Source-linked AI summary
Outward Accessibility in Urban Street Networks: Characterization and Improvements
Bruno Augusto Nassif Travençolo, Luciano da Fontoura Costa
TL;DR
The paper addresses how urban street-network topology affects accessibility by combining complex-network representations with self-avoiding random walks. It estimates transition probabilities across walk lengths to calculate outward accessibility, illustrating the approach on São Carlos, where accessibility highlights central and peripheral differences and supports proposed network improvements.
Problem
Urban transportation is affected by street-network topology, motivating objective and spatially resolved measurement of how accessible each location is.
Source: p. 1Method
The approach models streets as complex networks, simulates self-avoiding random walks from every node, estimates transition probabilities across walk lengths, and derives outward accessibility.
Source: pp. 1–3Results
In São Carlos, outward accessibility identifies highly accessible downtown and inner nodes while distinguishing low-accessibility border nodes; proposed new connections substantially increase mean accessibility.
Source: p. 3Takeaways & Limitations
Outward accessibility provides a spatially discriminative measure for characterizing urban access and evaluating hypothetical street-network improvements.
Source: pp. 1, 3
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
The dynamics of transportation through towns and cities is strongly affected by the topology of the connections and routes. The current work describes an approach combining complex networks and self-avoiding random walk dynamics in order to quantify in objective and accurate manner, along a range of spatial scales, the accessibility of places in towns and cities. The transition probabilities are estimated for several lengths of the walks and used to calculate the outward accessibility of each node. The potential of the methodology is illustrated with respect to the characterization and improvements of the accessibility of the town of Sao Carlos.