Abstract
The quantitative study of traffic dynamics is crucial to ensure the efficiency of urban transportation networks. The current work investigates the spatial properties of congestion, that is, we aim to characterize the city areas where traffic bottlenecks occur. The analysis of a large amount of real road networks in previous works showed that congestion points experience spatial abrupt transitions, namely they shift away from the city center as larger urban areas are incorporated. The fundamental ingredient behind this effect is the entanglement of central and arterial roads, embedded in separated geographical regions. In this paper we extend the analysis of the conditions yielding abrupt transitions of congestion location. First, we look into the more realistic situation in which arterial and central roads, rather than lying on sharply separated regions, present spatial overlap. It results that this affects the position of bottlenecks and introduces new possible congestion areas. Secondly, we pay particular attention to the role played by the edge distribution, proving that it allows to smooth the transitions profile, and so to control the congestion displacement. Finally, we show that the aforementioned phenomenology may be recovered also as a consequence of a discontinuity in the node’s density, in a domain with uniform connectivity. Our results provide useful insights for the design and optimization of urban road networks, and the management of the daily traffic.
Highlights
The sustainability of urban life represents one of the greatest challenges of our time
We found that the structural discontinuity between the central and arterial roads yields an abrupt transition of the location where congestion occurs
In “A model for center-periphery entanglement” section we present the Delaunay triangulation (DT)-minimum spanning tree (MST) random planar model developed in Lampo et al (2021), constituting a practical benchmark to deal with the interplay of central and arterial roads
Summary
The sustainability of urban life represents one of the greatest challenges of our time. This has sparked a lot of interest among researchers coming from several areas, and has led to the birth of the so-called science of cities (Batty 2012). In this context, the engineering and optimization of road transportation networks stands as a crucial task to ensure the efficiency of traffic dynamics and to control the related congestion emergence.
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