Affiliation:
1. Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA, USA
2. College of Information and Communication, National University of Defense Technology, Wuhan, China
Abstract
Traffic congestion is a major environmental and social problem whose causes include urban sprawl, imbalanced home-job distributions, increased car ownership, and lack of public transportation. We focus on a relatively understudied factor: the existence of geographic barriers. We study traffic times and flows in the Boston metropolitan area, a major coastal city with substantial shape non-convexities. We show that natural barriers not only cause additional delays to the trips affected directly, but also worsen downtown congestion for everyone. Additionally, commuter flows between places separated by barriers decrease, generating additional traffic elsewhere. We also find that places next to geographic obstacles suffer from higher risks of congestion, due to their lower traffic-diffusion ability. Policymakers may consider specific solutions for congestion arising from constraining physical geographies.
Subject
Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law,Nature and Landscape Conservation,Urban Studies,Geography, Planning and Development,Architecture
Cited by
3 articles.
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