This article attempts to highlight the importance that transportation has in the economic development of Greece and in particular the importance of the transportation infrastructure and transportation networks, which suggest a fixed structured capital covering the total of the country. For this purpose, longitudinal and cross-sectoral statistical data are examined over a set of fundamental macroeconomic measures and metrics. Furthermore, the study attempts to highlight the structural and functional aspects composing the concept of transportation networks and to highlight the necessity of their joint consideration on the relevant research. The transportation networks that are examined in this paper are the Greek road (GRN), rail (GRAN), maritime (GMN) and air transport network (GAN), which are studied both in terms of their geometry and technical characteristics, as well as of their historical, traffic and political framework. For the empirical assessment of the transportation networks importance in Greece an econometric model is constructed, expressing the welfare level of the Greek regions as a multivariate function of their transportation infrastructure and of their socioeconomic environment. The further purpose of the article is to highlight, macroscopically, all the aspects related the study of transportation infrastructure and networks.
With the booming economy in China, many researches have pointed out that the improvement of regional transportation infrastructure among other factors had an important effect on economic growth. Utilizing a large-scale dataset which includes 3.5 billion entry and exit records of vehicles along highways generated from toll collection systems, we attempt to establish the relevance of mid-distance land transport patterns to regional economic status through transportation network analyses. We apply standard measurements of complex networks to analyze the highway transportation networks. A set of t…
Disruptions to transportation networks are inevitable. Currently, most mandated development-related transportation planning is intended to prepare for frequently occurring and observable disruptions while low probability events that have not yet materialized attract less attention. When road networks are not resilient, these unpredictable events can cause significant delays that may not be proportional to the extent of the disruption. Enhancing resilience can help in mitigating consequences of disruptions but requires financial investment that is difficult to justify given that low probability…
Planning scholars have identified economic, safety, and social benefits of converting one-way streets to two-way. Less is known about how conversions could impact vehicular distances traveled - of growing relevance in an era of fleet automation, electrification, and ride-hailing. We simulate such a conversion in San Francisco, California. We find that its current street network's average intra-city trip is about 1.7% longer than it would be with all two-way streets, corresponding to 27 million kilometers of annual surplus travel. As transportation technologies evolve, planners must consider di…
This paper proposes a hierarchical Bayesian network model (BNM) to quantitatively evaluate the resilience of urban transportation infrastructure. Based on systemic thinkings and sustainability perspectives, we investigate the long-term resilience of the road transportation systems in four cities of China from 1998 to 2017, namely Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing, respectively. The model takes into account the factors involved in stages of design, construction, operation, management, and innovation of urban road transportation, which collected from multi-source data platforms. We test …
Transportation networks serve as windows into the complex world of urban systems. By properly characterizing a road network, we can therefore better understand its encompassing urban system. This study offers a geometrical approach towards capturing inherent properties of urban road networks. It offers a robust and efficient methodology towards defining and extracting three relevant indicators of road networks: area, line, and point thresholds, through measures of their grid equivalents. By applying the methodology to 50 U.S. urban systems, we successfully observe differences between eastern v…
Space weather is a collective term for different solar or space phenomena that can detrimentally affect technology. However, current understanding of space weather hazards is still relatively embryonic in comparison to terrestrial natural hazards such as hurricanes or earthquakes. Indeed, certain types of space weather such as large Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are an archetypal example of a low probability, high severity hazard. Few major events, short time-series data and a lack of consensus regarding the potential impacts on critical infrastructure have hampered the economic impact assessm…
This paper provides a multilayer and time-varying structural analysis of one air transportation network, having the Brazilian air transportation network as a case study. Using a single mathematical object called MultiAspect Graph (MAG) for this analysis, the multilayer perspective enables the unveiling of the particular strategies of each airline to both establish and adapt in a moment of crisis its specific flight network. Similarly, the time-varying perspective allows multi-scale analysis considering different time periods, and thus assessing the impact of the economic crisis on how the diff…
This research presented a novel resilience-based framework to support resilience planning regarding pre-disaster mitigation and post-disaster recovery. First, the author proposes a new performance metric for transportation network, weighted number of independent pathways (WIPW), integrating the network topology, redundancy level, traffic patterns, structural reliability of network components, and functionality of the network during community's post-disaster recovery in a systematical way. To the best of our knowledge, WIPW is the only performance metric that permits risk mitigation alternative…
Terrorist attacks on transportation networks have traumatized modern societies. With a single blast, it has become possible to paralyze airline traffic, electric power supply, ground transportation or Internet communication. How and at which cost can one restructure the network such that it will become more robust against a malicious attack? We introduce a unique measure for robustness and use it to devise a method to mitigate economically and efficiently this risk. We demonstrate its efficiency on the European electricity system and on the Internet as well as on complex networks models. We sh…
Modern society is increasingly massively connected, reflecting an omnipresent tendency to organize social, economic, and technological structures in complex networks. Recently, with the advent of the so-called multiplex networks, new concepts and tools were necessary to better understand the characteristics of this type of system, as well as to analyze and quantify its performance and efficiency. The concept of diversity in multiplex networks is a striking example of this intrinsically interdisciplinary efort to better understand the nature of complex networks. In this work, we introduce the M…
Around 80% of global trade by volume is transported by sea, and thus the maritime transportation system is fundamental to the world economy. To better exploit new international shipping routes, we need to understand the current ones and their complex systems association with international trade. We investigate the structure of the global liner shipping network (GLSN), finding it is an economic small-world network with a trade-off between high transportation efficiency and low wiring cost. To enhance understanding of this trade-off, we examine the modular segregation of the GLSN; we study provi…
Inspired by studies on airline networks we propose a general model for weighted networks in which topological growth and weight dynamics are both determined by cost adversarial mechanism. Since transportation networks are designed and operated with objectives to reduce cost, the theory of cost in micro-economics plays a critical role in the evolution. We assume vertices and edges are given cost functions according to economics of scale and diseconomics of scale (congestion effect). With different cost functions the model produces broad distribution of networks. The model reproduces key propert…
Subway systems span most large cities, and railway networks most countries in the world. These networks are fundamental in the development of countries and their cities, and it is therefore crucial to understand their formation and evolution. However, if the topological properties of these networks are fairly well understood, how they relate to population and socio-economical properties remains an open question. We propose here a general coarse-grained approach, based on a cost-benefit analysis that accounts for the scaling properties of the main quantities characterizing these systems (the nu…
The measurement and mapping of transportation network vulnerability to natural hazards constitute subjects of global interest, especially due to climate change, and for a sustainable development agenda. During a flood, some elements of a transportation network can be affected, causing loss of life of people and damage to vehicles, streets/roads, and other logistics services, sometimes with severe economic impacts. The Network Science approach may offer a valuable perspective considering one type of vulnerability related to network type critical infrastructures: the topological vulnerability. T…
Transportation infrastructure of a country is one of the most important indicators of its economic growth. Here we study the Airport Network of India (ANI), which represents India's domestic civil aviation infrastructure, as a complex network. We find that ANI, a network of domestic airports connected by air links, is a small-world network characterized by a truncated power-law degree distribution, and has a signature of hierarchy. We investigate ANI as a weighted network to explore its various properties and compare them with their topological counterparts. The traffic in ANI, as in the World…
Bikesharing has gradually become one adopted sustainable transportation mode recent years to bring us many social, environmental, economic, and health-related benefits and rewards. There is increased research toward better understanding of bikesharing systems (BSS) in urban environments. However, our comprehension remains incomplete on the patterns and characteristics of BSS. In this paper, aiming to help improving sustainability in multimodal transportation through BSS, we perform a systematic data analysis to examine underlying patterns and characteristics of the system dynamics in a bikesha…
