The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks

Great paper with an interesting application of Braess’s paradox to transportation: closing roads can reduce travel delays.

Youn, H., Gastner, M. T., & Jeong, H. (2008). Price of anarchy in transportation networks: efficiency and optimality control. Physical review letters, 101(12), 128701.

Abstract:

Uncoordinated individuals in human society pursuing their personally optimal strategies do not always achieve the social optimum, the most beneficial state to the society as a whole. Instead, strategies form Nash equilibria which are often socially suboptimal. Society, therefore, has to pay aprice of anarchy for the lack of coordination among its members. Here we assess this price of anarchy by analyzing the travel times in road networks of several major cities. Our simulation shows that uncoordinated drivers possibly waste a considerable amount of their travel time. Counterintuitively, simply blocking certain streets can partially improve the traffic conditions. We analyze various complex networks and discuss the possibility of similar paradoxes in physics.

Hyejin Youn also has some more recent and equally interesting papers on urban scaling laws, in case you're interested.

credit: Youn et al (2008)

Related paper:

• Case studies on the Braess Paradox in abstract and microscopic models

Getting updates from this blog

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Household composition in London: age and spatial distribution

This is a quite nice way to put a lot of info in a concise and beautiful figure. It comes from ‘The Information Capital’, a book by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti.

click on the image to enlarge it

PhD Feelings

This is how doing a PhD can feel in one image

via Gif Porn

Music for the weekend

Assorted Links

1. 52 Concepts To Add To Your Cognitive Toolkit . Great read (ht Leo Monasterio)
   
   
2. Extremely useful apps for on/off-line reading I use (and recommend)  Feedly and Pocket
   
   
3. The best review / criticism to effective altruism I've read so far
   
   
4. Interactive map of ethnic diversity in London
   
   
5. Good read on the urban policies battle going on in Sao Paulo, Brazil
   
   
6. Krugman on Inequality and the City
   
   
7. How Uber is devastating New York’s taxi business (and this is good)
   
   
8. 45 years of Doha's expansion (1972, 87, 92, 2001, 2014)

#Qatar's surge: 45 years of #Doha's expansion (72-87-92-01-14) Satellite imagery from @USGS pic.twitter.com/Vz3A9glVy4

— Javier BH (@BorgeHolthoefer) January 16, 2016

Car-centric Brasilia

Brasilia is great for cars, but less so for people.

Tesourinhas de Brasília from Drone Brasília on Vimeo.

"We are not Amsterdam"

'We cannot get rid of cars in OUR city; we are not Amsterdam!' Well, neither was Amsterdam via @Pascal_Amsterda pic.twitter.com/P5zTEaG3S9

— Cycling Professor (@fietsprofessor) January 15, 2016

On the same topic, there is an interesting piece at the Guardian and a 6-min documentary on how the Dutch got their cycling infrastructure:

Map of real estate prices in Sao Paulo

Great interactive map with real estate prices in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The data used in the map is available here and covers 200 thousand properties announced for sale in a real state agency website (Properati).

credit: Properati

TSU Seminars: Urban Mobilities in the Smart City

From January to March 2016, the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at the University of Oxford will host a lecture series on the theme of ‘Smart Cities’. This series will gather a range of world – leading academics and urban policy practitioners to debate some of the key issues raised by smart cities for urban transport and mobility futures.

The program is available here and we'll have the participation of some great researchers, including Gillian Rose, Michael Batty, Paul Newman, Geoff Vigar and others.