And what if everyone had an even probability of visiting some other fellow cyclist who lived between 3 and 8 kilometers away from them? This would be a beautiful and strange world. Here is what the traffic might look like in that world, assuming there were no effects of congestion. Thicker lines have more bikes:
Line thickness is scaled to the log of a measure of betweenness, based on optimal paths for bicycles, as defined according to current OSM data and OSRM‘s default bicycle routing profile. ‘People’ were located randomly inside their 2010 home census block and routes were calculated between random pairs of people where the straight-line distance between them was between 3 and 8 kilometers. The distance limits are to simulate reasonable cycling trips and work against MAUP effects.
This is the first step in a project to develop mode-specific street hierarchies, which can be used in transport maps where auto-based classification schemes are undesireable or unavailable. In the coming days, I’ll work on a better weighting scheme (than population density) and look at other modes and cities. I’ll be working the results into a poster for NACIS 2017, showing the different hierarchical classifications that result for cycling, walking, and driving modes, hopefully across three cities with widely different development patterns (Cincinnati, Toronto, …?)
More to come soon!
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