Using Urban Topology to Identify Critical Links of the Road Network: A Centrality-Based Approach

Understanding the urban network's structure is essential to comprehend how a city's traffic moves. A well-planned city can be distinguished from a demand-oriented development, where the road network is created based on traffic demand rather than a plan, using the topology of the road network. Though the usual measures of understanding the formation of a road network, including the road network density, the junction density, average path length, etc., aid in characterizing the road network, they are weak in explaining the importance or influence of specific nodes/links in the network. Betweenness centrality is particularly relevant for understanding urban movement patterns because it quantifies the extent to which a node lies on the shortest paths between other nodes. Nodes with high betweenness centrality are often located on important routes that facilitate efficient transportation and experience a higher flow of traffic. As betweenness centrality highlights the important edges present in a network there should, hypothetically, exist a correlation between the width of the road segments and their corresponding betweenness. The current study aims to mathematically quantify the correlation between the widths of different road segments in the network and their corresponding betweenness centralities. The topological analysis is conducted for the road network of Ludhiana City of Punjab. The final value of correlation is interpreted and further policy implications are discussed.