Reconstruction of Western Europe’s pre-motorway road network back to 1500: Data sources, historical information processing, and first application

Abstract

This paper presents the construction of a new historical road network data set, capturing conditions between 1500 and 1900, focusing on the 19 th and 18 th century. It continuous the work presented at TRB in 2015 on Reconstruction of 1950s Global Road Network Using American Army Maps. It covers Western Europe. The main part of this paper reports in detail the heuristics used, which were established based on an assessment of 900 or so collected historical transport related documents, mostly transport maps. Switzerland in 1850 is employed as an example of a geographical information system used to generate historical travel times. As far as the authors can ascertain, such comprehensive and detailed historical transport data has not been available until this point, but it enables examination of various historical and current transport-related research questions using spatial and time-variant data. The purpose of this paper is: first, to report on the reconstruction of these historical road network data and to position it in the existing literature and research tradition; second, to explain how the network is generated; third, to present our approach to model historical generalized travel costs; fourth, show how to use such information by applying it in a Swiss case study.