The following video clips show that aggregate flow, assigned to individual streets, is mainly shaped by the underlying street structure, and has little to do with human moving behavior. One can choose different moving behavior to see the effect: (1) aggregate flow is highly correlated to some topological metrics; (2) aggregate flow is power law distributed, implying that a minority of streets account for a majority of traffic. For more details about the research, one can refer to the following papers: Jiang B. (2009), Street hierarchies: a minority of streets account for a majority of traffic flow, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 23.8, 1033-1048; Jiang B., Yin J. and Zhao S. (2009), Characterizing human mobility patterns in a large street network, Physical Review E, 80, 021136; Jiang B. and Jia T. (2010), Agent-based simulation of human movement shaped by the underlying street structure, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 25(1), 51-64. Code is [here].

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 “There’s an old way of thinking that says the social world is complicated because people are complicated….We should think of people as if they were atoms or molecules following fairly simple rules and try to learn the patterns to which those rules lead…. Seemingly complicated social happenings may often have quite simple origins…. It’s often not the parts but the pattern that is most important, and so it is with people.”

Mark Buchanan (2007), The Social Atoms, Bloomsbury: New York