Population-weighted efficiency in transportation networks.

Lei Dong,Zengru Di,Jiang Zhang,Ruiqi Li

doi:10.1038/srep26377

Lei Dong, Zengru Di + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/srep26377

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Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: May 27, 2016
Citations: 43	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University

Abstract

Transportation efficiency is critical for the operation of cities and is attracting great attention worldwide. Improving the transportation efficiency can not only decrease energy consumption, reduce carbon emissions, but also accelerate people’s interactions, which will become more and more important for sustainable urban living. Generally, traffic conditions in less-developed countries are not so good due to the undeveloped economy and road networks, while this issue is rarely studied before, because traditional survey data in these areas are scarce. Nowadays, with the development of ubiquitous mobile phone data, we can explore the transportation efficiency in a new way. In this paper, based on users’ call detailed records (CDRs), we propose an indicator named population-weighted efficiency (PWE) to quantitatively measure the efficiency of the transportation networks. PWE can provide insights into transportation infrastructure development, according to which we identify dozens of inefficient routes at both the intra- and inter-city levels, which are verified by several ongoing construction projects in Senegal. In addition, we compare PWE with excess commuting indices, and the fitting result of PWE is better than excess commuting index, which also proves the validity of our method.

Highlights

Transportation efficiency is critical for the operation of cities and is attracting great attention worldwide
We focus on ten main cities of Senegal, especially Dakar, which is the capital and the largest city in Senegal
According to the call detailed records (CDRs), we find that: i) on average, in each fortnight, there are more than 170,000 users within the region of Dakar, which accounts for almost 60% of the total sampled users (300,000); ii) Plateau and Médina are two of the most active regions during the daytime, which is in agreement with the situation observed in reality

Summary

Introduction

Transportation efficiency is critical for the operation of cities and is attracting great attention worldwide. We leave tremendous “digital footprints” (geo-located data collected by electronic equipment) in cities due to the increasing penetration rate of mobile phones[20], social media[21], transportation cards[22], and credit cards[23], among others These “digital footprints” give us a dynamical perspective of the ongoing phenomena in cities[24,25], and provide us new data source to explore the transportation efficiency.

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