Gravity law in the Chinese highway freight transportation networks

The gravity law has been documented in many socioeconomic networks, which states that the flow between two nodes positively correlates with the strengths of the nodes and negatively correlates with the distance between the two nodes. However, such research on highway freight transportation networks (HFTNs) is rare. We construct the directed and undirected highway freight transportation networks between 338 Chinese cities using about 15.06 million truck transportation records in five months and test the traditional and modified gravity laws using GDP, population, and per capita GDP as the node strength. It is found that the gravity law holds over about two orders of magnitude for the whole sample, as well as the daily samples, except for the days around the Spring Festival during which the daily sample sizes are significantly small. Accordingly, the daily exponents of the gravity law are stable except during the Spring Festival period. The results also show that the gravity law has higher explanatory power for the undirected HFTNs than for the directed HFTNs. However, the traditional and modified gravity laws have comparable explanatory power.