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"
Sydney is there though....
City street orientations around the world
31–40 of 89 posts
Re: City street orientations around the world
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, even with navigation apps central London is a nightmare...
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?
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.
Re: City street orientations around the world
#33This looks mindblowing. I see most popular (world-wide and region-wise) and most unique orientations
Re: City street orientations around the world
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think so. My US colleagues seem to find it very easy to get around unfamiliar US cities but seem to struggle in European cities. I expect we have very different unconscious navigation algorithms.
I am from London and lived in the US for a bit. I struggled to navigate. I think it is because I navigate by modelling the shape of the streets. When all the streets are the same shape, that subconscious system stops working. I also tend to find I underestimate distances in grid systems. I think it’s because in European cities I estimate distance by the number of distinct shapes I can remember on the way there. In a…
You sort of need to know the [scale of] grid in question.
In a similar vein, I find the Las Vegas Strip is incredibly disorienting with respect to distance. You're used to buildings being of size approximately X and in Vegas the casinos are 10X. So you think--oh, that's just a couple of buildings away. 30 minutes later you're still walking (in the sweltering heat).
Re: City street orientations around the world
#35Funnily 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…
>In an organic layout there are central roads that go to places of interest and the smaller streets flow to the central roads
That doesn't sound organic, it sounds like basic transportation planning and street hierarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_hierarchy. Smaller roads flow into bigger roads which flow into main roads which flow into highways.
"By contrast, in many regular, traditional grid plans, as laid out, higher order roads (e.g. arterials) are connected by through streets of both lower order levels (e.g. local and collector.) An ordering of roads and their classification can include several levels and finer distinctions as, for example, major and minor arterials or collectors."
Re: City street orientations around the world
#36What 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.
Re: City street orientations around the world
#37Funnily 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…
I think the same way,however there was one city I did enjoy navigating as a pedestrian, and it was a grid layout - Barcelona. I think its because the grid is just for the cars, as a pedestrian you can walk “in between” the grid parallels and there were strange walkways and “diagonal” streets etc. Such a unique place
Re: City street orientations around the world
#38I 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.
Re: City street orientations around the world
#39I followed his jupyter notebook [0] and recreated it for all big dutch cities: https://imgur.com/a/EdvDrZY
Lelystad is very symmetric!
[0]: https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx-examples/blob/master/notebo...
Re: City street orientations around the world
#40Sydney 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"
Huh - Sydney's arrangement is a lot 'neater' than I would have expected. I would love to know what area it actually counted. The small CBD is rather grid-like, but once you extend past that it gets a bit higgledy-piggledy.