A Multi-Scale Analysis of 27,000 Urban Street Networks: Every US City, Town, Urbanized Area, and Zillow Neighborhood

Abstract

OpenStreetMap offers a valuable source of worldwide geospatial data useful to urban researchers. This study uses the OSMnx software to automatically download and analyze 27,000 US street networks from OpenStreetMap at metropolitan, municipal, and neighborhood scales - namely, every US city and town, census urbanized area, and Zillow-defined neighborhood. It presents empirical findings on US urban form and street network characteristics, emphasizing measures relevant to graph theory, transportation, urban design, and morphology such as structure, connectedness, density, centrality, and resilience. In the past, street network data acquisition and processing have been challenging and ad hoc. This study illustrates the use of OSMnx and OpenStreetMap to consistently conduct street network analysis with extremely large sample sizes, with clearly defined network definitions and extents for reproducibility, and using nonplanar, directed graphs. These street networks and measures data have been shared in a public repository for other researchers to use.

References in corpus (6)

• OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks
• Modeling urban street patterns
• Random planar graphs and the London street network
• Ranking Spaces for Predicting Human Movement in an Urban Environment
• Planarity and Street Network Representation in Urban Form Analysis
• The Morphology and Circuity of Walkable and Drivable Street Networks

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• Measuring urban road network resilience to extreme events: an application for urban floods
• Street Network Models and Indicators for Every Urban Area in the World
• Multimodal urban mobility and multilayer transport networks
• Off the Grid... and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design
• A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data
• Spatial Applications of Topological Data Analysis: Cities, Snowflakes, Random Structures, and Spiders Spinning Under the Influence
• The Right Tools for the Job: The Case for Spatial Science Tool-Building
• The Morphology and Circuity of Walkable and Drivable Street Networks
• Characterizing network circuity among heterogeneous urban amenities
• Spatial Strength Centrality and the Effect of Spatial Embeddings on Network Architecture