TITLE:
Travel Patterns and Street Networks: A Novel Visualization Methodology of City-Level Traffic Flows and Network Usability
AUTHORS:
Jewel Rana Palit, Osama A. Osman, Hesham Rakha
KEYWORDS:
Street Orientation, Travel Behavior, Network Usability, Rose Diagrams, Land Use, Urban Planning, Urbanization, OSMnx
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Transportation Technologies,
Vol.13 No.1,
January
31,
2023
ABSTRACT: Street Networks, knitted in the urban
fabric, facilitate spatial movement and control the flow of urbanization. The
interrelation between a city’s spatial network and how the residents travel
over it has always been of high interest to scholars. Over the years,
multifaceted visualization methods have emerged to better express this travel
trend from small to large scale. This study proposes a novel approach to 1)
visualize city-wide travel patterns with respect to the street network
orientation and 2) analyze the discrepancies between travel patterns and
streets to evaluate network usability. The visualizations adopt histograms and
rose diagrams to provide several insights into network-wide traffic flows. The
visualization of four New York City (NYC) boroughs including Queens, Brooklyn,
Bronx, and Staten Island was generated for the daily traffic and the average
hourly flows in the morning and evening rush hours. Then the contrasts between
built-in street network topology and travel orientation were drawn to show
where people travel over the network, travel demand, and finally which segments
experience high or light traffic, revealing the true picture of network
usability. The findings of the study provide an insight into the novel and
innovative approach that can help better understand the travel behavior lucidly
and assist policymakers in decision making to maintain a balance between urban
topology and travel demands. In addition, the study demonstrates how to further
investigate city street networks and urbanization from different diverse
dimensions.