ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Urban highways are barriers to social ties.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Uncovering how transport access reduces deprivation: When colocation misleads.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Misalignment between residential segregation of non-EU migrants and urban barriers varies across Western European cities.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- U.S. Highway 71 and Social Determinants of Health: Long-Term Disparities in Earnings, Economic Mobility, Incarceration, and Teen Birth in Kansas City.Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine · 2025Article
- Urban highways are barriers to social ties.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Urban highways are common, especially in the United States, making cities more car-centric. They promise the annihilation of distance but obstruct pedestrian mobility, thus playing a key role in limiting social interactions locally. Although this limiting role is widely acknowledged in urban studies, the quantitative relationship between urban highways and social ties is barely tested. Here, we define a Barrier Score that relates massive, geolocated online social network data to highways in the 50 largest US cities. At the granularity of individual social ties, we show that urban highways are associated with decreased social connectivity. This barrier effect is especially strong for short distances and consistent with historical cases of highways that were built to purposefully disrupt or isolate Black neighborhoods. By combining spatial infrastructure with social tie data, our method adds a dimension to demographic studies of social segregation. Our study can inform reparative planning for an evidence-based reduction of spatial inequality, and more generally, support a better integration of the social fabric in urban planning.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.