OSMnx: New methods for acquiring, constructing, analyzing, and visualizing complex street networks

Scholars have studied street networks in many ways. However, there are somelimitations to the current urban planning/street network analysis literature. Toaddress these challenges, this study presents a new tool to make the collection ofdata and creation and analysis of street networks simple, consistent, andautomatable. OSMnx is a new Python package that downloads administrativeboundary shapes and street networks from OpenStreetMap. OSMnx contributesfive significant new capabilities for researchers and city planners: first, theautomatic downloading of administrative place boundaries and shapefiles; second,the tailored and automated downloading and constructing of street networks fromOpenStreetMap (including driving, walking, biking, etc.); third, the automatedcorrection and simplification of network topology; fourth, the ability to save streetnetworks to disk as shapefiles, GraphML, or SVG files; and fifth, the ability toanalyze street networks, calculate routes, project and visualize the networks, andcalculate network metrics and statistics. These metrics and statistics include boththose common in urban design and transportation studies, and other measures ofthe structure and topology of the network. This is a rough draft of a working paper. For the most up-to-date version, seehttp://geoffboeing.com/publications/osmnx-complex-street-networks/