Ply number is a graph drawing metric inspired by studying road networks that has recently gained increasing attention. Intuitively, it captures both how evenly the vertices are distributed, and how evenly the lengths of the edges incident to each vertex are distributed.
We first formalize this intuition. We then present a recent bound on the edge-length ratio of outerplanar graphs, and a new drawing style that has low ply number for a certain class of outerplanar graphs. We believe that it may be possible to combine these ideas to produce drawings with low ply number for all outerplanar graphs.