Deconstructing Laws of Accessibility and Facility Distribution in Cities

Overview

Journal Sci Adv

Specialties Biology
Science

Date 2020 Sep 12

PMID 32917706

Citations 6

Authors

Yanyan Xu

Luis E Olmos

Sofiane Abbar

Marta C Gonzalez

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The era of the automobile has seriously degraded the quality of urban life through costly travel and visible environmental effects. A new urban planning paradigm must be at the heart of our road map for the years to come, the one where, within minutes, inhabitants can access their basic living needs by bike or by foot. In this work, we present novel insights of the interplay between the distributions of facilities and population that maximize accessibility over the existing road networks. Results in six cities reveal that travel costs could be reduced in half through redistributing facilities. In the optimal scenario, the average travel distance can be modeled as a functional form of the number of facilities and the population density. As an application of this finding, it is possible to estimate the number of facilities needed for reaching a desired average travel distance given the population distribution in a city.

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