The impact of large urban structural elements on traffic flow - A case study of Danwei and Xiaoqu in Shanghai

Danwei (working unit) and Xiaoqu (residential community) are two typical and unique structural urban elements in China. The interior roads of Danwei and Xiaoqu are usually not accessible for the public. Recently, there is a call for opening these interior roads to the public to improve road network structure and optimize traffic flow. In this paper we investigate the impact of Danwei and Xiaoqu on their neighbouring traffic quantitatively. By taking into consideration of origins and destinations (ODs) distributions and route selection behaviours (e.g., shortest paths), we propose an extended betweenness centrality to investigate the traffic flow in two scenarios 1) the interior roads of Danwei and Xiaoqu are excluded from urban road network, 2) the interior roads are integrated into road network. A Danwei and a Xiaoqu in Shanghai are used as the study area. The preliminary results show the feasibility of our extended betweenness centrality in investigating the traffic flow patterns and reveal the quantitative changes of the traffic flow after opening interior roads.