Multi-Dimensional Geometric Complexity in Urban Transportation Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric methodology to analyze urban road networks, revealing how their structural properties correlate with socio-economic factors and travel patterns across different U.S. cities.

Contribution

It presents a novel, efficient approach to quantify urban road network complexity using three key geometric indicators derived from grid measures.

Findings

Differences in network properties between eastern and western cities.

Correlations between network thresholds and socio-economic characteristics.

Associations between network geometry and travel patterns.

Abstract

Transportation networks serve as windows into the complex world of urban systems. By properly characterizing a road network, we can therefore better understand its encompassing urban system. This study offers a geometrical approach towards capturing inherent properties of urban road networks. It offers a robust and efficient methodology towards defining and extracting three relevant indicators of road networks: area, line, and point thresholds, through measures of their grid equivalents. By applying the methodology to 50 U.S. urban systems, we successfully observe differences between eastern versus western, coastal versus inland, and old versus young, cities. Moreover, we show that many socio-economic characteristics as well as travel patterns within urban systems are directly correlated with their corresponding area, line, and point thresholds.