CHRONEX-US: City-level historical road network expansion dataset for the conterminous United States

TL;DR

CHRONEX-US is a comprehensive geospatial dataset that reconstructs the historical expansion of road networks across urban areas in the US, enabling analysis of urban growth and transportation dynamics over the 20th century.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, model-based dataset of construction epochs for US road segments, integrating multiple sources and ensuring topological integrity for urban transportation research.

Findings

Provides detailed temporal data on road network expansion.

Enables analysis of urban growth and transportation inequality.

Supports routing and connectivity studies over time.

Abstract

Geospatial datasets on the long-term evolution of road networks are scarce, hampering our quantitative understanding of how the contemporary road network has evolved over the course of the 20th century. However, such information is crucial to better understand the dynamics of road network growth and expansion, and to shed light on the consequences of (sub-) urbanization processes, such as increasing mobility, traffic congestion, land take and transportation inequality. Herein, we describe CHRONEX-US ('City-level historical road network expansion dataset for the conterminous United States'), a geospatial vector dataset reporting estimates of the construction year for each road segment in densely and semi-densely built-up spaces within 693 core-based statistical areas (i.e., Metropolitan and Micropolitan statistical areas) in the conterminous US. CHRONEX-US is based on the USGS National Transportation Dataset (NTD), integrated with the historical settlement compilation for the US (HISDAC-US). CHRONEX-US reports model-based construction epoch estimates for local residential road network segments within urban and peri-urban areas, using different model-based scenarios. The vector data inherit topological integrity from the NTD data allowing for routing and other connectivity-based analyses within temporal strata of urban road networks. CHRONEX-US vector geometries are attributed with the US Census Bureau's MAF/TIGER Feature Class Code (MTFCC), enabling stratification of the data by road category. CHRONEX-US is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28644674.