected whenever there is at least one person commuting to work from a ward to another. Remarkably the in-strength and in-degree distribution tail is a power law with exponent around -2, while the out-strength and out-degree distribution tail is exponential. We propose a simple square lattice model to explain the observed empirical behaviour.