Topological Analysis of Urban Street Networks

Abstract

The authors propose a topological analysis of large urban street networks based on a computational and functional graph representation. This representation gives a functional view in which vertices represent named streets and edges represent street intersections. A range of graph measures, including street connectivity, average path length, and clustering coefficient, are computed for structural analysis. In order to characterise different clustering degrees of streets in a street network they generalise the clustering coefficient to a k-clustering coefficient that takes into account k neighbours. Based on validations applied to three cities, the authors show that large urban street networks form small-world networks but exhibit no scale-free property.