An Economic Development Evaluation Based on the OpenStreetMap Road Network Density: The Case Study of 85 Cities in China

Bo Liu,Gabriela Fernandez,Da-Jun Li,Yan-Dong Wang,Yu Shi,Ming-Hsiang Tsou

doi:10.3390/ijgi9090517

Abstract

The evaluation of urban economies has been one key concern identified by scholars. In the past, most research methods on urban development assessments have been based on statistical data, and the analysis results have been presented in the form of statistical tables. Moreover, the development of urban road networks reflects the status of urban development and spatial metrics, which are obtained from the urban road network which can be used to evaluate the growth of the urban economy. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) is collected through crowdsourcing, and the OSM road network has the characteristics of a simplified and efficient approach to collect data, update data, free available data, etc. Therefore, in this paper, the OSM road network density is used as a spatial metric which is taken as the main study subject, to evaluate the economic development of Chinese cities. In our experiment, results show that there is a significant regression correlation between the OSM road network density and municipal gross domestic product (GDP). For the 85 selected Chinese cities, a total of 71 cities with residuals between −0.1 and 0.1 account for 83.53%, and a total of 79 cities with residuals between −0.2 and 0.2 account for 92.94%. Therefore, it is apparent that the OSM road network density can be used as a spatial metric to evaluate the municipal GDP, and as a result, can be used by local governments and scholars to estimate, evaluate, and forecast the urban economic development of China.

Highlights

In recent years, the rapid development of remote sensing, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and other technologies, spatial data acquisition have become easier to employ
The OSM road network density is based on statistics and mainly uses a regression model, we take the OSM road network density as a spatial metric to evaluate the level of urban development and transparency in cites
Considering that the main purpose of this paper is to study whether the OSM road network density can be used as a spatial metric to evaluate the level of urban economic development, the following discussion will focus on forecasting results obtained by using the OSM road network density

Summary

Introduction

The rapid development of remote sensing, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and other technologies, spatial data acquisition have become easier to employ. Herold et al [5] used spatial metrics and texture measures to describe the spatial characteristics of land-cover objects within each land-use region as derived from interpreted aerial photographs These spatial metrics include percentage of landscape, patch density, mean patch size, area standard deviation, edge density, largest patch index, Euclidean mean nearest neighbor distance, Euclidean nearest neighbor distance standard deviation, area weighted mean patch fractal dimension, fractal dimension standard deviation, etc. The OSM road network density is based on statistics and mainly uses a regression model, we take the OSM road network density as a spatial metric to evaluate the level of urban development and transparency in cites

Objectives

Results

Conclusion