Transportation Networks, People, and Buildings: Characterization of Urban System Components
Similar to countless natural phenomena, cities have inherent orders that can be properly captured and expressed through a complex analysis of their components. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this work offers a ring-buffer fractal approach to analyze the spatial characteristics of the components of an urban system. This approach was applied to road length, number of intersections, population+employment, and building gross floor area for the city of Chicago. The complex nature of these four components manifested itself in power-law relationships and was represented by their fractal dimensions. Results showed that road length and number of intersections were closely related, albeit their fractal patterns followed slightly different trends. Additionally, population+employment and building gross floor area are significantly similar and one can explain the other. Moreover, the method developed in this study was able to identify the boundary of the old city of Chicago, highlighting its ability to capture hidden characteristics of an urban system. The proposed method could further be used to correlate complex properties of urban transportation systems to other relevant measures, including connectivity, accessibility, and mobility to name a few.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD30 Transportation and Land Development.
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Peiravian, Farideddin
- de Lapparent, Matthieu
- Derrible, Sybil
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
- Date: 2015
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 17p
- Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Cities; Employment; Fractals; Geographic information systems; Highways; Intersections; Population; Spatial analysis; Structures
- Geographic Terms: Chicago (Illinois)
- Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I21: Planning of Transport Infrastructure;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01557137
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 15-5453
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Mar 18 2015 11:32AM