Empirical study of long-range connections in a road network offers new ingredient for navigation optimization models

Navigation problem in lattices with long-range connections has been widely studied to understand the design principles for optimal transport networks; however, the travel cost of long-range connections was not considered in previous models. We define long-range connection in a road network as the shortest path between a pair of nodes through highways and empirically analyze the travel cost properties of long-range connections. Based on the maximum speed allowed in each road segment, we observe that the time needed to travel through a long-range connection has a characteristic time Th 29min, while the time required when using the alternative arterial road path has two different characteristic times Ta 13 and 41min and follows a power law for times larger than 50min. Using daily commuting origin‐destination matrix data, we additionally find that the use of long-range connections helps people to save about half of the travel time in their daily commute. Based on the empirical

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