2006/02/11 by Stefan Lämmer, Björn Gehlsen, Dirk Helbing · 1 citation
Engineering · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Land Use and Ecosystem Services #Transportation Planning and Optimization #Urban Design and Spatial Analysis #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.physa.2006.01.051
published as S. Lämmer, B. Gehlsen, and Dirk Helbing (2006) Scaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks, Physica A 363(1) 89-95
openalex publication_date 2006/02/11 · arxiv created 2006/03/30 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The 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.