Ramanathapuram 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 Ramanathapuram plotted against Tamil Nadu and India. The SNDi of new construction in Ramanathapuram rose steadily, compared to Tamil Nadu which rose steadily and India which followed a zig-zag trend with an overall increase. Most recently, Ramanathapuram's incremental SNDi rose from 3.53 to 3.98 between 1991-2005 and 2006-2020. In terms of the aggregate network, Ramanathapuram ranked 30th out of 121 cities in Tamil Nadu and 612th 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?

• Akugba, Nigeria
• Visnagar, India
• Chittaranjan, India
• Linshu, China
• `Amran, Yemen
• Ube, Japan

In new street additions, Ramanathapuram and Akugba both built increasingly disconnected streets over time, while Linshu fluctuated in its street-construction patterns. For the full street network, though, all three cities follow the same trend. Notably, Ramanathapuram had a more sprawly network than Akugba in 1975 but the two have since reversed their relative ranking.