Nagercoil 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 Nagercoil plotted against Tamil Nadu and India. The SNDi of new construction in Nagercoil rose steadily, compared to Tamil Nadu which rose steadily and India which followed a zig-zag trend with an overall increase. Most recently, Nagercoil's incremental SNDi rose from 5.3 to 5.84 between 1991-2005 and 2006-2020. In terms of the aggregate network, Nagercoil ranked 72nd out of 121 cities in Tamil Nadu and 1023rd 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?

• Shaoguan, China
• Providence, United States
• Fangshan, China
• Piura, Peru
• Cuito, Angola
• Malatya, Turkey

In new street additions, Nagercoil built increasingly disconnected streets over time, while Shaoguan built increasingly disconnected streets from 1975 through 1991-2005, then improved and Piura built increasingly disconnected streets from 1975 through 1976-1990, then improved. For the full street network, though, all three cities follow the same trend. Notably, Nagercoil had a more sprawly network than Shaoguan in 1975 but the two have since reversed their relative ranking.