The Decline of the City Grid
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The Decline of the City Grid
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Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#2> In London cab drivers have to spend up to four years learning the street network before they can get around without a map. Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve much the same thing in a day.
These days this is less about being able to navigate, and more a way to limit the number of taxi licenses without limiting the number of taxi licenses. Many other cities impose a numerical limit, but London has never had such a limit - they'll issue a license to anyone who can pass the test. It's just a very difficult test.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#3> In London cab drivers have to spend up to four years learning the street network before they can get around without a map. Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve much the same thing in a day. These days this is less about being able to navigate, and more a way to limit the number of taxi licenses without limiting the number of taxi licenses. Many other cities impose a numerical limit, but London has never had…
I think knowledge of the city is still much better than relying on GPS. The gap may have narrowed significantly but I'd still rather by driven by someone who knows the streets. One example I regularly encounter is Uber drivers following GPS down these extremely narrow (6ft I believe) bollard lined connecting roads. They are easily avoided if you know the area but every Uber driver will take them while we both hold our breath until we get through it.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#4[deleted]
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#5[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead]
I like grids... but I'm not sure why. I live at the edge of the old grid section in my town. West of me, it turns into modern non-grid. Which I don't like.
But do I not like it because of the lack of grid? Or because of the new modern wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction?
I look at an old organically-grown city and it's fascinating to me; its ties to the distant past are palpable. So maybe it is that I just don't like modern US housing overall... but also, the organic city grew that way _unplanned_. And we never do anything unplanned any longer. The "planned organic" look has a fake feel to it, right?
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#6Does anyone know the name of this visualization and what tool was used to produce it?
Silver Springs is interesting to look at. I think of that as prototypical suburbia and it maps pretty closely to London despite the planning.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#7[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead] I like grids... but I'm not sure why. I live at the edge of the old grid section in my town. West of me, it turns into modern non-grid. Which I don't like. But do I not like it because of the lack of grid? Or because of the new modern wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction? I look at an old organically-grown city and it's fascinating to me; its ties to the distant pas…
Old, organic non-grids in my area aren't due to anything other than topography and road construction technology available at the time the area was settled. There are grids too, with a very wide variety of architecture (the city was settled by people from all over europe and the near-east). In both cases, the architecture varies, so it's a nice point of comparison for non-cookie-cutter construction issues.
Non-grids tend to have fewer straight lines of sight, so they are more pleasing to live in; trees create an even greater sense of privacy, and people drive a bit slower. They tend to be more pleasing to live in, at least in that regard.
On the other hand, they're miserable for commuting if they're big enough. So many slow turns and stops makes it harder to get to a main thoroughfare. If you don't have a good sense of direction or memory, living back in one feels further away than you actually are, which makes the commute feel longer than it actually is. Short trips to the grocery store feel longer if you don't have one inside your non-grid neighborhood.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#8The big recent exemplar of street layout for a new place is Houten in the netherlands [0] which is basically focussed on a train station and walkable town square at the centre with a ring road at the edge. Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars making the car network more of a tree with dead ends rather than a grid. And making road speeds slow at the centre and fast at the edges.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/the-dutch...
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#9> In London cab drivers have to spend up to four years learning the street network before they can get around without a map. Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve much the same thing in a day. These days this is less about being able to navigate, and more a way to limit the number of taxi licenses without limiting the number of taxi licenses. Many other cities impose a numerical limit, but London has never had…
I think knowledge of the city is still much better than relying on GPS. The gap may have narrowed significantly but I'd still rather by driven by someone who knows the streets. One example I regularly encounter is Uber drivers following GPS down these extremely narrow (6ft I believe) bollard lined connecting roads. They are easily avoided if you know the area but every Uber driver will take them while we both hold ou…
There was a recent Tom Scott video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWREtcDVBE) where he was using a GPS and Tom Hutley (a London cabbie) only relied on his London knowledge to get around, travelling the same distance after reaching certain landmarks. It was interesting to watch.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#10[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead] I like grids... but I'm not sure why. I live at the edge of the old grid section in my town. West of me, it turns into modern non-grid. Which I don't like. But do I not like it because of the lack of grid? Or because of the new modern wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction? I look at an old organically-grown city and it's fascinating to me; its ties to the distant pas…
Many old neighborhoods were originally literal wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction, with Brooklyn brownstones being a prime example. My Brooklyn block was originally basically 4 different groups of identical buildings, with the new-law tenement I live in being substantially identical to 10 others it was built in a cluster with (except, now, to one that has had two stories added on top).
Nevertheless I find the area pleasing — partially due to wide sidewalks shaded by mature trees, partially the ways the buildings have changed over time ("How Buildings Learn" is a classic book) and a few vacant lots have been infilled with different buildings, partially due to the wear & texture that come with age, and significantly due to the uninterrupted-except-by-parks walkable street grid for miles in every direction.
Plenty of 1950s suburbs have gotten pretty aesthetically interesting with the texture of age and mature trees grown in at this point, but very few of them are particularly walkable for daily needs.
Very few American cities were unplanned, and many historic gridded neighborhoods sprung up at a shocking pace (many American cities grew at 50% or more a decade for decades on end eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago#Popula...) with a ton of cookie-cutter repetition. The city often engaged in extensive redrawing of farm field property lines and regrades before a street was opened. But such cities were designed primarily for pedestrians at a pedestrian scale, rather than modern 'master-planned communities' that are at best islands of walkability in a sea of car-oriented roadways designed to be incredibly unpalatable to traverse by any other means.
Much of this is due to modern American zoning, which is among the strictest in the world in terms of separating different uses from each other — "residential" zoning in other countries almost never differentiates single-family housing from other housing, and usually permits quiet auxiliary uses like corner stores, doctor's offices, childcares, etc. (Interestingly, such zoning is known as "Euclidean Zoning" not for any geometric reason but with the town of Euclid, Ohio as its namesake, the plaintiff in a Supreme Court Case establishing such zoning as a legitimate use of the police power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Re....)