# A Multi-Scale Analysis of 27,000 Urban Street Networks: Every US City, Town, Urbanized Area, and Zillow Neighborhood

## TL;DR

This study analyzes 27,000 US urban street networks using OSMnx to provide comprehensive, reproducible data on urban form and street network characteristics across various scales, facilitating urban research.

## Contribution

It introduces a large-scale, consistent methodology for analyzing US street networks using OpenStreetMap and OSMnx, with publicly shared data for reproducibility.

## Key findings

- Large-scale analysis of US street networks across multiple scales
- Identification of key urban form and network characteristics
- Demonstration of reproducible, automated data collection and analysis

## 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.