Abstract

Recently, large investments have been made by cities such as Singapore, New York City, and London towards creating smart city initiatives in the areas of traffic safety enhancement and higher mobility. In this article, we investigate the impact of various network topology measures on the number of vehicle crashes in a city mobility network. Extant literature on mobility in city traffic networks has not studied the impact of network structure on road accidents. We fill this important gap by identifying the structural properties of critical zones in the city traffic network, which have a high risk of vehicle crashes. We use econometric methods to analyze a large dataset on city mobility from the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission, and a dataset on motor vehicle collisions from the New York Police Department; and derive various insights on the scope of traffic safety issues in a smart city. Our dataset has information on about 100,000,000 taxi trips over the year 2018. In this year, around 1,500,000 vehicle crash events were reported in New York City. One would expect that due to a large number of shortest paths, the number of accidents should be significantly more in the high betweenness centrality zones in the traffic mobility network. However, our analysis reveals that zones with high betweenness centrality tend to have a lower number of accidents. Furthermore, zones with a high degree centrality in the traffic mobility network are associated with a higher number of vehicle crash incidents. Our study reveals some crucial pointers for smart city policymakers and the operations managers of ride-sharing companies on how information on the mobility patterns of the high accident risk zones can be leveraged to reduce motor vehicle collisions.

摘要

最近，新加坡、纽约市和伦敦等城市进行了大量投资，以在增强交通安全和提高机动性方面创建智慧城市计划。在本文中，我们研究了各种网络拓扑措施对城市交通网络中车辆碰撞次数的影响。现有关于城市交通网络移动性的文献没有研究网络结构对道路事故的影响。我们通过识别城市交通网络中具有高车祸风险的关键区域的结构特性来填补这一重要空白。我们使用计量经济学方法来分析来自纽约出租车和豪华轿车委员会的大型城市交通数据集以及来自纽约警察局的机动车碰撞数据集；并就智慧城市中的交通安全问题的范围得出各种见解。我们的数据集包含 2018 年约 100,000,000 次出租车出行的信息。今年，纽约市报告了约 1,500,000 起车祸事件。可以预期，由于存在大量最短路径，交通移动网络中的高介数中心区域的事故数量应该明显更多。然而，我们的分析表明，具有高中介中心性的区域往往发生事故的次数较少。此外，在交通出行网络中具有高度中心性的区域与更高数量的车辆碰撞事故相关。