Different Ways of Thinking about Street Networks and Spatial Analysis

摘要

Street networks, as one of the oldest transport infrastructures in the world, play a significant role in modernization, sustainable development, and human daily activities in both ancient and modern times. Although street networks have been well studied in a variety of engineering and scientific disciplines, including transportation science, geography, urban planning, economics, and even physics, our understanding of street networks in terms of their structure and dynamics remains limited, especially when dealing with such real-world problems as traffic jams, pollution, and human evacuations for disaster management. Thanks to the rapid development of geographic information science and its related technologies, abundant street network data have been collected in an attempt to better understanding these networks' behavior and human activities constrained by these networks. For example, OpenStreetMap has assembled hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data for streets and for other related geographic objects, such as public transportation, building footprints, and points of interest. Given this context, we predict that, in the near future, increasing amounts of research will be published regarding the underlying structure and dynamics of street networks. This special issue (SI) comprises five of the best articles from 19 articles submitted to and presented at the International Cartographic Association workshop on street networks and transport. Due to time constraints, we were unable to include a number of other high-quality articles, but we are confident that these other articles soon will be added to the literature elsewhere.