Fractal analysis of the influence of the distribution of road networks on the traffic

Urban population growth, together with the industrial advances, leads to consider time as one of the most precious goods and therefore, an indicator of quality of life. Larger cities usually have mobility challenges due to inefficient or insufficient transport means or inadequate design of the road layout. Therefore, people may spend large portions of their daytime moving around places. It is precisely in this type of cities, where it is more complicated to find solutions that really solve the problem because it would be harder to change the already existing infrastructure. Two roads compositions, from the cities of Barcelona, Spain, and La Plata, Argentina, were selected to incorporate a fractal analysis in order to relate it with homogeneity. This was performed using a box counting methodology which determines the fractal dimension. As a complement, fractal lagunarity was calculated to get a value of the existing voids in the magnetic resonance images. The results show that the images have similar fractal dimension regarding the differences in road structure. However, the lagunarity is not the same, La Plata, Argentina, has a lower value than Barcelona, Spain, which indicates more coherence in the road structure.