N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (Lou FCD @ April 23 2008,17:14) | | Quote (Richardthughes @ April 23 2008,18:08) | | Quote (Lou FCD @ April 23 2008,17:04) | Hang on tight, I'm throwing the UDidiots a bone here.
City road networks grow like biological systems at NewScientist.
| Quote | French and US physicists have shown that the road networks in cities evolve driven by a simple universal mechanism despite significant cultural and historical differences. The resulting patterns are much like the veins of a leaf.
Marc Barthélemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel and Alessandro Flammini of Indiana University, US, analysed street pattern data from roughly 300 cities, including Brasilia, Cairo, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Venice.
They found that cities' road patterns have a lot in common mathematically, as well as looking similar to the eye. |
This should be fun to watch. I expect a hat tip over there, Dave. |
JanieBell should have asked for the hat-tip! |
JanieBelle is currently on vacation for the most part. |
So which part is on vacation? Enquiring minds want to know.
Without having looked at the actual study, I'm a bit dubious about the results. The pictures aren't particularly convincing, beyond, "look, we have interconnected branching with a hierarchical structure of road sizes versus branching and with more or less perpendicular intersections". I'll grant a degree of similarity with reticulate and rotate venation patterns, but beyond that, no. Leaf venation represents a delivery and distribution system that converges at one point at one end of the leaf, and in which traffic streams don't cross other traffic streams, but where all traffic turns toward (or away from) the target point. Some port cities may be similar in having a road system that converges on one distal point, but most cities spread out from a central downtown and have multiple growth axes that relate to multiple exit directions. We've got the gridded cities of North America and a few new foreign cities like Islamabad, some designed spoke and wheel cities, the originally fortified cities, and cities that are constrained by topography in various dissimilar ways. And then we have gingko leaves, and parallel or pennate venation, which don't much match cities.
But maybe I should just go and read the paper before carping about it.
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