Understanding urban congestion with biking traffic and routing detour ratio

TL;DR

This paper uncovers a sublinear scaling relation between vehicle congestion and biking traffic-weighted detour ratio, revealing a strong interplay that can inform congestion prediction and urban planning improvements.

Contribution

It introduces a novel sublinear scaling relation linking vehicle congestion to biking traffic, enhancing understanding of urban traffic dynamics and aiding in congestion mitigation strategies.

Findings

Discovered a robust sublinear scaling relation between congestion and biking traffic-weighted detour ratio.

Demonstrated the application of detour ratio in detecting inefficient routes to alleviate congestion.

Showed the relation's potential in improving urban traffic models and planning.

Abstract

Bike-sharing systems have been regarded as a critical component of solutions towards the transition to greener and more sustainable transportation, with the benefits of reducing carbon emissions, improving public health, and mitigating congestion by replacing short-distance motorized trips. Due to better accessibility and usage flexibility, newly emergent dockless sharing bikes have become quite popular and are reviving the fashion of cycling in cities. Urban congestion is simultaneously influenced by heterogeneous saptio-temporal travel demands, topology and spatial characteristics of road networks, and the interplay between travel modes. In this paper, by considering aforementioned factors, we discover a robust sublinear scaling relation between the level of congestion for vehicles and the detour ratio weighted by biking traffic, which is intriguing given the fact that congestion and detour ratio is linearly independent. Such a scaling relation implies a strong interplay between vehicle traffic and cycling activities and can be applied in predictions for congestion or aggregated to more sophisticated traffic models. In addition, biking-traffic-weighted detour ratio can be applied to detect inefficient routes, which would help alleviate urban congestion, make better urban planning, and improve transportation efficiency and equity in cities.