Understanding Road Usage Patterns in Urban Areas
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Gonzalez_Understanding road.pdf
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Author(s) • • • •
Wang, Pu
Hunter, Timothy
Bayen, Alexandre M.
Schechtner, Katja
Gonzalez, Marta C.
Date Issued
December 2012
Journal
Scientific Reports
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Wang, Pu et al. “Understanding Road Usage Patterns in Urban Areas.” Scientific Reports 2 (2012).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In this paper, we combine the most complete record of daily mobility, based on large-scale mobile phone data, with detailed Geographic Information System (GIS) data, uncovering previously hidden patterns in urban road usage. We find that the major usage of each road segment can be traced to its own - surprisingly few - driver sources. Based on this finding we propose a network of road usage by defining a bipartite network framework, demonstrating that in contrast to traditional approaches, which define road importance solely by topological measures, the role of a road segment depends on both: its betweeness and its degree in the road usage network. Moreover, our ability to pinpoint the few driver sources contributing to the major traffic flow allows us to create a strategy that achieves a significant reduction of the travel time across the entire road system, compared to a benchmark approach.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/srep01001