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Deconstructing laws of accessibility and facility distribution in cities

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journal contribution
submitted on 2024-07-11, 10:40 and posted on 2024-07-14, 05:03 authored by Yanyan Xu, Luis E. Olmos, Sofiane Abbar, Marta C. González

The era of the automobile has seriously degraded the quality of urban life through costly travel and visible environmental effects. A new urban planning paradigm must be at the heart of our road map for the years to come, the one where, within minutes, inhabitants can access their basic living needs by bike or by foot. In this work, we present novel insights of the interplay between the distributions of facilities and population that maximize accessibility over the existing road networks. Results in six cities reveal that travel costs could be reduced in half through redistributing facilities. In the optimal scenario, the average travel distance can be modeled as a functional form of the number of facilities and the population density. As an application of this finding, it is possible to estimate the number of facilities needed for reaching a desired average travel distance given the population distribution in a city.

Other Information

Published in: Science Advances
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abb4112

Funding

University of California Institute of Transportation Studies, Berkeley DeepDrive (QCRI-CSAIL).

History

Language

  • English

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Publication Year

  • 2020

License statement

This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Institution affiliated with

  • Hamad Bin Khalifa University
  • Qatar Computing Research Institute - HBKU

Geographic coverage

United States of America and Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC)

Related Datasets

LandScan Global Population Database (2017); http://web.ornl.gov/sci/landscan/ [accessed 1 April 2017]. OpenStreetMap (2017); https://www.openstreetmap.org [accessed 1 April 2017]. Foursquare (2017); https://foursquare.com/ [accessed 15 April 2017].