Resilient by Design: Simulating Street Network Disruptions across Every Urban Area in the World

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Boeing, Geoff, Ha, Jaehyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914715930722304
author Boeing, Geoff
Ha, Jaehyun
author_facet Boeing, Geoff
Ha, Jaehyun
contents Street networks allow people and goods to move through cities, but they are vulnerable to disasters like floods, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks. Well-planned network design can make a city more resilient and robust to such disruptions, but we still know little about worldwide patterns of vulnerability, or worldwide empirical relationships between specific design characteristics and resilience. This study quantifies and measures the vulnerability of the street networks of every urban area in the world then models the relationships between vulnerability and street network design characteristics. To do so, we simulate over 2.4 billion trips across more than 8,000 urban areas in 178 countries, while also simulating network disruption events representing floods, earthquakes, and targeted attacks. We find that disrupting high-centrality nodes severely impacts network function. All else equal, networks with higher connectivity, fewer chokepoints, or less circuity are less vulnerable to disruption's impacts. This study thus contributes a new global understanding of network design and vulnerability to the literature. We argue that these design characteristics offer high leverage points for street network resilience and robustness that planners should emphasize when designing or retrofitting urban networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_10636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Resilient by Design: Simulating Street Network Disruptions across Every Urban Area in the World
Boeing, Geoff
Ha, Jaehyun
Physics and Society
Systems and Control
General Economics
Economics
Applications
Street networks allow people and goods to move through cities, but they are vulnerable to disasters like floods, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks. Well-planned network design can make a city more resilient and robust to such disruptions, but we still know little about worldwide patterns of vulnerability, or worldwide empirical relationships between specific design characteristics and resilience. This study quantifies and measures the vulnerability of the street networks of every urban area in the world then models the relationships between vulnerability and street network design characteristics. To do so, we simulate over 2.4 billion trips across more than 8,000 urban areas in 178 countries, while also simulating network disruption events representing floods, earthquakes, and targeted attacks. We find that disrupting high-centrality nodes severely impacts network function. All else equal, networks with higher connectivity, fewer chokepoints, or less circuity are less vulnerable to disruption's impacts. This study thus contributes a new global understanding of network design and vulnerability to the literature. We argue that these design characteristics offer high leverage points for street network resilience and robustness that planners should emphasize when designing or retrofitting urban networks.
title Resilient by Design: Simulating Street Network Disruptions across Every Urban Area in the World
topic Physics and Society
Systems and Control
General Economics
Economics
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10636