Urban road networks -- Spatial networks with universal geometric features? A case study on Germany's largest cities

Abstract

Urban road networks have distinct geometric properties that are partially determined by their (quasi-) two-dimensional structure. In this work, we study these properties for 20 of the largest German cities. We find that the small-scale geometry of all examined road networks is extremely similar. The object-size distributions of road segments and the resulting cellular structures are characterised by heavy tails. As a specific feature, a large degree of rectangularity is observed in all networks, with link angle distributions approximately described by stretched exponential functions. We present a rigorous statistical analysis of the main geometric characteristics and discuss their mutual interrelationships. Our results demonstrate the fundamental importance of cost-efficiency constraints for in time evolution of urban road networks.

16 pages; 8 figures

References in corpus (19)

• The complex network of global cargo ship movements
• Adaptive Coevolutionary Networks: A Review
• The spatial structure of networks
• Scaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks
• A Topological Pattern of Urban Street Networks: Universality and Peculiarity
• Public transport networks: empirical analysis and modeling
• Resilience of public transport networks against attacks
• Empirical analysis of the worldwide maritime transportation network
• Modeling urban street patterns
• Networks and Cities: An Information Perspective
• Random planar graphs and the London street network
• Statistical Analysis of the Metropolitan Seoul Subway System: Network Structure and Passenger Flows
• Shape and efficiency in spatial distribution networks
• Network Harness: Metropolis Public Transport
• Structural Evolution of the Brazilian Airport Network
• Co-evolution of density and topology in a simple model of city formation
• Scaling and allometry in the building geometries of Greater London
• Empirical analysis of the ship-transport network of China
• How to fit the degree distribution of the air network?

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Urban Spatial Order: Street Network Orientation, Configuration, and Entropy
• From the betweenness centrality in street networks to structural invariants in random planar graphs
• Classification of Urban Morphology with Deep Learning: Application on Urban Vitality
• Spatial Information and the Legibility of Urban Form: Big Data in Urban Morphology
• Urban street networks: a comparative analysis of ten European cities
• Disentangling different types of El Niño episodes by evolving climate network analysis
• Planarity and Street Network Representation in Urban Form Analysis
• Spatial network surrogates for disentangling complex system structure from spatial embedding of nodes
• Central loops in random planar graphs
• Orientations and matrix function-based centralities in multiplex network analysis of urban public transport
• Edge directionality properties in complex spherical networks
• Edge anisotropy and the geometric perspective on flow networks
• Exploring the relationship between the spatial distribution of roads and universal pattern of travel-route efficiency in urban road networks
• A perturbative approach to Lagrangian flow networks
• Combinatorial and approximative analyses in a spatially random division process