Assessing the Reliability of Street Networks: A Case Study Based on the Swiss Street Network

One-way restrictions on local streets, which tend to have low traffic stress, can create a significant barrier to low-stress cycling. Contraflow, a treatment that undoes one-way restrictions on bike travel, has the potential to improve low-stress connectivity. Although contraflow is applied routinely in the Netherlands and Belgium, it has been sparingly applied in the United States. We propose refined measures of connectivity and accessibility that account for one-way restrictions by requiring a low-stress round trip path between origins and destinations. Different methods of associating origin–destination demand from polygons with a street network were analyzed. These methods are particularly important where there are one-way restrictions and irregular street networks because of the assumptions they entail in relation to first- and last-segment travel. In a case study of Greater Boston, we found that with the current bike network, low-stress connectivity between homes and jobs would increase from 1.2% to 8.7% if one-way restrictions on local streets were eliminated. We also found that even with a dense mesh of low-stress main bike routes, connectivity would still be 16% lower without contraflow on local streets than with. These results suggest that creating a network of main bike routes is not always enough; it is also important to provide contraflow on local streets. The Boston study also found that providing contraflow on selected links representing only 3% of local one-way street mileage delivered 40% of the connectivity impact of universal contraflow. Based on this finding, a method is proposed for prioritizing streets for contraflow conversion.

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Urban Street Network Analysis in a Computational Notebook

REGION ◽

10.18335/region.v6i3.278 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (3) ◽

pp. 39-51 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Geoff Boeing

Keyword(s):

Network Analysis ◽

Spatial Data ◽

Street Network ◽

Urban Street ◽

Street Networks ◽

Points Of Interest ◽

The World ◽

Study Sites ◽

Python Package

Computational notebooks offer researchers, practitioners, students, and educators the ability to interactively run code and disseminate reproducible workflows that weave together code, visuals, and narratives. This article explores the potential of computational notebooks in urban analytics and planning, demonstrating their utility through a case study of OSMnx and its tutorials repository. OSMnx is a Python package for working with OpenStreetMap data and modeling, analyzing, and visualizing street networks anywhere in the world. Its official demos and tutorials are distributed as open-source Jupyter notebooks on GitHub. This article showcases this resource by documenting the repository and demonstrating OSMnx interactively through a synoptic tutorial adapted from the repository. It illustrates how to download and model street networks for various study sites, compute network indicators, visualize street centrality, calculate routes, and work with other spatial data such as building footprints and points of interest. Computational notebooks can empower guides for introducing methods to new users and can help researchers reach broader audiences interested in learning from, adapting, and remixing their work. Due to their utility and versatility, the ongoing adoption of computational notebooks in urban planning, analytics, and related geocomputation disciplines should continue into the future.

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OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks

10.31235/osf.io/q86sd ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Geoff Boeing

Keyword(s):

Urban Design ◽

Data Availability ◽

Street Network ◽

Street Networks ◽

New Methods ◽

And Topology ◽

Political Boundaries ◽

Topological Measures ◽

Transportation Studies

Urban scholars have studied street networks in various ways, but there are data availability and consistency limitations to the current urban planning/street network analysis literature. To address these challenges, this article presents OSMnx, a new tool to make the collection of data and creation and analysis of street networks simple, consistent, automatable and sound from the perspectives of graph theory, transportation, and urban design. OSMnx contributes five significant capabilities for researchers and practitioners: first, the automated downloading of political boundaries and building footprints; second, the tailored and automated downloading and constructing of street network data from OpenStreetMap; third, the algorithmic correction of network topology; fourth, the ability to save street networks to disk as shapefiles, GraphML, or SVG files; and fifth, the ability to analyze street networks, including calculating routes, projecting and visualizing networks, and calculating metric and topological measures. These measures include those common in urban design and transportation studies, as well as advanced measures of the structure and topology of the network. Finally, this article presents a simple case study using OSMnx to construct and analyze street networks in Portland, Oregon.

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Urban Street Network Analysis in a Computational Notebook

10.31235/osf.io/dxtq3 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Geoff Boeing

Keyword(s):

Network Analysis ◽

Spatial Data ◽

Street Network ◽

Urban Street ◽

Street Networks ◽

Points Of Interest ◽

The World ◽

Study Sites ◽

Python Package

Computational notebooks offer researchers, practitioners, students, and educators the ability to interactively conduct analytics and disseminate reproducible workflows that weave together code, visuals, and narratives. This article explores the potential of computational notebooks in urban analytics and planning, demonstrating their utility through a case study of OSMnx and its tutorials repository. OSMnx is a Python package for working with OpenStreetMap data and modeling, analyzing, and visualizing street networks anywhere in the world. Its official demos and tutorials are distributed as open-source Jupyter notebooks on GitHub. This article showcases this resource by documenting the repository and demonstrating OSMnx interactively through a synoptic tutorial adapted from the repository. It illustrates how to download urban data and model street networks for various study sites, compute network indicators, visualize street centrality, calculate routes, and work with other spatial data such as building footprints and points of interest. Computational notebooks help introduce methods to new users and help researchers reach broader audiences interested in learning from, adapting, and remixing their work. Due to their utility and versatility, the ongoing adoption of computational notebooks in urban planning, analytics, and related geocomputation disciplines should continue into the future.

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Exploring the Transformation in the ‘Spirit of Place’ by Considering the Changed and Unchanged Defensive Spaces of Settlements: A Case Study of the Wugoushui Hakka Settlement

Land ◽

10.3390/land10050490 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (5) ◽

pp. 490

Author(s):

Yan-Feng He ◽

Chie-Peng Chen ◽

Rung-Jiun Chou ◽

Hai-Feng Luo ◽

Jin-Xiong Hou

Keyword(s):

Sense Of Belonging ◽

Theoretical Foundation ◽

Cultural Preservation ◽

Street Network ◽

Context Analysis ◽

Network Nodes ◽

Site Analysis ◽

Spirit Of Place ◽

Depth Interviews

Over generations, economic development has accelerated traditional settlements in Taiwan while losing traditional culture. In Hakka villages, this is manifested in the changes in defensive spaces, the ‘spirit of place,’ and land use. Although some progress has been made through research into related issues, a correlated view has been missing. To explore the connection between the ‘spirit of place’ and defensive spaces in Wugoushui, a traditional representative settlement in Taiwan, this paper probes three questions: What are the changes in defensive spaces? What are the changes in the spirit of place? What are the connections between them? Taking the sixteen criteria of secure defensive space as the theoretical foundation, through more than a year of structured observations and in-depth interviews with ten representative residents, and based on context analysis and site analysis of the information collected, this paper has concluded that, although the actual functionality of Wugoushui settlement’s spiritual, behavioural, and physical defences have disappeared, cultural characteristics related to the settlement traditions, including religious beliefs, trust, sense of belonging, street network, nodes, institutions, territory, and social networks, constitute a concrete manifestation of the defensive space and the spirit of place as of today. This research contributes to developing a theory of the relevance of the spirit of place to the defensive space of settlements from a sustainability perspective and improving the cultural preservation and land management of traditional settlements.

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A New Methodology to Study Street Accessibility: A Case Study of Avila (Spain)

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information ◽

10.3390/ijgi10070491 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (7) ◽

pp. 491

Author(s):

Manuel Curado ◽

Rocio Rodriguez ◽

Manuel Jimenez ◽

Leandro Tortosa ◽

Jose F. Vicent

Keyword(s):

Network Analysis ◽

The Other ◽

Centrality Measures ◽

Innovative Behavior ◽

Street Network ◽

Commercial Activity ◽

Determining Factors ◽

Combine Network ◽

The City

Taking into account that accessibility is one of the most strategic and determining factors in economic models and that accessibility and tourism affect each other, we can say that the study and improvement of one of them involved the development of the other. Using network analysis, this study presents an algorithm for labeling the difficulty of the streets of a city using different accessibility parameters. We combine network structure and accessibility factors to explore the association between innovative behavior within the street network, and the relationships with the commercial activity in a city. Finally, we present a case study of the city of Avila, locating the most inaccessible areas of the city using centrality measures and analyzing the effects, in terms of accessibility, on the commerce and services of the city.

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Street Network: Physical and Cultural Transformations on the Morphology of Historical City of Malacca

10.36922/jcau.v2i2.972 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-13

Author(s):

Marina Mohd Nor ◽

Norzailawati Mohd Noor ◽

Sadayuki Shimoda

Keyword(s):

Cultural Influences ◽

Development Trend ◽

Street Network ◽

Cultural Impact ◽

Multiple Sensors ◽

Street Networks ◽

Cultural Transformations ◽

Physical Transformation ◽

Spot 5 ◽

The Development Trend

The deterioration of streets in the historical city of Malacca in Malaysia due to modernization contributes to the streets’ vulnerabilities. This paper purposely analyses the physical transformation of the street networks for the years of 1993-2015, and the cultural influences and impact throughout the establishment of multi-racial cultural society. The methodology for the study is through mapping the street networks of Malacca city by using SPOT satellite imageries of three different years; 1993, 2005, and 2015, and through the street semi-automatic extraction technique to monitor the street pattern of Malacca city. Multiple sensors of SPOT were used, consisting of SPOT-2XS, SPOT 5, and SPOT 6 with 20 m, 5 m, and 1.5 m resolutions in extracting the street objects, while using the IMAGINE OBJECTIVE tools from ERDAS. The finding shows that the street network trend varied from 1993, 2005, and 2015 where the streets achieved 23.8% street expansions in the year 1993 compared to 10.49% in the year 2005. However, the development trend of streets increased to 14.68% in the year 2015. The connection of the physical transformations of the streets with the cultural impact contributed to the sense of place and divided the streets based on socio-economic, cultural and ethnic lines. Finally, it shows that the trend and pattern of street networks were essential in understanding a city’s morphology that has a significant impact on cultural evolution since the establishment of the Chinese community in Malacca.

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Developing a route filtering system for street network development by integrating GIS and space syntax: a case study from tehran, Iran

Transportation Management ◽

10.24294/tm.v1i3.769 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Omid Rismanchian 1 ◽

Simon Bell 1 ◽

Safoora Mokhtarzadeh

Keyword(s):

Spatial Pattern ◽

Low Income ◽

Space Syntax ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Street Network ◽

Deprived Neighbourhoods ◽

Natural Movement ◽

Spatial Isolation ◽

Low Income Families

Throughout the urban development process over the last seven decades in Tehran, Iran many self-generated neighbourhoods have developed, in which the majority of the residents are low-income families. The main spatial attribute of these deprived neighbourhoods in space syntax terms is spatial isolation from the surrounding, more affluent areas, which is accompanied by inadequate urban infrastructure and a lack of accessibility and permeability. This paper discusses a method of developing a route filtering system for identifying the most suitable streets for the creation of a pedestrian-friendly network, using an example of a deprived area, in order to integrate it with the surrounding urban fabric. The theory of ‘Natural Movement’ formed the basis of the research, the spatial pattern being analysed through Space Syntax using Depthmap software and GIS. The results showed that it is possible to identify the underlying spatial pattern using this approach and this could form a very cost effective basis for developing a pedestrian friendly street network, in order to release the deprived area from its spatial isolation.

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

10.31235/osf.io/t9um6 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Geoff Boeing

Keyword(s):

Urban Form ◽

Design Patterns ◽

Open Data ◽

Urban Spatial Structure ◽

Street Network ◽

Street Networks ◽

Planning And Design ◽

Orientation Order ◽

Established Relationship ◽

Intersection Density

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 20th 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 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. 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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The Development of Pompeii’s Urban Street Network

10.1093/oso/9780190614676.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Eric E. Poehler

Keyword(s):

Urban Form ◽

Formal Analysis ◽

Street Network ◽

Urban Street ◽

Street Networks ◽

The City ◽

Present Understanding

Chapter 2 explores the present understanding of Pompeii’s evolution by disassembling the apparent patchwork of grids across the city and reconsiders the presumed awkwardness in their adhesion. To do this, the traditional tools of formal analysis—street alignments and block shapes—are employed with and critiqued by the stratigraphic evidence recovered in the last three decades of excavation below the 79 CE levels. The result is an outline of the development of Pompeii’s urban form as a series of street networks: from the archaic age, through the period of the “hiatus” of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, to a reorganization of the city’s space so profound that it can genuinely be considered a refoundation, and finally to the adjustments of a refounded city in the Colonial, Augustan, and post-earthquake(s) periods.

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