Impact of one-way streets on diffusive transport

Understanding the relation between network structure and dynamical processes is of utmost importance in many fields and in recent studies, there has been growing interest in analysing the effect of edge damage on random walk dynamics to better understand network functionality. In this article, we consider the effect of edge removal in the context of urban street networks and explore the impact of one-way streets on global transport capacity, where transport is modelled as a diffusive process described by a random walker. We measure global transport capacity using a global time defined in terms of mean first passage times between nodes, which quantifies the ability of a random walker to explore the network. To study the impact of one-ways, we consider drivable street networks in the centres of 55 cities worldwide and analyse the functionality of each network associated with diffusive transport. Our findings allow us to compare and classify the impact of one-ways in urban street networks and provide a general framework for studying the response of random walk dynamics to edge removal on networks in other domains.