
Comparing City Street Orientations - jsm386
http://geoffboeing.com/2018/07/comparing-city-street-orientations/
======
fredley
I remember this from 2014:

[http://www.datapointed.net/2014/10/maps-of-street-grids-
by-o...](http://www.datapointed.net/2014/10/maps-of-street-grids-by-
orientation/)

Where streets are coloured on the map by orientation.

While most US cities are a wash of one colour, Europe is much more chromatic!

------
stephengillie
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, so the vast majority of
roads in the county have "East" appended to them, all the way out to Mt.
Rainier (which is also in Pierce County). North of Tacoma's Narrows Bridge lay
Gig Harbor 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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma,_Washington#Transportat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma,_Washington#Transportation)

~~~
iFred
This has to be something that is somewhat unique to the Pacific Northwest
lowlands, where you have very large counties that are densely populated in
spots. I lived near 127th St, which had 127th St Ct, 127th St E, 127th St Ct
E, and then a few miles away you had 127th St S, etc.

God forbid someone give these streets creative names.

~~~
mjevans
I'd rather have shockingly un-creative names.

Given most of these cities run streets north or south I'd love the streets to
have Lat (N-S) or Long (E-W) followed by the subset of GPS co-ordinates that
are unique within the location.

This looks like a good standard to start from:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System)

For pure estimates 8 digits (within their grid) give 10 meter accuracy which
should be enough, so choosing the full "min+second" (truncated, no sub-
seconds) listing or the first 4 digits (truncate off 10 thousandths) from the
lat or long should suffice.

This would also have a bonus of making anyplace addressable (in a postal
sense) by it's GPS co-ordinates.

------
lainga
Charlotte's interesting because it grew fairly slowly until 1970, but has
almost quadrupled in population since then. If you look at it on a map, the
downtown core has a regular grid pattern, but the outer regions are a chaos
where the city's expansion presumably overran a bunch of small towns in the
last 40 years.

------
soared
This looks incorrect based on Denver's graph. The post claims its effectively
100% along cardinal directions but thats obviously not the case. All of
downtown is NE/SW.

(Maybe Denver is including a lot of urban sprawl?)

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Denver,+CO/@39.7488106,-10...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Denver,+CO/@39.7488106,-104.9830277,13.25z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x876b80aa231f17cf:0x118ef4f8278a36d6!8m2!3d39.7392358!4d-104.990251)

~~~
cafard
The downtown Denver grid was aligned parallel or perpendicular to the
approximate course of the South Platte River there. It covers a small area--I
recall it as something under a square mile. However, I would never say
"effectively 100%" along cardinal directions, for a lot of places one might
want to go are in downtown.

------
smilekzs
The histogram for Seattle looks unconvincing for me, because the entire
downtown-pike-denny area is slanted to align with the coastline (
[https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6090857,-122.3407184,15z](https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6090857,-122.3407184,15z)
). Possibly due to weighting?

~~~
iFred
North of Lake Union and most of West Seattle are responsible for that plain
look N-S grid. Zoomed in, it seems to better reflect the petty feuds.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_layout_of_Seattle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_layout_of_Seattle)

------
MajorSauce
I live near Montreal, while the street orientations are in a grid pattern,
since there is a 45 degree orientation for most of them, "North" is by
convention in fact NW.

It gets even more confusing on the NE part of the city, where Montreal's
"East" is closer to true North and Montreal's North is closer to true West.

~~~
gregsadetsky
Yes! It’s sometimes even more than that, going up to 55 degrees (measured at
the St-Laurent/René-Lévesque crossing), which makes North more West than
North..!

Street name suffixes follow the “Montreal convention” too, using East/West
(when it should be N/S). My impression is that this is because the city is
easier to look at horizontally (it’s closer to a 16:9 movie resolution) than a
very vertical portrait.

—

MajorSauce, could you please contact me? (email in profile). I’m working in
Montréal on a project related to emergency services (which you seem to be
doing as well, from your profile). Thanks!

------
CydeWeys
It'd be cool to see this weighted by street size (using, e.g., average daily
traffic numbers). Granted that data is harder to come up with.

The DC plot would tell a different story then, because the avenues are all
off-axis and few in number, but they're big streets with traffic light
priority that handle a lot of car traffic.

------
osdiab
While navigability of grids is nice, I kinda like it when cities have
haphazard street layouts—older cities with chaotic street grids tend to be
easier to walk around in (assuming you know where you're going) with slower
traffic and smaller streets, not as loud since sound doesn't carry through all
the buildings that block streets off (New York is loud almost everywhere,
Tokyo has countless quiet neighborhoods seconds from even Shibuya Scramble),
and as the author mentioned, instill a sense of adventure.

But maybe there's ways of getting these things while still maintaining street
navigability—narrow streets with not necessarily rail straight, but still
well-structured grids for the major streets, and maybe non-uniform/unstructred
alleys could work to get both in one system.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Pittsburgh is kind of like that. It wants to be grid based, but it just can't
with the geography it's given. There's lots of small areas that have only a
few ways in and out, due to it being on the top/bottom/side of a hill.

[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.439071,-80,13z](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.439071,-80,13z)

------
fit2rule
I'd love to see one of these rose diagrams for Tokyo .. when I was there I
found it very, very difficult to navigate even my local neighbourhoods, and
remarked as much to my hosts - who explained to me that the reason Tokyo was
laid out in what could only loosely be described as "chaotic crows feet on
acid", is so as to make it very difficult for any invading armies to march
directly into the city in a straight line - giving defenders lots of places to
choke them off.

~~~
kuanbutts
I imagine it would look similar to the examples from his follow-up post on
other cities from around the world, such as Rome or Paris, where distribution
becomes fairly even: [http://geoffboeing.com/2018/07/city-street-orientations-
worl...](http://geoffboeing.com/2018/07/city-street-orientations-world/)

------
the8472
A comparison to old european cities would be interesting.

~~~
aequitas
Also newer or rebuilt cities like Rotterdam would be interesting as well I
think. Also since Europe is more dense than America there might be some
different opinions on how things are to be planned.

~~~
amyjess
One thing that really surprised me when poking around Google Maps a while back
is how griddy Weimar is compared to other European cities. While the downtown
is a mess, the areas immediately outside it are on a grid that wraps around
the city.

~~~
close04
Most European cities have grids but you have to "zoom in" a lot. And those
grid "pieces" aren't themselves arranged in grids. So there's usually very
little continuity for the grid pattern over distances. The direction tends to
change every few streets.

So in most cities if you zoom in on the map you'll see mostly grid-like
patterns. But as soon as you start zooming out it fades away into a mash of
directions, turns, and swirls. The only places where it's hard to find any
kind of straight line is in (centuries) old city centers.

I don't find Weimar particularly "griddy" compared to any other city.

P.S. Barcelona is the "griddiest" big European city I know. Even though at
some point the grid changes alignment they have huge chunks with almost
perfect squares between streets.

~~~
websterisk
Barcelona is particularly awesome in this respect. Historically, it was a few
distinct villages. Then during a period of growth each of those separate areas
were connected by a modern (at least at the time) grid. Looking at this area
on google maps is fun. You can scroll between two adjacent zoom levels to see
modern gridded order vs the total chaos of a gothic village (looking at the
gothic quarter or vila de gracia in particular).

When I visited, I was confused about how the city was configured so oddly
until I saw a pre-modernization map, then everything suddenly clicked.

------
Someone
You would need different math for star forts such as Palmanova
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmanova](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmanova)),
or for 17th century Amsterdam, with its radial grid
([https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1_XUR_LAcsSSE9Lmx2S...](https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1_XUR_LAcsSSE9Lmx2SjJ1ATUCYw&ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=52.372638582627566%2C4.894623264526331&spn=0.019204%2C0.038624&t=p&z=15))

Such a circular grid has the advantage that it is easy to find its center.

------
seniorsassycat
Charlotte is really interesting. It's very evenly distributed, even compared
to Boston. It's also not balanced on the north / south axis. Are there more
north bound one way streets?

~~~
CydeWeys
Downtown Charlotte is definitely a strict grid pattern. I think Charlotte is
more a victim here of having really widely defined city limits than anything
else. Do a graph of just downtown Charlotte and it'd look just as much like a
strict grid as Manhattan does (which, worth noting, is not all of NYC).

------
ajuc
I much prefer older European cities street layout. It's usually a mix of
circular and rectangular patterns, but it's still usually easy to navigate by
roughly assuming each turn is 90 degree. And it's walkable.

In Poland especially interesting is Szczecin layout. It seems rectangular when
you're there, but when you look at it from height it's actually made mostly
out of triangles.

You turn right 2 times and you get to where you started :) Messed with my head
so much when I was there.

------
Sniffnoy
The histogram for Charlotte is asymmetrical... what's up with that? One-way
streets? (The same is true for some other cities in the follow-up also.) The
article doesn't say.

~~~
Isamu
I think you are right, one-way streets.

>The street networks are directed and preserve one-way directionality.
[http://geoffboeing.com/2016/11/osmnx-python-street-
networks/](http://geoffboeing.com/2016/11/osmnx-python-street-networks/)

>OSMnx automatically calculates all of the streets’ bearings. Specifically it
calculates the compass bearing from each directed edge’s origin node u to its
destination node v. [http://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-
orientation/](http://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/)

------
User23
I'll never forget the first time I drove in Boston as a teenager. I came up to
a forest of stoplights, some red some green hanging haphazardly at an
intersection of seven streets, and my burning question was: which one is mine?
I went when the driver behind me started honking.

------
Steltek
Manhattan burned to the ground so they got a do-over on their street grid. Any
East Coast city that wasn't centrally planned (e.g. DC) or burned to the
ground will resemble Boston.

Boston also more than tripled in size due to land reclamation, which included
leveling some hills. The contours that the current roads follow may have made
more sense when Boston Common was a muddy beach and everyone walked to where
they were going.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1s92xa/cool_map_of_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1s92xa/cool_map_of_bostons_land_reclamation_nearly/)
[https://imgur.com/gallery/0C349u9](https://imgur.com/gallery/0C349u9)

~~~
jakemoshenko
Got any more information about "Manhattan burned to the ground"? I can only
find two "great fires" that may be relevant, and neither of them gave
Manhattan a do-over.

The Commissioner's plan is the reason Manhattan has a grid system, and the
page for it doesn't reference any fires.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811)

Finally, the streets before the Commissioner's plan took effect are still
rather small and twisty.

~~~
oh_sigh
OP is wrong. The grid system was laid out before central/northern Manhattan
was developed. No fire required. They may be confusing with London, Paris ,
Amsterdam, Atlanta, etc

~~~
yread
Amsterdam is not regular because of fires. It's radial grid is the first urban
planning ever done - Amsterdam drew the streets far out and people settled
them over the next 100 years or so

------
allworknoplay
you think boston is bad, try this:
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Varanasi,+Uttar+Pradesh,+I...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Varanasi,+Uttar+Pradesh,+India/@25.3171527,82.9901522,15.27z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x398e2db76febcf4d:0x68131710853ff0b5!8m2!3d25.3176452!4d82.9739144)

