[OSM-Science] Study: A global assessment of street-network sprawl

[Dennis]

"Disconnected urban street networks, which we call “street-network sprawl,” are strongly associated
with increased vehicle travel, energy use and CO2 emissions, as shown by previous research in Europe
and North America. In this paper, we provide the first systematic and globally commensurable
measures of street-network sprawl based on graph-theoretic and geographic concepts. Using data on
all 46 million km of mapped streets worldwide, we compute these measures for the entire Earth at the
highest possible resolution. We generate a summary scalar measure for street-network sprawl, the
Street-Network Disconnectedness index (SNDi), as well as a data-driven multidimensional
classification that identifies eight empirical street-network types that span the spectrum of
connectivity, from gridiron to dendritic (tree-like) and circuitous networks. Our qualitative
validation shows that both the scalar and multidimensional measures are meaningfully comparable
within and across countries, and successfully capture varied dimensions of walkability and urban
development. We further show that in select high-income countries, our measures explain cross-
sectional variation in household transportation decisions, and a one standard-deviation increase in
SNDi is associated with an extra 0.25 standard deviations in cars owned per household. We aggregate
our measures to the scale of countries, cities, and smaller geographies and describe patterns in
street-network sprawl around the world. Latin America, Japan, South Korea, much of Europe, and North
Africa stand out for their low levels of street-network sprawl, while the highest levels are found
in south-east Asia, the United States, and the British Isles. Our calculations provide the
foundation for future work to understand urban processes, predict future pathways of transportation
energy consumption and emissions, and identify effective policy responses."

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0223078
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