A new perspective on street classification towards sustainability

Abstract

Roads located in urban areas should take the generic concept of streets that should be studied and analyzed based on their various domains of characterization. However, one difficulty of this process is the high heterogeneity of the features of the different urban environments. Usually, a functional road classification is based on a dichotomous relationship between the functions of mobility and accessibility, although it was not possible to represent all types of roads of a road network in this type of classification or road hierarchies. Since road classification is a fundamental tool of urban planning, this paper presents a new proposal for classification and hierarchy of streets, which takes into account the perspective of sustainable urban development. Thus, this proposal envisages the evaluation of the performance of streets, which allows identifying the key issues and defining a set of strategies for their resolution through an environmental, social and economical perspective.