Urban Science Beyond Samples: Up-to-Date Street Network Models and Indicators for Every Urban Area in the World
TLDR
This paper offers global, up-to-date street network models and indicators for every urban area, enabling worldwide urban science and local analyses.
Key contributions
- Provides up-to-date street network models and indicators for every urban area worldwide.
- Utilizes 2025 urban boundaries from the Global Human Settlement Layer for data integration.
- Processes 180M OpenStreetMap nodes and 360M edges across 10,351 urban areas globally.
- All code, models, and indicators are publicly available to foster reuse and research.
Why it matters
This work provides critical, consistent data for urban planners to measure resilience, model accessibility, and target interventions globally. It democratizes urban street network science, enabling analyses in under-resourced regions where such data is often inaccessible.
Original Abstract
Urban planners need up-to-date, global, and consistent street network models and indicators to measure resilience and performance, model accessibility, and target local quality-of-life interventions. This article presents up-to-date street network models and indicators for every urban area in the world. It uses 2025 urban area boundaries from the Global Human Settlement Layer, allowing users to join these data to hundreds of other urban attributes. Its workflow ingests 180 million OpenStreetMap nodes and 360 million OpenStreetMap edges across 10,351 urban areas in 189 countries. The code, models, and indicators are publicly available for reuse. These resources unlock worldwide urban street network science beyond samples as well as local analyses in under-resourced regions where models and indicators are otherwise less-accessible.
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