Mean speed in a network

Question

I am new to this community so I hope this is the rigth place for this question.
I am working on traffic simulations on a certain area, and I need to know which is the average speed in the area during the simulated period (4 hours). I know, for each vehicle in the simulation, the distance covered and the time needed, thus I can compute the mean speed of each vehicle by dividing those two.
Now that I have a list of mean speeds, what is the more correct thing to do: should I compute the average of those mean speeds, or their harmonic average? And why one is more suitable than the other? By searching online I found out that harmonic average is commonly used to compute the mean speed of a vehicle, but does this apply also to multiple vehicles on multiple different streets?
Second question: I will do multiple simulations with different parameters, and at the end I need to know the mean speed over the N simulations. Can I simply compute the mean (or harmonic mean?) of the mean values obtained in each simulation?
I hope I have been clear enough.
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Personally I would add up all the distances travelled and all the times travelling, then divide the first by the second.

• If each time was the same, this would amount to the arithmetic mean of the individual speeds

• If each distance was the same, this would amount to the harmonic mean of the individual speeds

• If distances and times both vary, this would give a different figure and in my view a better one

You can then compare these overall results between different simulations; the total distances and total times in different simulations may also be interesting information.