Congestion and extreme events in urban street networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Agarwal, Ajay, Santhanam, M. S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Agarwal, Ajay
Santhanam, M. S.
author_facet Agarwal, Ajay
Santhanam, M. S.
contents Congestion and extreme events in transportation networks are emergent phenomena with significant socio-economic implications. In this work, we study congestion and extreme event properties on real urban street (planar) networks drawn from four cities and compare it with that on a regular square grid. For dynamics, we employ three variants of random walk with additional realistic transport features. In all the four urban street networks and 2D square grid and with all dynamical models, phase transitions are observed from a free flow to congested phase as a function of birth rate of vehicles. These transitions can be modified by traffic-aware routing protocols, but congestion cannot be entirely mitigated. In organically evolved street networks, we observe a semi-congested regime which has both congested and free-flow components. In the free-flow regime, the extreme event occurrence probability is larger for small degree nodes than for hubs, a feature originally observed in non-planar scale-free networks. In general, with respect to congestion and extreme events, the urban street networks and regular square grid display similar properties.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15613
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Congestion and extreme events in urban street networks
Agarwal, Ajay
Santhanam, M. S.
Physics and Society
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Congestion and extreme events in transportation networks are emergent phenomena with significant socio-economic implications. In this work, we study congestion and extreme event properties on real urban street (planar) networks drawn from four cities and compare it with that on a regular square grid. For dynamics, we employ three variants of random walk with additional realistic transport features. In all the four urban street networks and 2D square grid and with all dynamical models, phase transitions are observed from a free flow to congested phase as a function of birth rate of vehicles. These transitions can be modified by traffic-aware routing protocols, but congestion cannot be entirely mitigated. In organically evolved street networks, we observe a semi-congested regime which has both congested and free-flow components. In the free-flow regime, the extreme event occurrence probability is larger for small degree nodes than for hubs, a feature originally observed in non-planar scale-free networks. In general, with respect to congestion and extreme events, the urban street networks and regular square grid display similar properties.
title Congestion and extreme events in urban street networks
topic Physics and Society
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15613