  Street networks allow people and goods to move through cities, but they are
vulnerable to disasters like floods, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks.
Well-planned network design can make a city more resilient and robust to such
disruptions, but we still know little about worldwide patterns of
vulnerability, or worldwide empirical relationships between specific design
characteristics and resilience. This study quantifies and measures the
vulnerability of the street networks of every urban area in the world then
models the relationships between vulnerability and street network design
characteristics. To do so, we simulate over 2.4 billion trips across more than
8,000 urban areas in 178 countries, while also simulating network disruption
events representing floods, earthquakes, and targeted attacks. We find that
disrupting high-centrality nodes severely impacts network function. All else
equal, networks with higher connectivity, fewer chokepoints, or less circuity
are less vulnerable to disruption's impacts. This study thus contributes a new
global understanding of network design and vulnerability to the literature. We
argue that these design characteristics offer high leverage points for street
network resilience and robustness that planners should emphasize when designing
or retrofitting urban networks.
