Title: 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.