Road space

Road space encompasses built and non-built areas which serve roadway traffic (incl. hard shoulders, accompanying cycle- and footpaths). The road network is subdivided according to the body responsible into autobahns, arterial roads, state roads, district roads, municipal roads and other roads (e.g. private roads). In addition there exist accessible rural hard-surface roads.

To calculate the extent of road space in the Monitor of Settlement and Open Space Development it is necessary to know the road width, which is available as an ATKIS attribute for each section of roadway (for standard roads: width of the carriageway, for rural roads: width of the transport pathway). This attribute is normally standardized for regional roadways (national autobahns, arterial roads, state roads and district roads), but frequently varies for municipal roads. If the attribute is unavailable, then the following average road widths are assumed, derived from the number of lanes:

No. of lanes       autobahn       other roads

          1                      5,5 m                 4,5 m (*)

          2                    10,0 m                 5,5 m

          3                    14,0 m               10,0 m

          4                    17,5 m               12,5 m

(*) If there is no information on the width of the transport pathway for a rural road then it is treated as a single lane road and assumed to have a standard width of 4.5 m.

 

Unsealed rural roads (Wirtschaftswege) captured by ATKIS Basis-DLM are primarily byways in areas of forest or woodland. These typically unsealed roads are normally not captured in the cadastral land register or in ALKIS. Therefore, they are not recognised as roads in the IOER Monitor. 

The downgrading of roads as a result of the AAA migration to rural hard-surface roads (or unsealed rural roads) affects indicator values for the length of roadways as well as roadway areas. This is most significant in the cases of Lower Saxony, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Saxony-Anhalt.   

Within urban sites, the IOER monitor applies an additional width of 2.50 m for pavements on both sides of the street (except for Autobahns or pedestrian zones).