Infrastructure Assessment of Urban Road Networks

Abstract

This paper describes a methodology to evaluate and compare vehicular traffic on complex urban road networks. It is focused on an integral assessment of whole urban nets trying to find quality criteria to be used by urban planers and infrastructure designers. Therefore, we aim to derive few simple but meaningful indicators usable in a generalized way. Such a quantity is the fraction of the total road net which is characterised by a certain velocity class. This allows the identification of the road length in the net suffering from heavy congestion, e.g. during peak traffic hours. Another concise method is the calculation of isochrones to mark the accessibility of urban and suburban areas from important economic or public centres in the city. All these methods rely on area-wide traffic monitoring data currently not available from conventional data sources. Therefore, probe vehicle data from a taxi fleet were used to establish an appropriate data base.