Scaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks

dc.creatorLämmer, Stefan
dc.creatorGehlsen, Björn
dc.creatorHelbing, Dirk
dc.date2006-03-30
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T07:07:50Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T07:07:50Z
dc.descriptionThe urban road networks of the 20 largest German cities have been analysed, based on a detailed database providing the geographical positions as well as the travel-times for network sizes up to 37,000 nodes and 87,000 links. As the human driver recognises travel-times rather than distances, faster roads appear to be 'shorter' than slower ones. The resulting metric space has an effective dimension d>2, which is a significant measure of the heterogeneity of road speeds. We found that traffic strongly concentrates on only a small fraction of the roads. The distribution of vehicular flows over the roads obeys a power law, indicating a clear hierarchical order of the roads. Studying the cellular structure of the areas enclosed by the roads, the distribution of cell sizes is scale invariant as well.
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0603257
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0603257
dc.identifierS. Lämmer, B. Gehlsen, and Dirk Helbing (2006) Scaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks, Physica A 363(1) 89-95
dc.identifierdoi:10.1016/j.physa.2006.01.051
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/110540
dc.subjectPhysics and Society
dc.titleScaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks
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