Urban Science Beyond Samples: Up-to-Date Street Network Models and Indicators for Every Urban Area in the World

TL;DR

This paper provides comprehensive, up-to-date street network models and indicators for all urban areas globally, enabling enhanced urban analysis and planning.

Contribution

It introduces a global, consistent dataset and workflow for street network modeling using OpenStreetMap data, accessible for diverse urban studies.

Findings

Processed 180 million nodes and 360 million edges across 10,351 urban areas.

Provides publicly available models and indicators for worldwide urban street networks.

Enables analysis beyond sample cities, including under-resourced regions.

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.