Montego Bay 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 Montego Bay plotted against Saint James and Jamaica. While Saint James and Jamaica both rose steadily, Montego Bay's new street additions rose steadily. Most recently, Montego Bay's incremental SNDi rose from 6.37 to 6.85 between 1991-2005 and 2006-2020. In terms of the aggregate network, Montego Bay ranked 1st out of 1 cities in Saint James and 5th out of 6 in Jamaica as of 2020.

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

What about similarly populated cities?

• Sinchon, North Korea
• Zhodzina, Belarus
• Banjariya, Nepal
• Pingyin, China
• Ninh Bình, Vietnam
• Kyaukpyu, Myanmar

In new street additions, Montego Bay and Sinchon both built increasingly disconnected streets over time, while Pingyin built increasingly connected streets from 1975 through 1976-1990, then shifted to more disconnected patterns. For the full street network, though, all three cities follow the same trend. Montego Bay and Sinchon have been growing further apart in their street-network character since 1975.