Travel Patterns and Street Networks: <i>A Novel Visualization Methodology of City-Level Traffic Flows and Network Usability</i>

Abstract

Street Networks, knitted in the urban fabric, facilitate spatial movement and control the flow of urbanization. The interrelation between a city’s spatial network and how the residents travel over it has always been of high interest to scholars. Over the years, multifaceted visualization methods have emerged to better express this travel trend from small to large scale. This study proposes a novel approach to 1) visualize city-wide travel patterns with respect to the street network orientation and 2) analyze the discrepancies between travel patterns and streets to evaluate network usability. The visualizations adopt histograms and rose diagrams to provide several insights into network-wide traffic flows. The visualization of four New York City (NYC) boroughs including Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Staten Island was generated for the daily traffic and the average hourly flows in the morning and evening rush hours. Then the contrasts between built-in street network topology and travel orientation were drawn to show where people travel over the network, travel demand, and finally which segments experience high or light traffic, revealing the true picture of network usability. The findings of the study provide an insight into the novel and innovative approach that can help better understand the travel behavior lucidly and assist policymakers in decision making to maintain a balance between urban topology and travel demands. In addition, the study demonstrates how to further investigate city street networks and urbanization from different diverse dimensions.