http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4915

Commuting in a polycentric city

Camille Roth, Soong Moon Kang, Michael Batty, Marc Barthelemy

The spatial arrangement of urban hubs and centers and how individuals
interact with these centers is a crucial problem with many
applications ranging from urban planning to epidemiology. We utilize
here in an unprecedented manner the large scale, real-time 'Oyster'
card database of individual person movements in the London subway to
reveal the structure and organization of the city. We show that
patterns of intraurban movement are strongly heterogeneous in terms of
volume, but not in distance, and that there is a polycentric structure
composed of simple flow patterns organized around a limited number of
activity centers arranged in a hierarchical way. This new
understanding can shed light on the impact of new urban projects on
the evolution of the polycentric configuration of a city and provides
an initial approach to modeling flows in an urban system.

#Paul