Network harness: Metropolis public transport

We analyze the public transport networks (PTNs) of 14 major cities of the world. While the primary network topology is defined by a set of routes each servicing an ordered series of given stations, a number of different neighborhood relations may be defined both for the routes and the stations. The networks defined in this way display distinguishing properties, the most striking being that often several routes proceed in parallel for a sequence of stations. Other networks with real-world links like cables or neurons embedded in two or three dimensions often show the same feature—we use the car engineering term harness for such networks. Geographical data for the routes reveal surprising self-avoiding walk (SAW) properties. We propose and simulate an evolutionary model of PTNs based on effectively interacting SAWs that reproduces the key features.