Higher-order interactions reveal synergistic backbones of cycling infrastructure networks
Abstract
Infrastructure networks essentially underlie human mobility and transport. Improving the quality of single links increases network performance locally. However, efficient transport requires high-quality connected corridors across multi-link paths that do not emerge from independent single-link upgrades. Here, we introduce a framework for evaluating the impact of jointly upgrading multiple links as inherently higher-order interactions, enabling us to quantify link synergies in complex transport networks. Two links are synergistic if an upgrade of one increases the benefit of upgrading the other, promoting upgrades of topologically complementary links along the same path while discouraging upgrades of redundant parallel links. By expressing these synergies as second-order derivatives of overall network performance, we develop an efficient computational framework to identify synergistic links that form a connected network backbone. We apply our theoretical framework by combining empirical street network and cycling demand data for Hamburg, Germany, with a perturbed utility route choice model for urban bicycle traffic. Our results reveal synergies from higher-order interactions, thereby enabling strategic infrastructure planning that goes beyond local link importance in complex transport and flow networks.
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BibTeX
@misc{steinacker2026higherorder,
title = {{Higher-order interactions reveal synergistic backbones of cycling infrastructure networks}},
author = {Christoph Steinacker and Henrik Wolf and Marc Timme and Malte Schröder},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.16285},
eprint = {2609.16285},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16285},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Higher-order interactions reveal synergistic backbones of cycling infrastructure networks
AU - Christoph Steinacker
AU - Henrik Wolf
AU - Marc Timme
AU - Malte Schröder
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/06
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.16285
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16285
AB - Infrastructure networks essentially underlie human mobility and transport. Improving the quality of single links increases network performance locally. However, efficient transport requires high-quality connected corridors across multi-link paths that do not emerge from independent single-link upgrades. Here, we introduce a framework for evaluating the impact of jointly upgrading multiple links as inherently higher-order interactions, enabling us to quantify link synergies in complex transport networks. Two links are synergistic if an upgrade of one increases the benefit of upgrading the other, promoting upgrades of topologically complementary links along the same path while discouraging upgrades of redundant parallel links. By expressing these synergies as second-order derivatives of overall network performance, we develop an efficient computational framework to identify synergistic links that form a connected network backbone. We apply our theoretical framework by combining empirical street network and cycling demand data for Hamburg, Germany, with a perturbed utility route choice model for urban bicycle traffic. Our results reveal synergies from higher-order interactions, thereby enabling strategic infrastructure planning that goes beyond local link importance in complex transport and flow networks.
ER -