Road network circuity in metropolitan areas

Circuity, the ratio of network to Euclidean distances, describes the directness of trips and the efficiency of transportation networks. This paper measures the circuity of the fifty-one most populated Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States and identifies trends in those circuities between 1990 and 2010. Overall circuity has increased between 1990 and 2010: random points have not only become farther apart in distance, their shortest network path has become more circuitous, suggesting that the more recently constructed parts of street networks are laid out more circuitously than older parts of the network. Over this period thirty-five MSAs experienced a statistically significant increase in circuity (six experienced a significant decrease). As expected, short trips are more circuitous than long trips. A new circuity distance-decay function describes how circuity varies with distance within metropolitan areas. The parameters of this function have changed from 1990 to 2010.

[1]  Christian Werner.  THE ROLE OF TOPOLOGY AND GEOMETRY IN OPTIMAL NETWORK DESIGN , 1968 .

[2]  P. Haggett.  Network Analysis In Geography , 1971 .

[3]  A. J. Goldman.  Approximate Localization Theorems for Optimal Facility Placement , 1972 .

[4]  Gordon F. Newell,et al.  Traffic flow on transportation networks , 1980 .

[5]  Carol E. Hoffecker,et al.  Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States , 1987 .

[6]  E. Mills,et al.  The Causes of Metropolitan Suburbanization , 1993 .

[7]  A. Yezer,et al.  Causality in the Suburbanization of Population and Employment , 1994 .

[8]  David J. Forkenbrock,et al.  Highways and Business Location Decisions , 1996 .

[9]  Hai Yang,et al.  Models and algorithms for road network design: a review and some new developments , 1998 .

[10]  Frank Southworth,et al.  Intermodal and international freight network modeling , 2000 .

[11]  P. Nijkamp,et al.  Mobility and spatial dynamics: an uneasy relationship , 2001 .

[12]  Ronald H. Ballou,et al.  Selected country circuity factors for road travel distance estimation , 2002 .

[13]  Peng Guo-xiong.  Network Traffic Capacity Analysis Method Based on OD Distribution Matrix , 2003 .

[14]  Manoj K. Jha.  CRITERIA-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR SELECTING HIGHWAY ALIGNMENTS , 2003 .

[15]  Faisal A. Mubarak.  Urban growth boundary policy and residential suburbanization: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia , 2004 .

[16]  Hartwig H. Hochmair,et al.  Towards a Classification of Route Selection Criteria for Route Planning Tools , 2004, SDH.

[17]  Konstantina Papagiannaki,et al.  Structural analysis of network traffic flows , 2004, SIGMETRICS '04/Performance '04.

[18]  Christophe Claramunt,et al.  Topological Analysis of Urban Street Networks , 2004 .

[19]  Peter F. Fisher,et al.  Developments in Spatial Data Handling, 11th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Leicester, UK, August 23-25, 2004 , 2005, SDH.

[20]  Douglas A. Popken.  Controlling order circuity in pickup and delivery problems , 2006 .

[21]  B. Jiang.  A topological pattern of urban street networks: Universality and peculiarity , 2007, physics/0703223.

[22]  Nathaniel Baum-Snow,et al.  Did Highways Cause Suburbanization , 2007 .

[23]  Dr A. Alavi,et al.  Statistical Mechanics and its applications , 2007 .

[24]  Harry Eugene Stanley,et al.  Transport in networks with multiple sources and sinks , 2008, ArXiv.

[25]  Alessandro Flammini,et al.  Modeling urban street patterns. , 2007, Physical review letters.

[26]  A. El-geneidy,et al.  The Minimum Circuity Frontier and the Journey to Work , 2009 .

[27]  David M Levinson,et al.  Network Structure and Activity Spaces , 2010 .

[28]  Marc Barthelemy,et al.  Spatial Networks , 2010, Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining.

[29]  Halit Üster,et al.  Strategic Design and Analysis of a Relay Network in Truckload Transportation , 2011, Transp. Sci..

[30]  David M Levinson,et al.  Network Structure and Spatial Separation , 2012 .

[31]  David M Levinson,et al.  A Positive Theory of Network Connectivity , 2010 .

[32]  Soong Moon Kang,et al.  Structure of Urban Movements: Polycentric Activity and Entangled Hierarchical Flows , 2010, PloS one.

[33]  Bambang Susantono,et al.  Transportation Land Use Dynamics in Metropolitan Jakarta , 2012 .

[34]  Vito Latora,et al.  Elementary processes governing the evolution of road networks , 2012, Scientific Reports.

[35]  S. Derrible.  Network Centrality of Metro Systems , 2012, PloS one.

[36]  D. Levinson.  Network Structure and City Size , 2012, PloS one.

[37]  Jonathan Levine,et al.  Does Accessibility Require Density or Speed? , 2012 .

[38]  Bin Jiang,et al.  Topological Structure of Urban Street Networks from the Perspective of Degree Correlations , 2013, ArXiv.