Observing rurality of a geographical area from road graph geometry -- a qualitative study

TL;DR

This study investigates how the geometric properties of road networks in Finland correlate with rural or urban classification by analyzing hyperbolicity measures of sampled geodesic triangles.

Contribution

It demonstrates that rural and urban road systems can be distinguished by their hyperbolic geometric properties using graph analysis.

Findings

Rural road networks exhibit hyperbolic graph characteristics.

Urban road networks resemble the Cayley graph of ^2.

Hyperbolicity measures can differentiate rural from urban areas.

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the Finnish road network as a graph in order to measure whether the "rurality" or "urbanity" of an area correlates with local geometrical properties of the graph. Our primary motivation is the observation that the road systems in rural areas look similar to hyperbolic graphs, while in large cities they resemble more the Cayley graph of $\mathbb{Z}^2$. We do not aim for a comprehensive analysis, but rather wish to demonstrate that this observation can be measured and analyzed through looking at various "hyperbolicity measures" of randomly sampled geodesic triangles in the road graph.