A New Distance Function for Modeling Travel Distances in a Transportation Network

Continuous location models generally use the Euclidean or rectangular norm to approximate travel in a transportation network. This paper considers a new and more accurate distance measure, termed the weighted one-two norm, which is a positive linear combination of the preceding norms. A directional bias function is introduced to show the equivalence of this distance measure to the well known l_p norm. We then formulate a simple linear regression model to fit the parameters of our distance function to a given data set. Some novel applications based on standard statistical tests are derived which provide practical insights into the nature of networks with rectangular bias. The results are readily extended to other types of networks.