Examining the Amenability of Urban Street Networks for Locating Facilities

Authors

Tong Zhang, State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Collaborative Innovation Center of Geospatial Technology
Zhe Zeng, China University of Petroleum
Tao Jia, Wuhan University
Jing Li, University of DenverFollow

Publication Date

4-8-2016

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

Geography and the Environment

Keywords

Urban street networks, Facility location, Efficiency, Centrality

Abstract

This paper aims to characterize urban street networks from the perspective of facility location that is widely used for siting public or private services. Both topological and geometrical features of urban street networks are investigated to examine their impacts on the performance of facility location. We propose a set of efficiency and centrality measures to evaluate the amenability of street networks for locating facilities. The evaluation of 15 large cities in the U.S. reveals that facility locations are strongly affected by road network structures. For realistic street networks, grid planned road network are more amenable to locating facilities than irregular networks. The analyses on idealized network offer further evidence of the correlations between network properties and service provision efficiencies.

Publication Statement

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Recommended Citation

Zhang, Tong, et al. “Examining the Amenability of Urban Street Networks for Locating Facilities.” Physica A, vol. 457, 2016, pp. 469–479. doi: 10.1016/j.physa.2016.03.059.