New research from McGill University and the University of California, Santa Cruz has found that the local streets of the world’s cities are becoming less connected, a global trend that is driving urban sprawl and discouraging the use of public transportation. The new study, published in an open-access paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , is the first global history of sprawl as measured by local connectivity of street networks. The research relied on publicly available data sourced from OpenStreetMap , the Wikipedia of maps, and satellite-derived data. The result of a 7-year collaboration, the study was able to show that in large parts of the world, recent urban growth has increasingly resulted in inflexible and disconnected street networks. Different forms of gated communities were also found to be on the rise globally. SNDi for streets added years 2000 to 2014. Inset charts the distribution at […]