The impact of one-way streets on the asymmetry of the shortest commuting routes

Abstract: On a daily commute, the shortest route from home to work rarely overlaps completely the shortest way back. We analyze this asymmetry for several cities and show that it exists even without traffic, due to a non-negligible fraction of one-way streets. For different pairs of origin-destination ($\rm OD$), we compute the log-ratio $r=\ln(\ell_{\rm D}/\ell_{\rm O})$, where $\ell_{\rm O}$ and $\ell_{\rm D}$ are the lengths of the shortest routes from $\rm O$ to $\rm D$ and from $\rm D$ to $\rm O$, respectively. While its average is zero, the amplitude of the fluctuations decays as a power law of the $\rm OD$ shortest path length, $r\sim \ell_{\rm O}^{-\beta}$. Similarly, the fraction of one-way streets in a shortest route also decays as $\ell_{\rm O}^{-\alpha}$. Based on semi-analytic arguments, we show that $\beta=(1+\alpha)/2$. Thus, the value of the exponent $\beta$ is related to correlations in the structure of the underlying street network.