A global take on congestion in urban areas

Marc Barthélemy

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science2016https://doi.org/10.1177/0265813516649955preprint
ABDC A*
Weight
0.26

Abstract

We analyze the congestion data collected by a GPS device company (TomTom) for almost 300 urban areas in the world. Using simple scaling arguments and data fitting we show that congestion during peak hours in large cities grows essentially as the square root of the population density. This result, at odds with previous publications showing that gasoline consumption decreases with density, confirms that density is indeed an important determinant of congestion, but also that we need urgently a better theoretical understanding of this phenomena. This incomplete view at the urban level leads thus to the idea that thinking about density by itself could be very misleading in congestion studies, and that it is probably more useful to focus on the spatial redistribution of activities and residences.

Open via your library →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/0265813516649955

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{marc2016,
  title        = {{A global take on congestion in urban areas}},
  author       = {Marc Barthélemy},
  journal      = {Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science},
  year         = {2016},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/0265813516649955},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

A global take on congestion in urban areas

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.


Evidence weight

0.26

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.00 × 0.4 = 0.00
M · momentum0.20 × 0.15 = 0.03
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.