ISF Workshop: Urban innovation through
walkability and spatial cognition
September 19-21, 2022, Tel Aviv University
Dr. Arch. Efrat Blumenfeld-Lieberthal
Dr. Arch. Efrat Blumenfeld-Lieberthal: is an architect and faculty at the Azrieli School of Architecture at Tel Aviv University. She received her BArch, MA, and PhD at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, at the Technion IIT. Her research interests are applying theories of complexity to urban environments; urban morphology; size distribution of entities in complex systems; complex networks in urban and human systems, spatial cognition in urban environments, and smart cities and the way they influence urban development. In recent years she has been focusing on analyzing urban traffic based on real big-data retrieved in near real-time. Efrat is the former Head of the School of Architecture at the Tel Aviv University and a member of the founding team and steering committee of City Center-TAU Research Center for Cities and Urbanism
Identification, cost evaluation, and prioritization of urban traffic congestions and their origin
Abstract:
With:
Nimrod Serok and Shlomo Havlin, Azrieli School of Architecture at Tel Aviv University
The increasing urbanization in the last decades results in significant growth in urban traffic congestion around the world. This leads to enormous time people spent on roads and thus significant money waste and air pollution. Here, we present a novel methodology for identification, cost evaluation, and thus, prioritization of congestion origins, i.e., their bottlenecks. The presented work is based on network analysis of the entire road network from a global point of view. We identify and prioritize traffic bottlenecks based on big data of traffic speed retrieved in near-real-time. Our approach highlights the bottlenecks that have the most significant effect on the global urban traffic flow. We follow the evolution of every traffic congestion in the entire urban network and rank all the congestions, based on the cost they cause (in Vehicle Hours units). We show that the macro-stability that represents the seeming regularity of traffic load both in time and space, overshadows the existence of meso-dynamics, where the bottlenecks that create these congestions usually do not reappear on different days or hours. Our method enables to identify in near-real-time both recurrent and nonrecurrent congestions and their sources.
We present HaShalom Interchange as an example of the significance of considering the entire road network simultaneously and not analyzing traffic congestion at the local level. i.e., a single or a few adjacent junctions. We demonstrate that by solving the traffic congestion based on the analysis of individual junctions, one can miss the real bottlenecks that have the most significant effect on the overall road network.
(Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022, 14:00-15:30 IL)