Transport indicator analysis and comparison of 151 urban areas, based on open source data

IntroductionThe accurate analysis and comparison of transport indicators from a large variety of urban areas can help to evaluate the performance of different adopted transport policies. This paper attempts to determine important transport and socio-economic indicators from 151 urban areas and 51 countries, based on comparable, directly observable open-source data such as OpenstreetMap (OSM) and the TomTom database.AnalysisThis is the first, systematic indicator-analysis using recent, open source data from different urban areas around the world. The indicator road kilometers per person, sometimes cited as infrastructure accessibility is calculated by processing OSM data. Information on congestion levels have been taken from the TomTom database and socio-economic data from various, publicly accessible databases. Relations between indicators are identified through correlations and regression models are calibrated, quantifying the relation between transport infrastructure and performance indicators. Three sub-categories of cities with different population sizes (small cities, large cities and metropolises) are defined and studied individually. In addition, a qualitative analysis is performed, putting five different indicators into relation.Results & ConclusionsThe main results reconfirm previous findings but with a larger sample size and more comparable data. Good correlation values between infrastructure accessibility, socio-economic indicators, and congestion levels are demonstrated. It is shown that cities with higher GDP have generally built more infrastructure which in turn reduces their congestion levels. In particular, for cities with low population density (above approximately 1500 inh. Per sq.km), more roads per inhabitant lead to lower congestion levels; cities with high population density have in general lower congestion levels if the rail infrastructure per person ratio is high. Furthermore, these cities increasing railways per person is more effective in reducing congestions than increasing road length per person.