Road traffic: A case study of flow and path-dependency in weighted directed networks

How much can we tell about flows through networks just from their topological properties? Whereas flow distributions of river basins, trees or cardiovascular systems come naturally to mind, more complex topologies are not so immediate, especially if the network is large and heterogeneously directed. Our study is motivated by the question of how the distribution of path-dependent trails in directed networks is correlated to the distribution of network flows. As an example we have studied the path-dependencies in closed trails in four metropolitan areas in England and the USA and computed their global and spatial correlations with measured traffic flows. We have found that the heterogeneous distribution of traffic intensity is mirrored by the distribution of agglomerate path-dependency and that high traffic roads are packed along corridors at short-to-medium trail lengths from the ensemble of nodes.