From one-way streets to percolation on random mixed graphs

TL;DR

This paper investigates how one-way streets affect urban traffic patterns and models this effect using a percolation framework on mixed graphs, revealing a phase transition in connectivity that differs from classical percolation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mixed graph model incorporating one-way streets and analyzes the percolation transition, identifying a new universality class and connecting urban street network effects to statistical physics.

Findings

Empirical one-way street effects induce non-universal detour exponents.

A threshold p_c exists where the strongly connected component vanishes.

The transition exhibits a new universality class distinct from classical percolation.

Abstract

In most studies, street networks are considered as undirected graphs while one-way streets and their effect on shortest paths are usually ignored. Here, we first study the empirical effect of one-way streets in about $140$ cities in the world. Their presence induces a detour that persists over a wide range of distances and characterized by a non-universal exponent. The effect of one-ways on the pattern of shortest paths is then twofold: they mitigate local traffic in certain areas but create bottlenecks elsewhere. This empirical study leads naturally to consider a mixed graph model of 2d regular lattices with both undirected links and a diluted variable fraction $p$ of randomly directed links which mimics the presence of one-ways in a street network. We study the size of the strongly connected component (SCC) versus $p$ and demonstrate the existence of a threshold $p_c$ above which the SCC size is zero. We show numerically that this transition is non-trivial for lattices with degree less than $4$ and provide some analytical argument. We compute numerically the critical exponents for this transition and confirm previous results showing that they define a new universality class different from both the directed and standard percolation. Finally, we show that the transition on real-world graphs can be understood with random perturbations of regular lattices. The impact of one-ways on the graph properties were already the subject of a few mathematical studies, and our results show that this problem has also interesting connections with percolation, a classical model in statistical physics.