Road networks are beautiful bird-eye view representations of cities. Nevertheless, their importance reaches far beyond eye candies used as wallpapers. Actually, for the trained urbanist eyes, the visual structure of a city’s road network already hints at numerous information concerning the masterplan (if there was any) and the possible paths of development a city took, in addition to the potential pitfalls and problems currently, or within the near future could affect town. These can range from private and non-private transportation planning to the advance of green infrastructure and the accessibility of services and amenities.
In this text, I introduce you to step one of this process by utilizing the OSMnx library to download various global cities road networks.
All images were created by the creator.
Let’s start with something easy and quick to process, as an example, a smaller ity district. For instance, I take advantage of downtown, District 5, in Budapest.
First, using OSMnx, I download the admin boundaries of town, after which use the graph_from_polygon command…
