The Decline of the City Grid
11–20 of 212 posts
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#12> 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…
> 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.
This is such a patently false assertion that it goes well beyond hyperbole. Roads meeting at right angles doesn't mean you magically know how to get to destinations unless the road naming also follows a logical progression. Midtown Manhattan is an example, but that's only a part of New York City, and you still have to worry about things like Central Park and streets that don't span the entire island.
It'll still take a cabbie a long time to figure out things like where the corner of Cermak and Bell in Chicago or Willoughby and Marcy are in New York. In fact, they'll learn in the same way I suspect most people do, which is to become familiar with major roads in an area, how they connect, and they learn destinations relative to that.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#13[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…
Exactly, grids are not perfect, but they are much much better than modern non-grid. Modern non-grid is not made for people, it is made for cars, and is incompatible with walking. More specifically, it is the result of optimizing for the wrong thing, it optimizes for getting cars from their houses to the highway and back, sacrificing all local connection and mobility in the process.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#14Does 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.
I'm not sure what they used for the web visualizations but I have seen this before with the python osmnx tool (https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orienta...)
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#16I was in NYC recently and the grid layout made it incredibly easy to navigate.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#17Does 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.
Here is a post with an Jupyter notebook producing such visualizations with the OSMnx library:
https://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#18The decline is in served purposes not a specific design: cities in the very past was needed for various reasons, in the modern age most reasons was economy of scale, witch means: lower prices because your neighbor competitor try to lower it's prices a little bit to compete against you and so you do until the lowest possible denominator in the current state of thing, than companies specialize and split, one window maker decide it's good at cutting glass plates, the neighbor that's good at cut frames and so on.
Nowadays urban density surpass the advantage point of economy of scale while the push toward a service economy and bigger and bigger enterprises kill it completely.
The final results is simple: cities have no purposes anymore. We still need to be social, to meet other people so we still need to be together but modern cities are not good even in that terms.
That's the decline.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#19https://archive.ph/RujBG
As this is one of the "Christmas specials", I believe that it won't hit the paywall.
The archive.ph link also misses out on several of the javascript animation tools that integrate with OSM and the city grid explorer at the bottom of the article.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#20I like a city I can get lost in. Grids seem like an anti-pattern to me.