
City street orientations around the world - fanf2
http://geoffboeing.com/2018/07/city-street-orientations-world/
======
noelwelsh
Funnily enough I find organic street layouts easier to navigate as a tourist
than grid systems. In an organic layout there are central roads that go to
places of interest and the smaller streets flow to the central roads. In a
grids all the roads look the same (they have the same size for example) so I
often can't work out how I'm oriented and wandering around doesn't necessarily
lead to anywhere interesting.

I also find grids less satisfying to walk. I feel they favour cars over
pedestrians. I'm always stopping for traffic lights in New York while I feel I
can walk mostly without interruption in London. London roads are also more
interesting because you don't know what's around the corner.

Conclusion: these are pretty graphs but I think the claims in the first post
are overstated. Experiments are required.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Optimising for tourists is pretty lame, they don't have to live there. In my
opinion, I think a balance between the approaches works well. I'm in
Philadelphia. I really appreciate that anyone can tell me some event is at
"14th and Locust" and I know how to get there without directions. At the same
time, roads like Ben Franklin Parkway are wide and open enough, with multiple
courtyards along its length, that it opens up a larger part of the city for
people to get their bearings in and get a larger part of the city in their
visual field. Broad and Market street do the same thing, to a lesser extent.

~~~
noelwelsh
The reason I said "for tourists" is because a local will learn the layout
eventually regardless of what it is. I don't think my experiences in, say,
Birmingham where I lived for a decade are comparable to my experiences in
Philly, which I have visited once for a few days.

~~~
brlewis
I've been local to Boston for decades and haven't truly learned the layout. I
can get to any given place, but without consulting the map I'll often choose a
suboptimal route. It's hard to stop my brain from forcing the layout into a
grid, which it very much is not.

------
retrac98
I grew up in the UK where most towns and cities have roads going in all
directions.

I've always found the grid layout of US cities difficult to navigate, which is
strange because it's objectively a much simpler system. The sameness of each
block and straightness of the roads makes it really hard for me to position
myself with sight alone, whereas in the UK there seems to be more uniqueness
to each road that makes it easier for me to find my way around.

Interestingly, my US friends who've visited the UK have had the exact opposite
experience!

~~~
fredley
US grid cities are really easy to navigate by car, but at the expense of
pedestrians. Old cities like London are easy to navigate on foot, but hard to
navigate by car.

~~~
robbick
Agreed - IMHO favoring the pedestrian is the correct decision

~~~
panic
Especially now that we all use navigation apps in our cars.

~~~
fredley
To be fair, even with navigation apps central London is a nightmare...

~~~
ghaff
Like a lot of automated things, navigation apps are pretty much designed for
the 95% case. Especially somewhere like a city, they fall down on the lack of
instructions like "You want to be getting over into the right hand lane soon.
You'll be making a turn up at $LANDMARK in a couple of minutes." Or, in
London, which of the 5 streets coming off the circle do you want to be taking
exactly?

~~~
laumars
I don't agree with your examples. I've used a few different sat navs over the
years and I've found they generally do 2 of the 3 things you suggested:

> _You want to be getting over into the right hand lane soon_

Granted it's not 100% accurate 100% of the time but you do often get advanced
warning to change lanes - particularly on faster roads.

On my VW I have two screens on the satnav (one behind the steering wheel and
one on the central entertainment system console). The entertainment system
displays a map view and the other display is a turn-by-turn display. The
beauty of the turn-by-turn display is it also gives a countdown (in the form
of a gauge bar) until you hit a junction so if the map is a bit cluttered or
there are a few junctions (or even if the junction isn't clearly visible for
whatever reason), you not only get advanced warning about when you're
approaching it but you can clearly see which junction it is and precisely when
you'll hit it.

Sometimes I'll have that sat nav on even for routes I'm familiar with just so
I get a reminder to change lanes on the busier roads and longer journeys where
you might lose concentration about the route you're taking.

> _You 'll be making a turn up at $LANDMARK in a couple of minutes_

Yeah, I've not experienced that. It would be a cool feature though.

> _Or, in London, which of the 5 streets coming off the circle do you want to
> be taking exactly?_

The sat nav in my VW explicitly gives a junction number. Eg "leave the 2nd
exit". It does this both on roundabouts and on straight roads which have a
cluster of exits near each other. It also has a display showing which of the
multiple exits to take.

I can't emphasis enough just how good the dual-display system is. It means at
any point in time you know exactly where you are and where you need to be.

------
Stratoscope
Redwood City, California has a strange mix of street grids. There's a roughly
NSEW grid downtown, with separate grids to the northwest and southeast angled
about 45 degrees. The grids meet in confusing jumbles of triangles:

[https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4861576,-122.2356476,15z](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4861576,-122.2356476,15z)

It's easy to see where the 45 degree grids came from: one parallels El Camino
and the railroad tracks, the other parallels Middlefield Road. But why the
abrupt change to a NSEW grid in between?

Downtown Redwood City was once a shipping harbor and a center of the redwood
logging trade (thus the name). Redwood Creek ran N-S through this area, and
downtown was built up around it. If you're familiar with the area, the
multistory parking garage between Broadway/Marshall/Main/Jefferson is located
where the "turning basin" was: a wide part of the creek where ships could turn
around, with businesses along the banks.

Broadway was originally named Bridge Street, for its drawbridge that connected
the two sides of the creek. There's an interesting historical marker on
Broadway across from the driveway into the garage, and here are a few pages
with maps and photos:

[https://1084.myt.li/tours/45512040/stops/1980869008/index.ht...](https://1084.myt.li/tours/45512040/stops/1980869008/index.html)

[http://www.redwoodcityport.com/p7iq/Assets/port_history_for_...](http://www.redwoodcityport.com/p7iq/Assets/port_history_for_web.pdf)

[http://www.redwoodcity.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=1038](http://www.redwoodcity.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=1038)
[PDF]

~~~
llimllib
Here's the road orientation graphic for Redwood City:
[https://i.imgur.com/iueLofq.png](https://i.imgur.com/iueLofq.png)

------
bartkappenburg
I followed his jupyter notebook [0] and recreated it for all big dutch cities:
[https://imgur.com/a/EdvDrZY](https://imgur.com/a/EdvDrZY)

Lelystad is very symmetric!

[0]: [https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx-
examples/blob/master/notebo...](https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx-
examples/blob/master/notebooks/17-street-network-orientations.ipynb)

~~~
mfringel
Very nice!

I didn't see it on the image, but maybe it got cropped out. Did you give
credit to the original author for the code/idea?

------
smcl
Anyone know why Philadelphia has a _kinda_ NSEW orientation like the other
cities but rotated ever so slightly? Manhattan is similar and it makes sense
(they are aligned with the island itself), but Philadelphia is so close to the
actual compass points and not aligned with anything really else.

~~~
blatherard
As I understand it, the grid plan originated in Philadelphia in a stretch of
land between the Delaware and Schyulkhill rivers. This portion, which is now
generally called Center City, has a grid that aligns itself with the Delaware
which runs at that point a little East of North. The rest of the city grew up
extending that grid.

~~~
madcaptenor
Also, that particular point was picked, I believe, because it was the shortest
distance between the Delaware and the Schuylkill. (Well, except for a few
miles downriver where the Schuylkill flows into the Delaware, but South Philly
was basically swamps back then.) See for example
[https://hiddencityphila.org/2015/08/courtyard-compass-
reveal...](https://hiddencityphila.org/2015/08/courtyard-compass-reveals-a-
city-off-axis/)

------
JorgeGT
It would be interesting to add a color dimension with the average age of
buildings registered to each street, I'm thinking about cities that Madrid
where a combination of "omnidirectional" and "4-direction grid" patterns is
clearly visible.

------
n4r9
I wonder how roundabouts in European cities would affect these plots, since in
OSM they are often represented as a single way. The original post about this
says:

"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."

I suppose it depends what they mean by "directed edge". I'd expect it's what
most modern routers use i.e. the portion of a way which goes between two
junction nodes. Although it might mean literally every section of a way, which
in some sense would be more accurate. Either way, you would expect roundabouts
to bloat out the plot.

~~~
rmc
If OSMnx splits each way into sequences of "node N to node N+1", then the
results are based on the number of node-node connections, not the number of
ways.

~~~
n4r9
That's probably how it's done. Makes some things like this easier, but other
things (like routing) slower.

------
bonyt
Cool. Out of curiosity, I ran the Jupyter notebook[1] on the five boroughs of
NYC + Nassau County on Long Island, and got the following graphic:
[https://i.imgur.com/LyxP6yQ.png](https://i.imgur.com/LyxP6yQ.png)

I'm a bit surprised by the results, since Nassau in particular doesn't have
anything resembling a county-wide grid system that I know of. I like the
diagram for Queens, since it technically has a grid[2], although it shifts in
places to be at a different angle, like Long Island City / Hunters Point,
which were originally their own cities with their own design plans. The
diagram for Brooklyn is really interesting as well.

[1]: [https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx-
examples/blob/master/notebo...](https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx-
examples/blob/master/notebooks/17-street-network-orientations.ipynb)

[2]:
[https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm](https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm)

EDIT: Perhaps scale is a bit deceiving here. The original had every graph on a
different scale, so I modified it to have a fixed scale instead, which shows
how disproportionately organized Manhattan is compared to the other boroughs /
LI: [https://i.imgur.com/l3yV1sY.png](https://i.imgur.com/l3yV1sY.png)

------
detaro
some discussion already in the submission of the american cities only article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17507676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17507676)

------
TomK32
Because cities do grow it would be interesting to color parts of the ray
depending on the age of the streets/districts with that direction.

------
mislankanova
If anyone is interested in how the layout of a city affects the way in which
people perceive the city mentally, you may find the book The Image of the City
by Kevin Lynch a nice read.

The book talks about how people create mental models of the cities in which
they live, using certain abstract elements (paths, landmarks et cetra) that
are present in their cities.

------
Zaskoda
I live in Seattle. There's a famous story about how we ended up with half of
our streets running along one grid that was N,S,E,W and another grid that was
aligned with the water front. As they built the city, these two patterns
merged to create a total fuster cluck.

I am extremely confident that the graph for Seattle is incorrect.

~~~
imaoreo
Washington too, a good chunk of our streets are diagonal.

------
ericdykstra
This is a fun, short video on the different types of city plans (gridiron,
organic, radial, loose grid), some examples of each, and some observations on
each of them.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSnt0MTMcbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSnt0MTMcbw)

And from that video I found these cool visualizations of cities and their
street orientations: [http://www.datapointed.net/2014/10/maps-of-street-grids-
by-o...](http://www.datapointed.net/2014/10/maps-of-street-grids-by-
orientation/)

------
totally
Can this visualization ever be non-symmetrical?

Like, a street that goes north tends to go south if you're headed in the other
direction. Is it one-way streets that make Charlotte's visualization non-
symmetrical?

------
iambateman
The most remarkable city I’ve ever visited is Seville, Spain. It has a
labyrinth of tiny streets and apparently no grid. As a pedestrian, I felt like
I could get “lost” while never really being truly lost. In fact, I think I
could still get around in Seville without a map if you dropped me into a
random spot.

On the other hand, I live 90 minutes from Charlotte and have been there a
dozen times and have absolutely no clue how to navigate that city. It’s a
mess.

------
sfifs
This is very interesting! I wonder what the chart would look like if the
lengths in each direction represented total lengths of streets in that
orientation.

Hypothesis for some of the oldest European cities which look like big circles
currently - the older parts of the cities which would likely have streets
going in all directions are small - so the fat circles would get smaller and
we'd start seeing spokes for the newer parts of the cities.

------
onion2k
Really interesting. I suspect there's something about the political climate
more than the age of the city that dictates the orientation of the roads.
Where societies where strongly controlled by small group of leaders (religious
leaders, monarchs, city planners, etc) the streets ended up much more
coherent. Where cities grew organically as needed the layouts are less
coherent.

Also, what happened in Charlotte?!

~~~
pitt1980
I was curious about Charlotte as well, best I could find:

\-----

The streets of most newer American cities follow very clear East-West and
North-South grid patterns, but not here. The streets of Charlotte have some of
the most unusual patterns in the world.

Our city may seem like a new city, but it actually has a very rich history of
Native Americans, famous battles, and gold.

We were founded in 1768 (and officially declared independence from England in
1775) at the crossroads of two Native-American trading paths which ran
northeast-southwest and northwest-southeast. That intersection is now the
center of our city – Trade and Tryon.

Trade and Tryon Streets became the framework for Uptown, which now has blocks
that look more like diamonds than squares.

The crazy shape of our highways primarily evolved from the shape of the two
major creeks, Irwin Creek (77 and top part of 277), and Little Sugar Creek
(bottom part of 277).

I still haven’t figured out why i85 runs west to east at times, and south to
north other times, but it most likely also has it’s roots in the Carolina
Peidmond geography as well.

The reason for some of the other crazy anomalies in our city
(Queens/Providence intersection, Queens loop, all the Sharon rds., etc) stem
from the old farmers routes.

The city of Charlotte was never really designed to be a major city, so many of
the small winding trails simply grew over time.

[http://www.charlottestories.com/heres-why-the-streets-in-
cha...](http://www.charlottestories.com/heres-why-the-streets-in-charlotte-
dont-run-north-and-south-or-east-and-west/)

quick glance at google maps confirms that most of the major roads don't seem
to be straight lines, and what grids there are, don't appear to follow any
consistent directional orientation

[https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2120603,-80.8169718,11z?hl=e...](https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2120603,-80.8169718,11z?hl=en)

~~~
danielvf
Here's a map I made of Queens road in Charlotte.

[https://danielvf-
downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/2018/queens_road...](https://danielvf-
downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/2018/queens_road_charlotte.png)

\- In driving down five major roads, you can suddenly be on Queens road.

\- It intersects itself.

\- Following it requires making constant right or left turns at stop lights,
or you end up on a different road.

------
danesparza
This is incredibly misleading. Atlanta proper only accounts for a small
percentage of the roads in the Atlanta metro area -- but it's the only place
that actually has roads on a grid. The rest of Atlanta has roads that go in
every damn direction (and would probably look a lot more like Charlotte if
plotted)

------
ansgri
Very distinctive pattern for Moscow — basically it's a very centralized city
with ~15 major radial roads, which segment circular roads into separate
streets. It's interesting that the most similar histogram is for Rome, which
has also been a center for hypercentralization of power.

------
nautilus12
Could someone explain some actionable insights that could possibly come from
these visualization?

~~~
24gttghh
One I pondered is how some cities have a primary axis offset a few degrees
from N/S, either more to the East or more to the West and how that might be
related to their location in a given time zone with respect to where the sun
rises/sets to shine directly down a majority of streets. I think of this in
terms of perhaps not placing most streets in a grid where you would have to
drive directly into the sun around dawn/dusk for most of the year, but it
probably has more to do with the local topography; bodies of water or hills in
the way, that kinda thing.

------
wodenokoto
I'd love to see comparisons between Manhatten and New York, or central Kyoto
and Kyoto proper, as well as other old Asian capitals that were often based on
a grid system, but might not have kept it outside "the old city"

------
heartbreak
Houston's graph is oriented like +, but the downtown grid in Houston should be
represented like x.

------
0x45696e6172
How come there appears to be symmetry in Rio de Janeiro?

~~~
systoll
180 degree rotational symmetry happens because almost all roads are
bidirectional -- if there's a road pointing north, it's also a road pointing
south.

90 degree symmetry seems like a consequence of the road system consisting more
of straightness and 90 degree turns, with no other _specific_ angle being
common.

[https://www.google.com/maps/@-22.9111837,-43.2566471,14z](https://www.google.com/maps/@-22.9111837,-43.2566471,14z)

Rio fits the bill. There's no overarching grid, but if you zoom into any small
area, you'll usually find a pattern of rectangular blocks with 90 degree
intersections.

As far as I can see, the only viable way out rotational symmetry would be to
use concentric 'ring-blocks' either for local areas or for the city as a
whole. The rings would cancel themselves out, and the 'spokes' could be places
relatively freely.

So... Canberra might have an interesting distribution?

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Canberra+ACT+2601/@-35.288...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Canberra+ACT+2601/@-35.2883807,149.1116899,14z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x6b164d69b05c9021:0x500ea6ea7695660!8m2!3d-35.2809368!4d149.1300092)

------
quickthrower2
Sydney would be interesting to add, being a harbour city. With weird stuff
like it can take a 10km trip by land to get somewhere just 1km away "as the
crow flies"

~~~
bostonpete
Sydney is there though....

~~~
quickthrower2
Oops. Need to get my retinas checked.

------
InsIStERm
This looks mindblowing. I see most popular (world-wide and region-wise) and
most unique orientations

------
nicheasta
What a great idea! Wouldn't have ever thought of that myself. I would love to
see more of these and more comparisons. Let's say what are more popular layout
for some regions or world-wide or what are most unique. Also, would be
interesting to see comparison of same city oldtown to the rest of the city.

