Examining the amenability of urban street networks for locating facilities

This paper aims to characterize urban street networks from the perspective of facility location that is widely used for siting public or private services. Both topological and geometrical features of urban street networks are investigated to examine their impacts on the performance of facility location. We propose a set of efficiency and centrality measures to evaluate the amenability of street networks for locating facilities. The evaluation of 15 large cities in the U.S. reveals that facility locations are strongly affected by road network structures. For realistic street networks, grid planned road network are more amenable to locating facilities than irregular networks. The analyses on idealized network offer further evidence of the correlations between network properties and service provision efficiencies.