Street hierarchies: a minority of streets account for a majority of traffic flow

Abstract

Urban streets are hierarchically organized in the sense that a majority of streets are trivial, while a minority of streets is vital. This hierarchy can be simply, but elegantly, characterized by the 80/20 principle, i.e. 80% of streets are less connected (below the average), while 20% of streets are well connected (above the average); out of the 20%, there is 1% of streets that are extremely well connected. This paper, using a European city as an example, examined, at a much more detailed level, such street hierarchies from the perspective of geometric and topological properties. Based on an empirical study, we further proved a previous conjecture that a minority of streets accounts for a majority of traffic flow; more accurately, the 20% of top streets accommodate 80% of traffic flow (20/80), and the 1% of top streets account for more than 20% of traffic flow (1/20). Our study provides new evidence as to how a city is (self‐)organized, contributing to the understanding of cities and their evolution using increasingly available mobility geographic information.

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