Street Hierarchies: A Minority of Streets Account for a Majority of 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.

arXiv comment15 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables, submitted to Int. J. of Geographic Information Science

References in corpus (7)

• Emergence of scaling in random networks
• Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
• Hierarchical Organization in Complex Networks
• The Network Analysis of Urban Streets: A Primal Approach
• A Topological Pattern of Urban Street Networks: Universality and Peculiarity
• Scale Invariance in Road Networks
• Scaling and universality in the micro-structure of urban space

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• Modeling fractal structure of city-size distributions using correlation function
• Zipf's law, 1/f noise, and fractal hierarchy
• Recursive Subdivision of Urban Space and Zipf's law
• A New Kind of Beauty Out of the Underlying Scaling of Geographic Space
• Volunteered Geographic Information and Computational Geography: New Perspectives