Ahmedabad in context: Street-network sprawl trends

The chart above shows SNDi trends for new street additions (left panel) and the entire network (right panel), with Ahmedabad plotted against Gujarat and India. The SNDi of new construction in Ahmedabad rose steadily, compared to Gujarat which rose steadily and India which followed a zig-zag trend with an overall increase. Most recently, Ahmedabad's incremental SNDi rose from 4.14 to 4.21 between 1991-2005 and 2006-2020. In terms of the aggregate network, Ahmedabad ranked 45th out of 92 cities in Gujarat and 864th out of 1868 in India as of 2020.

Rankings go from most connected to most disconnected — rank 1 is the most connected.

What about similarly populated cities?

• Tianjin, China
• Luanda, Angola
• Wuhan, China
• Hangzhou, China
• Johannesburg, South Africa
• Surabaya, Indonesia

In new street additions, Ahmedabad built increasingly disconnected streets over time, while Tianjin built increasingly disconnected streets from 1975 through 1991-2005, then improved and Hangzhou fluctuated in its street-construction patterns. For the full street network, though, all three cities follow the same trend. Ahmedabad and Hangzhou have been converging in their street-network character since 1975.