Infrastructures connecting people: A mechanistic model for terrestrial transportation networks

Abstract

Terrestrial Transportation Infrastructures (TTIs) are shaped by both socio-political and geographical factors, hence encoding crucial information about how resources and power are distributed through a territory. Therefore, analysing the structure of pathway, railway or road networks allows us to gain a better understanding of the political and social organization of the communities that created and maintained them. Network science can provide extremely useful tools to address quantitatively this issue. Here, focussing on passengers transport, we propose a methodology to shed light on the processes and forces that moulded transportation infrastructures into their current configuration, without having to rely on any additional information besides the topology of the network and the distribution of the population. Our approach is based on a simple mechanistic model that implements a wide spectrum of decision-making mechanisms (representing different power distributions) which could have driven the growth of a TTI. Thus, by adjusting a few model parameters, it is possible to generate several synthetic transportation networks, and compare across them and against the empirical system under study. An illustrative case study (i.e. the railway system in Catalonia, a region in Spain) is also provided to showcase the application of the proposed methodology. Our preliminary results highlight the potential of our approach, thus calling for further research.

Advances in geospatial approaches to transport networks and sustainable mobility

“…Their results illustrate that a welldeveloped railway network decreases the tendency to move away from a given municipality, while better road accessibility tends to increase the likelihood of moving out of large cities, as it is easier to commute longer distances (Lai et al, 2022). Prignano et al (2023) proposed a methodology inspired by archaeological research and network science to shed light on the processes and forces that have moulded transport infrastructures into their current configuration. By using a mechanistic network model, the authors generate several synthetic transport networks with different parameters and compare the outputs against the empirical real-world passenger transport network in Spain.…”