How much longer do you have to drive than the crow has to fly?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wang, Shanshan, Bette, Henrik M., Schreckenberg, Michael, Guhr, Thomas
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Wang, Shanshan
Bette, Henrik M.
Schreckenberg, Michael
Guhr, Thomas
author_facet Wang, Shanshan
Bette, Henrik M.
Schreckenberg, Michael
Guhr, Thomas
contents When traveling by car from one location to another, our route is constrained by the road network. The network distance between the two locations is generally longer than the geodetic distance as the crow flies. We report a systematic relation between the statistical properties of these two distances. Empirically, we find a robust scaling between network and geodetic distance distributions for a variety of large motorway networks. A simple consequence is that we typically have to drive $1.3\pm0.1$ times longer than the crow flies. This scaling is not present in standard random networks; rather, it requires non-random adjacency. We develop a set of rules to build a realistic motorway network, also consistent with the above scaling. We hypothesize that the scaling reflects a compromise between two societal needs: high efficiency and accessibility on the one hand, and limitation of costs and other burdens on the other.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_06490
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How much longer do you have to drive than the crow has to fly?
Wang, Shanshan
Bette, Henrik M.
Schreckenberg, Michael
Guhr, Thomas
Physics and Society
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
When traveling by car from one location to another, our route is constrained by the road network. The network distance between the two locations is generally longer than the geodetic distance as the crow flies. We report a systematic relation between the statistical properties of these two distances. Empirically, we find a robust scaling between network and geodetic distance distributions for a variety of large motorway networks. A simple consequence is that we typically have to drive $1.3\pm0.1$ times longer than the crow flies. This scaling is not present in standard random networks; rather, it requires non-random adjacency. We develop a set of rules to build a realistic motorway network, also consistent with the above scaling. We hypothesize that the scaling reflects a compromise between two societal needs: high efficiency and accessibility on the one hand, and limitation of costs and other burdens on the other.
title How much longer do you have to drive than the crow has to fly?
topic Physics and Society
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06490