No Arabic abstract
Transportation networks serve as windows into the complex world of urban systems. By properly characterizing a road network, we can therefore better understand its encompassing urban system. This study offers a geometrical approach towards capturing inherent properties of urban road networks. It offers a robust and efficient methodology towards defining and extracting three relevant indicators of road networks: area, line, and point thresholds, through measures of their grid equivalents. By applying the methodology to 50 U.S. urban systems, we successfully observe differences between eastern versus western, coastal versus inland, and old versus young, cities. Moreover, we show that many socio-economic characteristics as well as travel patterns within urban systems are directly correlated with their corresponding area, line, and point thresholds.
Public urban mobility systems are composed by several transportation modes connected together. Most studies in urban mobility and planning often ignore the multi-layer nature of transportation systems considering only aggregate
This article analyzes the complex geometry of urban transportation networks as a gateway to understanding their encompassing urban systems. Using a proposed ring-buffer approach and applying it to 50 urban areas in the United States, we measure road lengths in concentric rings from carefully-selected urban centers and study how the trends evolve as we move away from these centers. Overall, we find that the complexity of urban transportation networks is naturally coupled, consisting of two distinct patterns: (1) a fractal component (i.e., power law) that represent a uniform grid, and (2) a second component that can be exponential, power law, or logarithmic that captures changes in road density. From this second component, we introduce two new indices, density index and decay index, which jointly capture essential characteristics of urban systems and therefore can help us gain new insights into how cities evolve.
We propose a phenomenological non-equilibrium framework for modelling the evolution of cities which describes the intra-urban resettlement as an irreversible diffusive process. We validate this framework using the actual migration data for the Australian capital cities. With respect to the residential relocation, the population is shown to be composed of two distinct groups, exhibiting different relocation frequencies. In the context of the developed framework, these groups can be interpreted as two components of a binary mixture, each with its own diffusive relaxation time. Using this approach, we obtain long-term predictions of the cities spatial structure, which defines their equilibrium population distribution.
Improved mobility not only contributes to more intensive human activities but also facilitates the spread of communicable disease, thus constituting a major threat to billions of urban commuters. In this study, we present a multi-city investigation of communicable diseases percolating among metro travelers. We use smart card data from three megacities in China to construct individual-level contact networks, based on which the spread of disease is modeled and studied. We observe that, though differing in urban forms, network layouts, and mobility patterns, the metro systems of the three cities share similar contact network structures. This motivates us to develop a universal generation model that captures the distributions of the number of contacts as well as the contact duration among individual travelers. This model explains how the structural properties of the metro contact network are associated with the risk level of communicable diseases. Our results highlight the vulnerability of urban mass transit systems during disease outbreaks and suggest important planning and operation strategies for mitigating the risk of communicable diseases.
Short-term passenger flow forecasting is a crucial task for urban rail transit operations. Emerging deep-learning technologies have become effective methods used to overcome this problem. In this study, the authors propose a deep-learning architecture called Conv-GCN that combines a graph convolutional network (GCN) and a three-dimensional (3D) convolutional neural network (3D CNN). First, they introduce a multi-graph GCN to deal with three inflow and outflow patterns (recent, daily, and weekly) separately. Multi-graph GCN networks can capture spatiotemporal correlations and topological information within the entire network. A 3D CNN is then applied to deeply integrate the inflow and outflow information. High-level spatiotemporal features between different inflow and outflow patterns and between stations that are nearby and far away can be extracted by 3D CNN. Finally, a fully connected layer is used to output results. The Conv-GCN model is evaluated on smart card data of the Beijing subway under the time interval of 10, 15, and 30 min. Results show that this model yields the best performance compared with seven other models. In terms of the root-mean-square errors, the performances under three time intervals have been improved by 9.402, 7.756, and 9.256%, respectively. This study can provide critical insights for subway operators to optimise urban rail transit operations.