Demand and Congestion in Multiplex Transportation Networks

Urban transportation systems are multimodal, sociotechnical systems; however, while their multimodal aspect has received extensive attention in recent literature on multiplex networks, their sociotechnical aspect has been largely neglected. We present the first study of an urban transportation syste...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jiang, Shan, Chodrow, Philip Samuel, Gonzalez, Marta C.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Public Library of Science 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/109121
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5667-490X
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3483-5132
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8482-0318
Description
Summary:Urban transportation systems are multimodal, sociotechnical systems; however, while their multimodal aspect has received extensive attention in recent literature on multiplex networks, their sociotechnical aspect has been largely neglected. We present the first study of an urban transportation system using multiplex network analysis and validated Origin-Destination travel demand, with Riyadh’s planned metro as a case study. We develop methods for analyzing the impact of additional transportation layers on existing dynamics, and show that demand structure plays key quantitative and qualitative roles. There exist fundamental geometrical limits to the metro’s impact on traffic dynamics, and the bulk of environmental accrue at metro speeds only slightly faster than those planned. We develop a simple model for informing the use of additional, “feeder” layers to maximize reductions in global congestion. Our techniques are computationally practical, easily extensible to arbitrary transportation layers with complex transfer logic, and implementable in open-source software.