An analysis of the Spanish high capacity road network criticality

The analysis of complex networks has been carried out in different fields using an ample variety of method and concepts. Recently, in the general literature of regional economics, the concepts of resilience, connectivity, vulnerability and criticality have been gaining their momentum. The aim of this paper is to provide an analytical framework, using well-known accessibility indicators, in order to calculate the critical links or road sections of the Spanish high-capacity road network. Our analysis will be based on approximately four hundred sections that will be classified in five different groups according to their criticality degree in the whole network. Our analysis will be complemented with the comparison of the results obtained in five different scenarios, namely the average criticality using the effects on the whole country, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Pontevedra. Furthermore, the paper will also analyze what kind of intrinsic characteristics of the sections favor or not the links’ criticality using a method based on a classification and regression tree. This analysis is crucial to understand other important concepts that are recently being studied in network and spatial economics, like, for example, resilience and vulnerability. It is concluded that the number of relations or routes, being a trunk or not, the road density and the time to Madrid capital play an important role in the criticality of the roads section in the high capacity road network.Depto. de GeografíaFac. de Geografía e HistoriaTRUEpu

Network-based Accessibility Measures for Vulnerability Analysis of Degradable Transportation Networks

Accessibility is a fundamental concept in transportation analysis and urban planning. Typically, accessibility refers to the ‘ease’ of reaching opportunities for activities and services and can be used to assess the performance of a transportation and urban system. In this paper, we present network-based accessibility measures for assessing vulnerability of degradable transportation networks. The network-based accessibility measures consider the consequence of one or more link failures in terms of network travel time or generalized travel cost increase as well as the behavioral responses of users due to the failure in the network. To model different dimensions of travel behavioral responses, a combined travel demand model is adopted to estimate the long-term equilibrium network condition due to network disruptions. Numerical examples are conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed vulnerability measures for assessing degradable transportation networks. The results indicate that the accessibility measures derived from the combined travel demand model are capable of measuring the consequences of both demand and supply changes in the network and have the flexibility to reflect the effects of different travel choice dimensions on the network vulnerability. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Vulnerability analysis, Combined travel demand model, Accessibility, Random utility,