Morphological and Functional Analysis of Urban Rail Transit Networks

In view of the rise of complex networks study and construction of rail transit in metropolises of China, this paper tries to apply the study of complex networks to urban rail transit networks analysis both considering topological and metric properties. First, the rail transit networks in six Chinese cities are abstracted with primal approach. Second, from a new perspective, the topological analysis is correlated with the network morphological properties, which shows that the networks with "ring plus radials" can decrease the mean topological distance and reflect better operation efficiency of the whole network. Furthermore, the structure regularities are demonstrated by the exploration of Generalized Extreme Value distributions, which are well approximate with the topological distance distribution. Third, metric analysis is correlated with the functional structure of cities, which displays the spread-out development pattern is more reasonable than the centralized pattern to guide the passenger flow of rail transit and urban land use. Then, the role of transfer stations in rail transit networks is prominent in both topological and functional analysis. The results show the spatial distribution of transfer stations is more important than the relative number of transfer stations for urban development. Last, the rail transit networks of Hong Kong and Chicago are adopted as data validation. The topological and metric results are in accordance with the six Chinese cities. These findings indeed can effectively help planners in the practice of rail transit network and have great significance to promote the development of complex networks.