Understanding congested travel in urban areas
Name
Colak-2016-Understanding congested.pdf
Size
1.42 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
48905f258a78ccdd48f438f3d8351520
Author(s)
Colak, Serdar
Lima, Antonio
Gonzalez, Marta C.
Date Issued
March 2016
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Colak, Serdar, Antonio Lima, and Marta C. Gonzalez. “Understanding Congested Travel in Urban Areas.” Nat Comms 7 (March 15, 2016): 10793.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Rapid urbanization and increasing demand for transportation burdens urban road infrastructures. The interplay of number of vehicles and available road capacity on their routes determines the level of congestion. Although approaches to modify demand and capacity exist, the possible limits of congestion alleviation by only modifying route choices have not been systematically studied. Here we couple the road networks of five diverse cities with the travel demand profiles in the morning peak hour obtained from billions of mobile phone traces to comprehensively analyse urban traffic. We present that a dimensionless ratio of the road supply to the travel demand explains the percentage of time lost in congestion. Finally, we examine congestion relief under a centralized routing scheme with varying levels of awareness of social good and quantify the benefits to show that moderate levels are enough to achieve significant collective travel time savings.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10793
