• Pu Wang, Timothy Hunter, Alexandre M Bayen, Katja Schechtner, and Marta C González.
• School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410000, P.R. China.
• Sci Rep. 2012 Jan 1; 2: 1001.

AbstractIn this paper, we combine the most complete record of daily mobility, based on large-scale mobile phone data, with detailed Geographic Information System (GIS) data, uncovering previously hidden patterns in urban road usage. We find that the major usage of each road segment can be traced to its own--surprisingly few--driver sources. Based on this finding we propose a network of road usage by defining a bipartite network framework, demonstrating that in contrast to traditional approaches, which define road importance solely by topological measures, the role of a road segment depends on both: its betweeness and its degree in the road usage network. Moreover, our ability to pinpoint the few driver sources contributing to the major traffic flow allows us to create a strategy that achieves a significant reduction of the travel time across the entire road system, compared to a benchmark approach.

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