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City street orientations around the world

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Re: City street orientations around the world

#51

Post by nkrisc »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

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…

Having grown up in a city with a very well defined grid, Chicago, I mainly favor grid layouts. Here you can tell important facts about a location based solely on the address.

Given an address, like 4012 N Pulaski, I immediately know how far it is from me in the North/South direction and also in which direction on that axis. I also know it's on the West side of the street. The only other important bit not included is how far in the East/West direction. So it's not perfect, but once you know which way, East or West, you're on your way.

Re: City street orientations around the world

#52

Post by jagath »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

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…

I feel the same sentiment while walking old European cities vs modern cities. I found this tweet very helpful in understanding why I feel that way. The pictures are great, even if you don't agree with the thesis. https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/883181352933236736 "It is time for a thread on traditional urbanism, or town planning 13th-century style. I will dispel some myths of modern dis-urbanism...Traditional urbanism has short blocks. No building takes more than 3-4 seconds to walk past, providing interesting colors, shops, textures...Modern dis-urbanism means massive buildings, long block: takes minutes to walk past with nothing to distract or relieve the tedium. (Zürich) "

Re: City street orientations around the world

#53

Post by n4r9 »

rmc wrote: post #50
n4r9 wrote: post #38

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…

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.

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

Re: City street orientations around the world

#54

Post by 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.

Re: City street orientations around the world

#55

Post by underwater »

Stratoscope wrote: post #46

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 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…

The quirky layout is not at all obvious when you’re on the ground, either I had a few “how did I end up here” moments when driving through the city.

Re: City street orientations around the world

#56

Post by noelwelsh »

jagath wrote: post #52
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

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…

I feel the same sentiment while walking old European cities vs modern cities. I found this tweet very helpful in understanding why I feel that way. The pictures are great, even if you don't agree with the thesis. https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/883181352933236736 "It is time for a thread on traditional urbanism, or town planning 13th-century style. I will dispel some myths of modern dis-urbanism...Traditional…

Love that post---great examples!

Re: City street orientations around the world

#57

Post by pitt1980 »

onion2k wrote: post #5

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?!

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...

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...

Re: City street orientations around the world

#58

Post by muddyrivers »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

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…

I have similar experiences in both systems. Growing up in China, it is easy for me to navigate in US cities. Beijing is primarily of grid system.

The first time I went to Europe, I got quite lost in the city (Madrid). The second time was in Paris. I got some free time. So I walked around aimlessly in some neighborhoods, away from the popular tourist sites, appreciating the beauty, the history and the local people I ran across. It brought back the feeling I walked around the Hutongs in Beijing, which I enjoyed so much. Since then, I have been feeling very comfortable in navigating European cities with organic layout. In my case, it does seems there are two navigation systems, and I make subconscious switches based on the layouts.

Re: City street orientations around the world

#59

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: City street orientations around the world

#60

Post by [deleted] »

24gttghh wrote: post #49
nautilus12 wrote: post #45

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

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/…

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