Spatial cross correlations of traffic flows on urban road networks

This work investigates the relationship between the traffic flow series' cross correlation coefficient(CCC) and the spatial distance of the road network sections.A cross correlation analysis(CCA) is used to analyze the traffic flow time series in each section within the traffic network to study the influences of traffic load,daily flow trends and sampling period on the CCA of the traffic flow series.These studies show that the CCC of section pairs with the same distance differ from each other.However,the mean of CCC with a specified distance decreases with this distance gradually.Heavier traffic loads cause more congestion,which increases the interactions between sections and results in a larger CCC.The results also show how to select traffic flow's sampling periods for CCA.