Burghardt et al.: Road Network Evolution in Urban and Rural U.S.
In Road Network Evolution in the Urban and Rural United States Since 1900, authors Keith Burghardt, Kristina Lerman (both of Information Sciences Institute, USC), Johannes H. Uhl (Institute of Behavioral Science & Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Colorado), and Stefan Leyk (Geography, Colorado) discuss the long-term development trajectories of road networks in rural and urban settings.
Road networks are critical to local and national transportation and provide significant benefits to the economy, while also incurring significant construction and maintenance costs. This article argues it is crucial to both public health and the economy to understand how road infrastructure has evolved in order to learn about the effectiveness of past policies. However – this data is scarce. Due to this scarcity, researchers are left to manually digitize road networks based on historical maps, construct advanced GIS modeling, and use statistical and network-analytic methods to study the characteristics of current and past road networks.
Prior research has left many questions unanswered. One in particular, according to the authors, is one of the questions this article sets out to explore: Are trends of road network evolution stationary across the rural-urban continuum, or are these trends dependent on the degree of urbanization? The authors ask the question as part of a wider critique of the tendency for urban planning literature to focus on urban areas at the expense of understanding rural and suburban settlements and development.
To address these knowledge gaps, the authors exhaustively explore road network evolution across to conterminous United States since 1900. Based on various datasets, the authors develop a three-part analysis aiming to assess long-term road network evolution at three different levels of spatial granularity. These levels include (a) urban road networks at the city level, (b) road networks in urban, peri-urban and rural settings at the county-level, and (c) intra-urban, local road network characteristics.
The authors’ data are shown throughout the article with figures demonstrating the evolution of road networks in the United States nationwide from 1900 – 2015. The results are nuanced and worth a closer look. Overall, the authors claim this study demonstrates how integration of large spatio-temporal datasets enables new detailed insights into long-term evolution of human settlements through the lens of road networks across the rural-urban continuum in the United States. The data they collect and create shed light on the evolution of specific road networks and can help fill important knowledge gaps, including about possible drivers of change.
More on Transportation from the Project
For more on the role of transportation in shaping rural past and presents, see this collection from the Project’s 2021 – 2022 Research Series on Rural Infrastructure.
