Street Network Models and Measures for Every U.S. City, County, Urbanized Area, Census Tract, and Zillow-Defined Neighborhood

Boeing, Geoff

doi:10.3390/urbansci3010028

Cited by 21 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 111 publications

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“…Chicago (IL) and Manhattan illustrate high orientation order (they have internally consistent orientations because nearly all of their streets point in just four different directions), whereas Charlotte (NC) and Boston (MA) illustrate low orientation order (their streets point more evenly in all directions). See Boeing (2019a) for methodological details, further interpretation, and worldwide findings. Accordingly, across the relatively flat Great Plains (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma), griddedness is ubiquitous as both urban and rural tracts have median grid index values of 0.52, demonstrating the influence of the Homestead Act and similar historical orthogonal planning instruments across the region.…”

Section: Nationwide Spatial Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design

Boeing

2020

SSRN Journal

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Problem, research strategy, and findings: In this morphological study I identify and measure recent nationwide trends in American street network design. Historically, orthogonal street grids provided the interconnectivity and density that researchers identify as important factors for reducing vehicular travel and emissions and increasing road safety and physical activity. During the 20th century, griddedness declined in planning practice along with declines in urban form compactness, density, and connectivity as urbanization sprawled around automobile dependence. But less is known about comprehensive empirical trends across U.S. neighborhoods, especially in recent years. Here I use public and open data to examine tract-level street networks across the entire United States. I develop theoretical and measurement frameworks for a quality of street networks defined here as griddedness. I measure how griddedness, orientation order, straightness, 4-way intersections, and intersection density declined from 1940 through the 1990s, while dead-ends and block lengths increased. However, since 2000, these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns. Despite this rebound, when controlling for topography and built environment factors, all decades after 1939 are associated with lower griddedness than pre-1940 decades. Higher griddedness is associated with less car ownership-which itself has a well-established relationship with vehicle kilometers traveled and greenhouse gas emissions-while controlling for density, home and household size, income, jobs proximity, street network grain, and local topography.Takeaway for practice: Interconnected grid-like street networks offer practitioners an important tool for curbing car dependence and emissions. Once established, street patterns determine urban spatial structure for centuries, so proactive planning is essential.

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Section: Nationwide Spatial Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design

Boeing

2020

SSRN Journal

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“…Table 4 depicts various network measures to describe the input datasets, the carriageways we generated, and the differences between centrelines and carriageways. We used as our starting point the network measures as developed by [ 41 ].…”

Section: Analysis Of the Reconstructed Carriageways Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

From road centrelines to carriageways—A reconstruction algorithm

et al. 2022

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Roads are important for many urban planning applications, such as traffic modelling and delivery vehicle routing. At present, most available datasets represent roads only as centrelines. This is particularily true for OpenStreetMap which provides, among many features, road networks at worldwide coverage. Furthermore, most approaches for creating more detailed networks, such as carriageways or lanes, focus on doing so from sources that are not easy to acquire, such as satellite imagery or LiDAR scans. In this paper we present a methodology to create carriageways based on OpenStreetMap’s centrelines and open access areal representations (i.e. polygons) to determine which roads should be represented as two individual carriageways. We applied our methodology in five areas across four different countries with different built environments. We analysed the outcome in a delivery routing problem to evaluate the validity of our results. Our results suggest that this method can be effectively applied to create carriageways anywhere in the world, as long as there is sufficient coverage by OpenStreetMap and an areal representation dataset of roads.

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“…To construct the tract-level street network models, this study uses OSMnx (Boeing, 2017) to download data from OpenStreetMap, a high-quality worldwide mapping project and geospatial data repository (Basiri et al, 2016;Maier, 2014). These data are then assembled into undirected network models, where nodes represent intersections and dead-ends and edges represent the street segments that link them (for network modeling details and data repository see Boeing, 2019a). These models collectively comprise approximately 19 million nodes and 24 million edges.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Off the Grid…and Back Again?

Boeing¹

2020

Journal of the American Planning Association

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This morphological study identifies and measures recent nationwide trends in American street network design. Historically, orthogonal street grids provided the interconnectivity and density that researchers identify as important factors for reducing vehicular travel and emissions and increasing road safety and physical activity. During the 20 th century, griddedness declined in planning practice alongside declines in urban form compactness, density, and connectivity as urbanization sprawled around automobile dependence. But less is known about comprehensive empirical trends across US neighborhoods, especially in recent years. This study uses public and open data to examine tract-level street networks across the entire US. It develops theoretical and measurement frameworks for a quality of street networks defined here as griddedness. It measures how griddedness, orientation order, straightness, 4-way intersections, and intersection density declined from 1940 through the 1990s while dead-ends and block lengths increased. However, since 2000, these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns. Yet, despite this rebound, when controlling for topography and built environment factors all decades post-1939 are associated with lower griddedness than pre-1940. Higher griddedness is associated with less car ownership-which itself has a wellestablished relationship with vehicle kilometers traveled and greenhouse gas emissions-while controlling for density, home and household size, income, jobs proximity, street network grain, and local topography. Interconnected grid-like street networks offer practitioners an important tool for curbing car dependence and emissions. Once established, street patterns determine urban spatial structure for centuries, so proactive planning is essential.

show abstract

Street Network Models and Measures for Every U.S. City, County, Urbanized Area, Census Tract, and Zillow-Defined Neighborhood

Cited by 21 publications

References 111 publications

Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design

Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design

From road centrelines to carriageways—A reconstruction algorithm

Off the Grid…and Back Again?

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