Do people use urban transit systems the way planners intended? Or do mobility patterns self-organize through millions of individual decisions?
In our new paper in CEUS (Computers, Environment and Urban Systems), we combine optimal transport theory with mobility flow analysis to examine how travelers use Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system, one of the world’s most efficient transit networks.
We find that observed travel patterns are substantially closer to a self-organized "desire-path" configuration than to the system-optimal routing predicted by centralized optimization.
This suggests that designing people-centric and efficient urban transit systems requires us to consider not only top-down planning objectives, but also the collective behavioral dynamics that shape urban mobility patterns.
Many congratulations to the paper’s lead authors, Tianyu Dong and Jiazu Zhou.
Read the paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0198971526000815