When Edge Importance Disagrees: Resistance-Ranked versus Betweenness Pruning on Urban Road Networks

Abstract

Sparsifying large road-network graphs by removing a fraction of their edges is a common way to reduce storage and accelerate spatial queries, but the choice of which edges to remove can quietly degrade the network that remains. We compare three edge-importance criteria for deciding what to prune, namely uniform random removal, low edge-betweenness removal, and low-effective-resistance removal, on 27 urban road networks drawn from OpenStreetMap that span a wide range of sizes and street-network morphologies. At edge-removal ratios from five to thirty percent we evaluate each criterion along three complementary axes: length-weighted routing utility, a topology-only measure given by the retention of the second-smallest eigenvalue of the normalized Laplacian of the largest connected component, and the fraction of an externally defined arterial backbone, taken from OpenStreetMap road classes, that each criterion destroys. The criteria disagree. Low-effective-resistance ranking, which targets electrically redundant edges, preserves connectivity well only below ten percent removal; beyond this level, retention falls below that of random removal in a growing majority of cities, and by thirty percent the method removes a larger share of the arterial backbone than random deletion does. Betweenness removal is consistently the best of the three on all three axes, at every removal ratio. Resistance-based redundancy is therefore not a safe proxy for routing importance when compressing real road networks, and a routing-oriented criterion is the more dependable choice.