Analysis of Public Bus Transportation of a Brazilian City Based on the Theory of Complex Networks Using the P-Space

Abstract

The city of Curitiba, located at Southern Brazil, is recognized by its urban planning structured on three pillars: land use, collective transportation, and traffic. With 3.8 million people in its metropolitan area, the public transport system deals with approximately 2.5 million passengers daily. The structure and properties of such a transportation system have substantial implications for the urban planning and public politics for sustainable development of Curitiba. Therefore, this paper analyzes the structure of the public transportation system of Curitiba through the theory of complex networks in a static approach of network topology and presents a comparative analysis of the results from Curitiba, three cities from China (Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou), and three cities from Poland (GOP, Warszawa, and Łódź). The transportation network was modeled as a complex network with exact geographical coordinates of its bus stops. In all bus lines, the method used was the P-Space. The results show that this bus network has characteristics of both small-world and scale-free networks.