A Look at Street Network Orientation in Major US Cities (geoffboeing.com) 130
Geoff Boeing, a postdoc in the Urban Analytics Lab at the University California, Berkeley, has published a blog post that offers a fascinating look at the street orientation of major cities in the USA and around the world. What is interesting in his findings is how cities from different historical periods form different patterns, and also just how uniformly grid-structured most American cities are. From his post: In 1960, Kevin Lynch published The Image of the City, his treatise on the legibility of urban patterns. How coherent is a city's spatial organization? How do these patterns help or hinder urban navigation? I recently wrote about visualizing street orientations with Python and OSMnx. That is, how is a city's street network oriented in terms of the streets' compass bearings? How well does it adhere to a straightforward north-south-east-west layout? I wanted to revisit this by comparing 25 major US cities' orientations.
Each of the cities is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar's direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings. [...] Most cities' polar histograms similarly tend to cluster in at least a rough, approximate way. But then there are Boston and Charlotte. Unlike most American cities that have one or two primary street grids organizing city circulation, their streets are more evenly distributed in every direction. Boeing published a follow-up to the post to include to compare world cities.
Each of the cities is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar's direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings. [...] Most cities' polar histograms similarly tend to cluster in at least a rough, approximate way. But then there are Boston and Charlotte. Unlike most American cities that have one or two primary street grids organizing city circulation, their streets are more evenly distributed in every direction. Boeing published a follow-up to the post to include to compare world cities.
Pretty interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Pretty interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty sure if you fed Boston's street structure to an AI, it would first barf, then start spitting out gibberish and finally turn itself off.
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Re: Pretty interesting (Score:5, Funny)
No, if you look at Bostons street structure you would see why it was built like it was. Hint: the big blue blob in the middle of the city.
That's not a nice thing to call the Kennedy family.
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Re: Pretty interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
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The same as what? Bostons first streets followed the shorelines and built from there. It likely would show up looking like Baltimore in his graphs. As you go away from the city it gets less structured.
Yes, because none of those other cities are on bodies of water. Charlotte is land locked and its the other city that is a mess. You probably didn't see it, but there's another chart of 25 cities from around the world and your correlation between water and organization of the streets just doesn't hold up. Rome it seems is the most chaotic and its not on water. It seems that the age of the city and its willingness to fix infrastructure issues after the fact are the two factors that influence this measure
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Re:Pretty interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Many older cities, especially in Europe, followed a circular diagram, with ray streets outwards and round ones connecting them. At first that would be the result of being squeezed into city walls, then followed expansion outwards, along these streets and filling in the space in between.
And cities located in hilly/mountainous terrain will have streets following curvature of the hills; the steep streets of San Francisco that completely ignore the slopes and make for such iconic scenes in car chase movies are something rarely seen in the world. Usually, you'll have streets that run along the slope, maintaining level or moderate climb/descent, and connecting/branching where terrain allows.
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Many older cities, especially in Europe, followed a circular diagram, with ray streets outwards and round ones connecting them. At first that would be the result of being squeezed into city walls, then followed expansion outwards, along these streets and filling in the space in between.
And cities located in hilly/mountainous terrain will have streets following curvature of the hills; the steep streets of San Francisco that completely ignore the slopes and make for such iconic scenes in car chase movies are something rarely seen in the world. Usually, you'll have streets that run along the slope, maintaining level or moderate climb/descent, and connecting/branching where terrain allows.
In the bay area, there are many parts where the roads follow the curvature of the hills (Oakland hills, etc). Many times, those parts are just too steep to make a grid a viable solution. The hills in SF just are not that steep by comparison which is why the grid ignores the hills and the sidewalks turn into steps. From being in both parts, I can tell you its far faster to use the grid. Even with all the extra traffic in SF, its still faster to move across the city than the Oakland hills due to the stree
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You should take climate into account. During snowy winter, it may be much, much faster... in one direction.
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I agree with you on the hilly areas being less likely to have organized grids. Which is why Atlanta's graph makes no sense... Many of the major arterials aren't straight. Also, the downtown area has a huge kink in it that may or may not be reflected in the summary representation.
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Large-scale grids are a 19th-20th century American phenomenon, following the precedent of New York. Roman cities had tiny grids, just a few blocks long, like Edinburgh's New Town. But in the medieval era grids went completely out of fashion and roads just went anywhere at random. I don't know how or when Atlanta was laid out, but its layout is not that untypical.
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Many older cities, especially in Europe, followed a circular diagram, with ray streets outwards and round ones connecting them.
That's the style that Boston followed. You can see the pattern if you know to look for it. The main problem was that they quickly ran into water on all sides, so the plan ended up failing pretty miserably.
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It's nowhere near as structured as circles, rays, and hoops. What happened was there was an important location here, and an important location there, and some people decided "hey we should build a road connecting these impo
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And cities located in hilly/mountainous terrain will have streets following curvature of the hills; the steep streets of San Francisco that completely ignore the slopes and make for such iconic scenes in car chase movies are something rarely seen in the world.
Seattle is just like SF in this regard - downtown roads go straight up and down the side of a steep hill. In Seattle's case, it's due to its history as a logging town... those roads were originally "skid roads", and were used to slide the felled trees down to the harbor.
It makes for a stress-inducing driving experience, especially if you drive a manual transmission. It's not uncommon to be stuck halfway up a hill because of a red light, and many drivers don't think about allowing any roll-back room at all.
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Why would you roll back if you had a manual transmission?
Just use the handbrake to hold you until the clutch engages and drive forwards, it's a standard part of the driving test where I live.
Re:Pretty interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Actully, think of it this way; coastal cities were likely developed earlier, with some notable exceptions on the West Coast, and so while they are constrained by the shoreline, they also were developed before grid layouts were common or imposed by planning, IE NO planning. Boston being an excellent example, Beacon Hill being settled before there was a city there, and the roads more likely being livestock paths before they were even horse paths or wagon trails. Chicago has a grid pattern right up to much of Lake Michigan, though Evanston shows some irregular streets. Los Angeles has a great mix of grid and non-grid, and I wonder if that can be traced to the time of development...
Phoenix is a grid, probably because it had planning from early on, while San Diego is quite a mess, probably because it lacked planning.
I'ts not just the coastline, it's also the age when the development occurred. In another area of interest, London is not so populated with skyscrapers as New York, probably because elevators did not exist when London expanded, while New York had elevators, and that enables higher buildings.
Planning enables streets to be laid out on grid. Coastlines do interfere with that, but coastal cities were settled earlier, before planning was an option.
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Phoenix is a grid, probably because it had planning from early on, while San Diego is quite a mess, probably because it lacked planning.
There's a little bit of truth to this, but mostly in San Diego it's because of the large number of hills and canyons within the urban area. The original San Diego ("old town") is just as irregular as any other part of the urban bits of Greater San Diego. Alonzo Horton's "New Town" development by the bay -- which is the current Downtown San Diego -- is grid-like, but the urban core only extends about 20-25 blocks outward from the bay.
After that, despite there still being numbered streets going eastward here
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Consider the following:
Of the cities listed, the most "disorganized" are older, east coast cities. The exception being Atlanta, which was largely burned down and re-built. Midwestern cities have a more regular pattern because they were more planned out, as opposed to organically grown. Exceptions involve unique geographical features that were hard to over-lay a grid on top of.
Miami is mostly new construction since the 1940s. Manhattan is old, but geographically constrained in a way that made the grid sen
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With the westward expansion, a uniform land survey system was adopted and all towns were laid out following a standard pattern. This was mirrored in certain parts of Australia.
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Railroad (Score:2)
The difference is pre-railroad and post-railroad. Pre-railroad cities usually grew from hamlets laid out based on topography and geography, often the nearby river or bay. Post-railroad cities had a plan by the time they grew beyond a single main drag, with roads and blocks laid out on a north/south east/west basis.
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It is almost like the cities that have a body of water have street orientation that follows the shoreline. Like maybe the shoreline was important and stuff to the city and the city grew from the ports along the shoreline. Interesting stuff.
Yep, that's exactly right. Their chart of Minneapolis is incorrect for the main urban part that was built around the Mississippi river.
It's a pretty regular grid EXCEPT for downtown.
Tacoma (Score:1)
Tacoma has a bizarre direction pattern for its streets. Every location east of A Street is "East", and west of Division is "West". Between these 2 (and including A and Division streets), everything north of 6th Ave is "North" and south of 6th Ave is "South".
6th Ave itself has no direction name, and oddly, streets increment in both directions. North of 6th Ave is 7th Ave North, while south of 6th Ave is 7th Ave South. There is no 1st Ave through 5th Ave.
These directional names persist through Pierce County,
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I wonder if Tacoma is near water
It is. So is Seattle. The core downtown area is made up of three grid systems, each oriented to face Elliot Bay and each with its own orientation. But this effect is swamped by the surrounding neighborhoods built on a N-S, E-W grid system. So the histogram is somewhat misleading.
Also, we didn't build around the terrain, we removed it [wikipedia.org]
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That's nothing.... You should see Dallas..
We have ONE road that goes, north, south, east and west if you drive all of it in one direction (no U-Turns). It would take you hours. This road passes though nearly a dozen towns, each having their own block numbers. The road is named "Beltline" and it completely circles Dallas. So "101 North Beltline" is the address of multiple places.
Then, we have roads like I-35 East and I-35 West which are different roads that run north and south or the 190/George Bush Tu
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We have ONE road that goes, north, south, east and west if you drive all of it in one direction (no U-Turns). It would take you hours. This road passes though nearly a dozen towns, each having their own block numbers. The road is named "Beltline" and it completely circles Dallas.
Sure, and Houston is encircled by a freeway. Ring roads [wikipedia.org] are not uncommon.
All this in Texas where it seems the "speed limit" are but friendly suggestions for a minimum, and are set to 70 MPH for most major highways in town and 75 or more outside of population centers. And don't get me started on how we use service roads to put exits AFTER the bridge and merge into traffic BEFORE the bridge.
Ugh, driving in Texas was awful. You want to get me started? Bring up these little shit towns in the middle of bumfuck with hidden speed limit signs. I got dinged by one of those literally on my way into Texas, and I was in a loaner vehicle from a mechanic (my van crapped out on the way in) so I was being careful not to speed, too.
I knew you were going to say Beltline (Score:2)
As soon as you started talking about a weird road in Dallas, I knew you were going to say Beltline. I thought it was really weird until I thought about the name. Belts go around. It's a loop, which isn't uncommon at all. Beltline is kind of a messed up loop, though.
The good news is - wherever you are in Dallas, if you're lost you can ask anyone how to get to Beltline. Follow Beltline long enough and you'll eventually get to your neighborhood - no matter where your neighborhood is.
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Not far from the truth, for freeways (Score:2)
Not too far from the truth, for the freeways. Spokes to drive into town in the morning and drive out toward the suburbs after work. Then three concentric rings to get from the spoke to your neighborhood.
If your able to select your spoke such that when you get to the ring you're on the opposite side of the road from the majority of traffic, it works pretty well.
Grid cities (Score:2)
Most cities in the new world are laid out in grids. All you need to get around Calgary is a ruler. Montreal is very much a grid, but a tilted one that follows geography. And long, skinny ribbon-farm-like blocks, reflecting its French heritage.
The town that makes me shake my head is Bellingham, Washington. A new(-ish) city, but since it was assembled by amalgamating three towns with their own street grids, it always give me a headache when I'm there.
...laura
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North of Tacoma's Narrows Bridge lay Gig Harbor (where the blacks live, and msmash doesn't like the blacks) and the Key Peninsula, where streets prepend the direction name with "KP" - i.e. "KPN" for North - to be more clear that they're across Puget Sound from the rest of Pierce County.
Uh... I know quite a few people who live in Gig Harbor, and they are all upper-middle-class whites. I realize there are less affluent areas of Gig Harbor, but the black population is almost certainly higher in Tacoma proper, especially in areas like Hilltop and Salishan.
But with regards to the roads in Tacoma - I agree it's a bizarre layout. They've redone the "theater district" somewhat, but I remember back when the Pantages Theater was still the Rialto (I saw the original Star Wars there on the one-year a
You can probably guess Age (Score:5, Insightful)
You can probably guess the age of those cities by those graphs- at least how long they've been a major population centre. The ones under 250 years of age (most of the American ones) are very N-S E-W. Older ones like Rome show the roads go in every direction.
Madrid is interesting because it shows N-S E-W but with a big cluster in the middle. I don't know much about Madrid's history- obviously it is an old city, but the chart would suggest a rapid boom in population in the modern age of proper road planning.
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You can probably guess the age of those cities by those graphs- at least how long they've been a major population centre.
Seems like you should also take the width of roads into account. The wider, the later, thanks to the car.
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You can probably guess the age of those cities by those graphs- at least how long they've been a major population centre.
Seems like you should also take the width of roads into account. The wider, the later, thanks to the car.
Generally yes, but some places have very wide boulevards independently or very much predating car development. Washington, DC has a few roads which were probably ridiculously wide when they were laid down, and cars were not even on the horizon. Beijing has some ultra-wide boulevards. Many streets in Pyongyang seemed stupidly wide 10 years ago, but traffic jams are now starting to be more and more common. On the other hand, this may be luck- Burma's highway to Naypyidaw being a great example of how makin
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The wide boulevards in Paris are supposedly to make it harder for rioters & revolutionaries to barricade them.
Re:You can probably guess Age (Score:4, Interesting)
What you can see is the difference between a town developing out of an agglomeration of houses and settlements, and a planned community. Many U.S. cities fall in the later category, but so do Roman colonias from 2000 years ago, Middle Age towns in Central Europe or large Asian cities. If cities grow, it may even happen that a rectangular grid downtown loses its dominance in the suburbs, as they are former separate towns and villages merged with the larger town, or that vice versa an old core of irregular streets gets surounded by large, planned suburban communities, which cause the North-South/East-West grid to dominate the statistics.
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You can probably guess the age of those cities by those graphs- at least how long they've been a major population centre. The ones under 250 years of age (most of the American ones) are very N-S E-W. Older ones like Rome show the roads go in every direction.
Actually Roman cities followed a strict grid pattern laid out in a N-S-E-W axis, with the streets of uniform width and the two main N-S and E-W streets (the Cardo Maximus and the Decumanus Maximus intersecting at the heart of the city. Some older Roman-descended European cities still have their main streets running along the Cardo and Decumanus Maximus - in Cologne, Germany, for example, they are the present day and Hohe Strasse and Schildergasse streets.
The organic growth came later during medieval times.
DUH? this is Geography 101 (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall this being taught in my middle school aerial cartography section of Geography. There's different epochs and influences on city layout. The french and spanish tended to build layouts conformal to landscape features like rivers, foothills, and drainages. The spanish ones always were oriented around a major zocolo plaza with the church at one end. Later American cities were Rectilinear grids. For an extreme case look at Salt Lake city which is paced out by distance from the church at the center.
But this is all well known, the design of cities and it's traceability to the varied possible influences used to be well taught
Re:DUH? this is Geography 101 (Score:4, Funny)
But this is all well known, the design of cities and it's traceability to the varied possible influences used to be well taught
What this guy did, which is completely revolutionary, is look at how the layouts align to cardinal directions - north, south, east, west. I don't think anyone has done that before. I mean, he used Python!
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Maybe he used AI and Blockchain to keep it secure?
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There's no need to be flippant - it's a neat visualization, that's all. Nothing revolutionary but I found it worth a look.
Of course (Score:2)
You're correct. I'm just a bit jaded after experience firsthand what absolute garbage doctoral candidates try to pass off as research. I in college at the leading edge of "look I played around with stuff in SPSS and found something!" getting through as doctoral dissertations. I wasn't in the doctoral program, but knew enough that most of what was getting through was junk.
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Your cheekiness may be more appropriate than you think. Almost exactly the same visualization appeared in a different blog post [tumblr.com] four years ago.
Las vegas New Mexico (Score:2)
Las Vegas New Mexico was developed in 3 waves. First the spanish settlements on the farmlands west of the river. (1830s) The streets here have spanish surnames and the blocks are not rectangular or uniform. Then the Railiroad era (1880s) where the highlands to the west of the river were settled. This has very rectangular blocks and all the streets have names like "Washington" or numbered avenues. And finally the freeway and strip mall era of development further to the west has long dead straight boulev
Most US cities are designed (Score:3)
Most of the US cities were designed by semi-intelligent humans. When you've got a greenfield install, you do it the Right Way.
Boston's streets were designed by cows, according to local lore. But what's up with Charlotte?
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Most US cities would have grown out of farming and fishing communities, and things like bodies of water would have shaped them. Those cities weren't "designed", they just sorta "happened".
Which is why so many of those "city of the future" type things are bullshit ... sure, if you could build a fresh city from scratch and someone else was going to pay for it, you could do all of these
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Which is why so many of those "city of the future" type things are bullshit ... sure, if you could build a fresh city from scratch and someone else was going to pay for it, you could do all of these cool things. But you won't have that option, so it'll never happen.
California City, CA has the street layout down cold. Unfortunately, that's about all they've got. There is a little town there, but most of the roads they laid out aren't paved. (As long as nobody is driving on them this is a reasonable solution; paved roads aren't any more expensive to maintain, but you do have to pay for actually building them.)
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Depends on what Fatboy Kim gets up to.
You could probably buy recently nuked real estate at a hefty markdown ... Hey, I wonder i&^^..;.*
no carrier
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Boston's streets were designed by cows, according to local lore.
Cows tend to walk in a North/South direction most of the time. For some unknown reason they seem to sense the earth's magnetic field and line up accordingly. I saw an article once (it might have been from Slashdot even) linking to satellite photos of cows- people noticed they almost faced North or South... EXCEPT when they were under powerlines... when under powerlines cows would face random directions. Cows might actually be useful in designing a North/South road system.
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Here you go, from Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
The short summary states "Google Earth images reveal that cattle around the world tend to align themselves with Earth's magnetic field. "
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Here you go, from Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican... [www.scient...merican...]
You reference an audio clip? WTF? Here is a real reference: doi: 10.1073/pnas.0803650105 [doi.org]
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I know it isn't the primary source. Frankly, the whole thing wasn't getting much effort out of me. I did notice that in the audio clip that did reference the real study. For the level of effort I considered the whole thing worth, that was enough.
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Next thought, it seems that many people want to put "cow polarity" up as an instance of internal navigation. Here comes another theory, they may just be trying to maximize the amount of sun on their body.
But, as I said, this isn't getting a lot of effort from me.
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This is a neat presentation of data.
With most cities you can read off features of their history and topography from the histogram.
Los Angeles you see the small disk of streets that represent hill neighborhoods on top of a simple grid.
"Ancient" cities (developed gradually over centuries), only found in Colonial America in the U.S., are large disks due to the incorporation of many unplanned, or separately planned, nuclei. Or you see rapid modern growth from an ancient core. Delhi is a good example, and but th
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But what's up with Charlotte?
Someone decided that cities shouldn't be ugly arse grids?
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Boston's streets were designed by cows...
Reminds me of The Calf Path by Sam Walter Foss
One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.
Since then two hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell-we
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But what's up with Charlotte?
I was wondering about charlotte, too. specifically, how does it have more streets running north than south? I didn't see any mention of taking directionality of traffic into account in the article.
Can anyone explain Charlotte (Score:2)
Can anyone explain Charlotte? It's the only one that looks like an ancient European city on it's graph rather than a city built in the last few centuries. Why are Charlotte's roads going all over the place in every direction. I've been to Charlotte several times and can't think of any geological reason.
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If by "Downtown Charlotte" you mean a tiny, tiny area of only 12 x 12 city blocks, then you're correct. However suburban sprawl doesn't begin to be a factor when a city is still only 12 x 12 blocks. Something else happened (or more than likely something didn't happen) very early on in the city's development to result in this level of disorganization.
Look for yourself if you don't believe me. Check out "Morehead St", "Central Ave", "N Graham St", "Rt 49" - these seem to be the seeds of disorganization tha
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Like Boston, it has areas of small grids that go every which way. There appears to be attempts at circumferential roadways, which would certainly explain it. But unplanned growth seems to be at the heart of it.
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High ground that follows the topography.
Designed by Obi-Wan.
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I really wouldn't want to live in a city where all the roads are straight and uniform in a grid.
But then I'm from yurp and used to small cities (but real ones: with actual city rights) full of twisty roads and bridges over canals and such like. And trees. A city is not livable if there aren't any trees. Even if it does mean the city'll have to clean up all the dead leaves come autumn. Trees!
To be fair, many American cities do have plenty of trees. It varies city-by-city, but a lot American cities do have tree-lined streets and large green-areas. There are some cities that lack them and look grey and boring. I can think of plenty of cities back home in Britain that were industrial dump towns with fewer trees and green spaces.
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After the Fire of 1666, a good chunk of London streets were re-aligned.
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EDIT: Not quite correct; there were some new streets, but not as many as I had thought...
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Your point would be relevant if the diagram refers to the ancient square mile of the City of London. Or did they measure the 600-700 sq. miles of the modern city?
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It would allow traffic to go in 6 directions instead of 4 in a direct line.
Increasing the length of traffic light waiting by 50%?
Honeycomb city blocks not a good idea (Score:1)
I got this in school. And that was so long ago that it was still called New Amsterdam.
You're not that old.
I wonder if a honeycomb structure would be more eficient than squares. It would allow traffic to go in 6 directions instead of 4 in a direct line.
I first thought, six directions? That's gonna cause more traffic accidents. But then I realised that if your city blocks are six-sided, you only have three roads meeting at an intersection, not six. The downside is that now you can never go straight for more than one side of a block. At each intersection you must choose whether to go left or right, since there's no straight ahead any longer.
So asking for directions is going to get really confusing really quickly. Can you think of an effi
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South by Southwest... (Score:1)
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If you're traveling in the opposite direction and going northeast towards the 280, how can it still be called Southwest Expressway?
The same way I can drive both North and South on both South and North streets; it's the location relative to the city center. A better question is how you can get anywhere around there during rush hour.
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A better question is how you can get anywhere around there during rush hour.
I take public transit. A local bus take me down the street to pick up the express bus, the express bus drops me off in Palo Alto, and a local bus take me down the street to my job. An hour each way. Driving through Palo Alto during rush hour is insane. Since I work in government I.T., I start work at 7:00AM.
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Alas, we're moving away from the grid (Score:1)
We're moving away from the grid system in many areas, especially suburbs, since we prioritize for cars, not people. People find a dense, small grid system to be easier to navigate, due to shorter distances between most point. While automobiles find the winding suburban roads, with limited egress, to be easier to navigate, due to less intersections.
Unfortunately, we haven't really adapted to the latter. Which leads to some problems for human safety as well as a financial can that we're kicking down the ro
It makes sense (Score:2)
Many years ago I worked as a copier repairman in rural Northern California (the part of CA that you don't see in the movies). I had three towns in my territory that were so similar that it was sometimes hard to remember which town I was in. On the positive side, once I learned the grid in one of the towns the knowledge was transferable to all three.
I had a simple theory that explained the similarity in these towns. The similarity was the founders. While all three were founded by different people, all were f
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That meant that the planning was done by people who had similar educations, life experiences, and biases; they were the products of their time. I later confirmed this by visiting the towns museums on my free time.
Are you sure there was no coordination between them? There could be a simpler explanation than that they all happened to do the same thing for the same reasons independently.
State roads can be interesting, too (Score:2)
Mormon Pioneers (Score:2)
I like how the historic sections of historic cities in Utah are laid out. There are 8 city blocks to the mile and the street numbers increment by 100 for each city block. Center Street divides the city in half. North of Center Street are 100 N, 200 N, etc; south of Center Street are 100 S, 200 S, etc. Main Street divides the city in the other direction flanked by 100 E and 100 W.
Salt Lake County consolidated its street numbers when the cities grew together and emergency services ended up at 200 N 100 W in
Slashdotted! (Score:1)
Maybe they should also consider the layout of their digital network, because right now, it ain't making it.
Curved Streets (Score:3)
N-S, E-W (Score:1)
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St Louis: City, City+County, Metro? (Score:1)
Looks like St. Louis was done for just the City of St. Louis. The riverfront and downtown are NS-EW, but there are neighborhoods that are maybe 15 or 30 degrees off that.
And the suburbs -- especially towns that were settled not long after the founding of St. Louis -- have their own layouts.