Rationality of Urban Road Networks

Not many cities around the world have well-planned road networks where the minimisation of circuitousness is taken into account. Normally, unnecessarily long journeys are made between origins and destinations in many urban road networks, while the straight distances (i.e. the distances as the crow flies) between the same origin and destination points are much shorter. However there is a lack of literature in quantifying the amount of such circuitous portions of routes. The present book therefore provides a number of measuring scales so that for a given urban road network, potential improvement areas can easily be identified. Also, by means of these scales, it has become possible to compare the quality of road networks of various cities. The techniques introduced have been applied in the book on 14 cities, carefully selected around the world (i.e. Ankara, Beijing, Birmingham, Istanbul, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Manchester, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Rome, Tehran and Tokyo).