Modeling Network Growth with Scaling Laws in a Linear Monocentric City

Abstract

Scaling relationships have been observed across urban systems and appear to reveal global emergent properties that may help to characterize, understand, and predict urban growth. Empirical urban studies that show scaling laws relating the growth in population to that of the transportation network warrant theoretical investigation. Such scaling phenomena are considered in the context of a linear monocentric city. Commuters are distributed from the city boundary to the common destination (the central business district), and two modes (railway and car) are available along the corridor. Two scenarios of urban growth are considered: vertical and horizontal. Road capacity and corridor length both increase alongside the population growth. Within these scenarios, growth is constrained to follow a scaling law and the evolution of network performance is examined. The results suggest that different long-term evolution trajectories may exist depending on the scaling-law and network features. On this basis, theoretical limits need to be investigated on the possible evolutionary pathways for a city whose growth is dependent on its transport system.