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Entangled communities and spatial synchronization lead to criticality in urban traffic.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the relation between patterns of human mobility and the scaling of dynamical features of urban environments is a great importance for today's society. Although recent advancements have shed light on the characteristics of individual mobility, the role and importance of emerging human collective phenomena across time and space are still unclear. In this Article, we show by using two independent data-analysis techniques that the traffic in London is a combination of intertwined clusters, spanning the whole city and effectively behaving as a single correlated unit. This is due to algebraically decaying spatio-temporal correlations, that are akin to those shown by systems near a critical point. We describe these correlations in terms of Taylor's law for fluctuations and interpret them as the emerging result of an underlying spatial synchronisation. Finally, our results provide the first evidence for a large-scale spatial human system reaching a self-organized critical state.

SUBMITTER: Petri G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3650667 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Entangled communities and spatial synchronization lead to criticality in urban traffic.

Petri Giovanni G Expert Paul P Jensen Henrik J HJ Polak John W JW

Scientific reports 20130101

Understanding the relation between patterns of human mobility and the scaling of dynamical features of urban environments is a great importance for today's society. Although recent advancements have shed light on the characteristics of individual mobility, the role and importance of emerging human collective phenomena across time and space are still unclear. In this Article, we show by using two independent data-analysis techniques that the traffic in London is a combination of intertwined clust ...[more]

PMID: 23660823

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Project description:Relatively few studies have characterized differences in intra- and inter-neighborhood traffic-related air pollutant (TRAP) concentrations and distance-decay gradients in along an urban highway for the purposes of exposure assessment. The goal of this work was to determine the extent to which intra- and inter-neighborhood differences in TRAP concentrations can be explained by traffic and meteorology in three pairs of neighborhoods along Interstate 93 (I-93) in the metropolitan Boston area (USA). We measured distance-decay gradients of seven TRAPs (PNC, pPAH, NO, NOX, BC, CO, PM2.5) in near-highway (<400 m) and background areas (>1 km) in Somerville, Dorchester/South Boston, Chinatown and Malden to determine whether (1) spatial patterns in concentrations and inter-pollutant correlations differ between neighborhoods, and (2) variation within and between neighborhoods can be explained by traffic and meteorology. The neighborhoods ranged in area from 0.5 to 2.3 km2. Mobile monitoring was performed over the course of one year in each pair of neighborhoods (one pair of neighborhoods per year in three successive years; 35-47 days of monitoring in each neighborhood). Pollutant levels generally increased with highway proximity, consistent with I-93 being a major source of TRAP; however, the slope and extent of the distance-decay gradients varied by neighborhood as well as by pollutant, season and time of day. Correlations among pollutants differed between neighborhoods (e.g., ? = 0.35-0.80 between PNC and NOX and ? = 0.11-0.60 between PNC and BC) and were generally lower in Dorchester/South Boston than in the other neighborhoods. We found that the generalizability of near-road gradients and near-highway/urban background contrasts was limited for near-highway neighborhoods in a metropolitan area with substantial local street traffic. Our findings illustrate the importance of measuring gradients of multiple pollutants under different ambient conditions in individual near-highway neighborhoods for health studies involving inter-neighborhood comparisons.

Dataset Information

Entangled communities and spatial synchronization lead to criticality in urban traffic.

Publications

Entangled communities and spatial synchronization lead to criticality in urban traffic.

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