Street Hierarchies: A Minority of Streets Account for a Majority of Traffic Flow

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that a small minority of streets in a city carry the majority of traffic flow, following the 80/20 principle, and provides detailed geometric and topological analysis to support this.

Contribution

It offers detailed empirical evidence that a tiny fraction of streets account for most traffic, refining the understanding of urban street hierarchies and city organization.

Findings

20% of streets carry 80% of traffic

1% of streets carry over 20% of traffic

Street hierarchies follow the 80/20 principle in traffic flow

Abstract

Urban streets are hierarchically organized in the sense that a majority of streets are trivial, while a minority of streets is vital. This hierarchy can be simply, but elegantly, characterized by the 80/20 principle, i.e. 80 percent of streets are less connected (below the average), while 20 percent of streets are well connected (above the average); out of the 20 percent, there is 1 percent of streets that are extremely well connected. This paper, using a European city as an example, examined, at a much more detailed level, such street hierarchies from the perspective of geometric and topological properties. Based on an empirical study, we further proved a previous conjecture that a minority of streets accounts for a majority of traffic flow; more accurately, the 20 percent of top streets accommodate 80 percent of traffic flow (20/80), and the 1 percent of top streets account for more than 20 percent of traffic flow (1/20). Our study provides new evidence as to how a city is (self-)organized, contributing to the understanding of cities and their evolution using increasingly available mobility geographic information.