Similarity and economy of scale in urban transportation networks and optimal transport-based infrastructures

Abstract

Designing and optimizing the structure of urban transportation networks is a challenging task. In this study, we propose a method inspired by optimal transport theory to reproduce the optimal structure of public transportation networks, that uses little information in input. Contrarily to standard approaches, it does not assume any initial backbone network infrastructure, but rather extracts this directly from a continuous space using only a few origin and destination points. Analyzing a set of urban rail, tram and subway networks, we find a high degree of similarity between simulated and real infrastructures. By tuning one parameter, our method can simulate a range of different networks that can be further used to suggest possible improvements in terms of relevant transportation properties. Outputs of our algorithm provide naturally a principled quantitative measure of similarity between two networks that can be used to automatize the selection of similar simulated networks.