Outward Accessibility in Urban Street Networks: Characterization and Improvements

The dynamics of transportation through towns and cities is strongly affected by the topology of the connections and routes. The current work describes an approach combining complex networks and self-avoiding random walk dynamics in order to quantify in objective and accurate manner, along a range of spatial scales, the accessibility of places in towns and cities. The transition probabilities are estimated for several lengths of the walks and used to calculate the outward accessibility of each node. The potential of the methodology is illustrated with respect to the characterization and improvements of the accessibility of the town of São Carlos.