Exploring impact of street layout on urban flood risk of people and vehicles under extreme rainfall based on numerical experiments

Urban street layout is an important factor in the formation process, characteristics, and risk level of urban flooding;therefore, this study numerically investigates the impact of street layout on urban flood risk to people and vehicles. Four typical street-layout scenarios with areas of 3 km × 3 km are established based on a block-scale investigation. The layout types are regular grid,irregular grid, radial, and annular. Urban inundation models are then constructed for these typical street layouts based on the twodimensional(2D) hydrodynamic method. Two historic, extreme rainfall events, which occurred in Beijing on July 21, 2012 and in Zhengzhou on July 20, 2021, are used as rainstorm scenarios for urban inundation modelling. The flood risks to people and vehicles are then calculated. Results show that, for an extreme rainstorm on the block scale, the street layout impacts the spatial and temporal distributions of the inundation variables, which include the water depth, flow velocity, flood volume, and inundated area. Moreover, for the same extreme-rainfall scenario, the greatest differences in the total flood volume, maximum street-water depth, and maximum street-flow velocity caused by street-layout differences are 17.22%, 60.25%, and 61.50%, respectively.Among the four street layouts considered in this study, the annular street layout exhibits the lowest degrees of inundation and flood risk. For the same extreme-rainfall scenario, the proportions of high-risk road sections for adults and children in this layout are 58.89% and 62.28% smaller than those for the layout with the largest proportion of high-risk road sections, respectively;the proportions of high-risk road sections for the Honda Accord and Audi Q7 were 55.31% and 53.04% smaller, respectively. The findings of this study may aid scientific understanding and development of “flood-sensitive” block-scale street layouts and urban planning in the context of the changing environment.