No Arabic abstract
Cycling is a promising solution to unsustainable car-centric urban transport systems. However, prevailing bicycle network development follows a slow and piecewise process, without taking into account the structural complexity of transportation networks. Here we explore systematically the topological limitations of urban bicycle network development. For 62 cities we study different variations of growing a synthetic bicycle network between an arbitrary set of points routed on the urban street network. We find initially decreasing returns on investment until a critical threshold, posing fundamental consequences to sustainable urban planning: Cities must invest into bicycle networks with the right growth strategy, and persistently, to surpass a critical mass. We also find pronounced overlaps of synthetically grown networks in cities with well-developed existing bicycle networks, showing that our model reflects reality. Growing networks from scratch makes our approach a generally applicable starting point for sustainable urban bicycle network planning with minimal data requirements.
The use of public transportation or simply moving about in streets are gendered issues. Women and girls often engage in multi-purpose, multi-stop trips in order to do household chores, work, and study (trip chaining). Women-headed households are often more prominent in urban settings and they tend to work more in low-paid/informal jobs than men, with limited access to transportation subsidies. Here we present recent results on urban mobility from a gendered perspective by uniquely combining a wide range of datasets, including commercial sources of telecom and open data. We explored urban mobility of women and men in the greater metropolitan area of Santiago, Chile, by analyzing the mobility traces extracted from the Call Detail Records (CDRs) of a large cohort of anonymized mobile phone users over a period of 3 months. We find that, taking into account the differences in users calling behaviors, women move less than men, visiting less unique locations and distributing their time less equally among such locations. By mapping gender differences in mobility over the 52 comunas of Santiago, we find a higher mobility gap to be correlated with socio-economic indicators, such as a lower average income, and with the lack of public and private transportation options. Such results provide new insights for policymakers to design more gender inclusive transportation plans in the city of Santiago.
We study the Krapivsky-Redner (KR) network growth model but where new nodes can connect to any number of existing nodes, $m$, picked from a power-law distribution $p(m)sim m^{-alpha}$. Each of the $m$ new connections is still carried out as in the KR model with probability redirection $r$ (corresponding to degree exponent $gamma_{rm KR}=1+1/r$, in the original KR model). The possibility to connect to any number of nodes resembles a more realistic type of growth in several settings, such as social networks, routers networks, and networks of citations. Here we focus on the in-, out-, and total-degree distributions and on the potential tension between the degree exponent $alpha$, characterizing new connections (outgoing links), and the degree exponent $gamma_{rm KR}(r)$ dictated by the redirection mechanism.
We introduce and analyze a model of a multi-directed Eulerian network, that is a directed and weighted network where a path exists that passes through all the edges of the network once and only once. Networks of this type can be used to describe information networks such as human language or DNA chains. We are able to calculate the strength and degree distribution in this network and find that they both exhibit a power law with an exponent between 2 and 3. We then analyze the behavior of the accelerated version of the model and find that the strength distribution has a double slope power law behavior. Finally we introduce a non-Eulerian version of the model and find that the statistical topological properties remain unchanged. Our analytical results are compared with numerical simulations.
During the last decades, the study of cities has been transformed by new approaches combining engineering and complexity sciences. Network theory is playing a central role, facilitating the quantitative analysis of crucial urban dynamics, such as mobility, city growth or urban planning. In this work, we focus on the spatial aspects of congestion. Analyzing a large amount of real city networks, we show that the location of the onset of congestion changes according to the considered urban area, defining, in turn, a set of congestion regimes separated by abrupt transitions. To help unveiling these spatial dependencies of congestion (in terms of network betweenness analysis), we introduce a family of planar road network models composed of a dense urban center connected to an arboreal periphery. These models, coined as GT and DT-MST models, allow us to analytically, numerically and experimentally describe how and why congestion emerges in particular geographical areas of monocentric cities and, subsequently, to describe the congestion regimes and the factors that promote the appearance of their abrupt transitions. We show that the fundamental ingredient behind the observed abrupt transitions is the spatial separation between the urban center and the periphery, and the number of separate areas that form the periphery. Elaborating on the implications of our results, we show that they may have an influence on the design and optimization of road networks regarding urban growth and the management of daily traffic dynamics.
Popularity is attractive -- this is the formula underlying preferential attachment, a popular explanation for the emergence of scaling in growing networks. If new connections are made preferentially to more popular nodes, then the resulting distribution of the number of connections that nodes have follows power laws observed in many real networks. Preferential attachment has been directly validated for some real networks, including the Internet. Preferential attachment can also be a consequence of different underlying processes based on node fitness, ranking, optimization, random walks, or duplication. Here we show that popularity is just one dimension of attractiveness. Another dimension is similarity. We develop a framework where new connections, instead of preferring popular nodes, optimize certain trade-offs between popularity and similarity. The framework admits a geometric interpretation, in which popularity preference emerges from local optimization. As opposed to preferential attachment, the optimization framework accurately describes large-scale evolution of technological (Internet), social (web of trust), and biological (E.coli metabolic) networks, predicting the probability of new links in them with a remarkable precision. The developed framework can thus be used for predicting new links in evolving networks, and provides a different perspective on preferential attachment as an emergent phenomenon.