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An analysis of the Spanish high capacity road network criticality

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Abstract

The analysis of complex networks has been carried out in different fields using an ample variety of method and concepts. Recently, in the general literature of regional economics, the concepts of resilience, connectivity, vulnerability and criticality have been gaining their momentum. The aim of this paper is to provide an analytical framework, using well-known accessibility indicators, in order to calculate the critical links or road sections of the Spanish high-capacity road network. Our analysis will be based on approximately four hundred sections that will be classified in five different groups according to their criticality degree in the whole network. Our analysis will be complemented with the comparison of the results obtained in five different scenarios, namely the average criticality using the effects on the whole country, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Pontevedra. Furthermore, the paper will also analyze what kind of intrinsic characteristics of the sections favor or not the links’ criticality using a method based on a classification and regression tree. This analysis is crucial to understand other important concepts that are recently being studied in network and spatial economics, like, for example, resilience and vulnerability. It is concluded that the number of relations or routes, being a trunk or not, the road density and the time to Madrid capital play an important role in the criticality of the roads section in the high capacity road network.

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Acknowledgements

We have benefited from many colleagues’ comments, suggestions, discussions and assistance. The reviewer’s comments are also acknowledged and appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Geography, Complutense University of Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Juan Carlos García-Palomares, Javier Gutiérrez & Borja Moya-Gómez

  2. Department of Applied Economic Analysis, Institute of Tourism and Sustainable Economic Development, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 35017, Las Palmas, GC, Spain

    Juan Carlos Martín

Authors
  1. Juan Carlos García-Palomares
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  2. Javier Gutiérrez
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  3. Juan Carlos Martín
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  4. Borja Moya-Gómez
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Correspondence to Juan Carlos Martín.

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García-Palomares, J.C., Gutiérrez, J., Martín, J.C. et al. An analysis of the Spanish high capacity road network criticality. Transportation 45, 1139–1159 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-018-9877-4

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