Does 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.
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The Decline of the City Grid
41–50 of 212 posts
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
These things sound efficient and productive , but I don't think that makes them better.
At the end of the day, it's better for people, too, to live in a place that can grow and adapt, where they can walk to a coffee shop, or ride their bikes on a quieter side street instead of being shunted into a nasty collector street with deadly 40mph traffic.
I feel like London, for example (along with many other European cities), achieves this goal as well or better than any rigidly grid based city I’ve ever visited.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#43How do you even give directions in Chicago? It seems horribly confusing — go down the straight road, once you’ve passed 15 intersections turn left blah blah. No way to keep track of that kind of junk. Boston is much easier to navigate and get direction, go until you hit the triangular intersection, take the left branch, you’ll eventually find a rotary has brushed up on your road, take that etc etc. Each intersection…
Directions are easier with grids. Numbering systems that ascend and descend from a particular central point make sense. State and Madison is zero. Anything else is a higher or lower number in the direction you are relative to that intersection. 100 numbers is one block. All streets have numbers, even if they also have names. Most of the South side also uses numbers for names of east-west streets... so 30th street is 30 blocks south of Madison, and addresses will be 3000 S.
North-south streets you can memorize, and would likely get by with only knowing a half dozen main ones. North side has a bunch of main through streets that you can orient around. You can get a rough sense of how far north or west you are. Or you can fall back to the numbers. 5000 north is 50 blocks north, which is pretty far north.
If you don't have google maps you can usually go in two straight lines to just about anywhere. Just keep going until you are at the right east-west spot, and then do the same until you are at the right north-south spot. And use the handful of diagonal streets to be fancy.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#44[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 t…
There's an interesting hybrid system in New Orleans proper. The city follows the curve of the river, with original land grants being in the French classic frontage-and-depth layout (each grant received a certain minimum amount of river frontage, for shipping out products, and then extended back as far as was possible given the terrain). Within each original grant, there is a grid, and between them there are major boulevards to permit higher-speed, higher-volume traffic from one part of the city to another. But within each grid section, you're entirely on narrow, mostly residential streets - with a few commercial stretches scattered around, and far more neighborhood bars and restaurants in mostly-residential areas than is common in most of the US. Aside from the weather (it's almost always hot and humid), a very bikeable city. And if you're in a car, it usually only takes a few blocks of travel to get to a major road (e.g., the largely-pedestrian French Quarter bounded by Canal, Rampart, and Esplanade).
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#45[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…
You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning . Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the build…
> It made addresses have real meaning.
In the spirit of this observation, here are some fun ways to place addresses in (some of) Manhattan.
- First of all, "evens go east," so 20th St runs to the East and 21st to the West (14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, and 59th are the primary two-way, E/W thoroughfares (I think you just have to memorize those, but note that they line up with the stops on many of the N/S subway lines))
- Street numbers pivot on 5th Ave and increase in each direction from there, so if you know the street number, you know which two avenues it's between. For example, when I lived at 4xx W 45th St, that was between 9th and 10th, which can be deduced from the first number of the address added to 5 (5 + 4 = 9, so the address is West of 9th).
- If you need to remember the order of Lexington -> Park -> Madison, just remember, "Let's party, motherfucker" :)
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#46[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.
I don't see how it's incompatible with walking. I see the article mentions the same:
If you are walking in a modern suburb, “You’re always going out of your way,” he says. It is not only people walking who have to take less direct routes. Buses are more effective when roads are in grids, allowing passengers to get anywhere with just one change.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#47Oh man I can look at this all day. What an interesting take on how we do city planning and how it really hasn't changed over the years. I'd be more interested in taking this a step further to look at the infrastructure overlay and how that has changed over the years.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#48I recently visited Vancouver, BC (Canada) and I was blown away by their urban development planning. They have tons of density, but the city doesn't look dystopian because they've mixed different styles of building well.
What this manifests in reality is a less car-dependent city that's extremely walkable (they also have amazing walking paths all over).
Overall, I just found the experience to be amazing in comparison to visiting every other city in North America. It actually felt like a "city" and not just a collection of office buildings surrounded by 2-3 story houses (looking at you SF!).
Are there any other exemplary examples of good urban development in other cities?
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
it's the other way around. Grids are made for cars. And buses, trucks (garbage trucks too), semis. They are ok at moving vehicles from houses to the highway, but you can walk them too. Non-grids are for people and (few) cars. They are intentionally designed to discourage non-residents from driving through them. They optimize for selling the maximum amount of land and delivering the minimum conveniently drivable surfa…
I would disagree.
Grids are bad for cars because four way stops are really inefficient at processing them. You'll notice in American suburban planning that there are as few four-way stops as possible inside a subdivision.
Non-grids extend the distance of a lot of trips and are thus hostile to slower non-motorized users. Driving an extra 500m is not a big deal for a car but is an additional several minutes for slower users. And non-grids in the US funnel onto very big roads with few crosswalks, so that's even more diversion distance; and then on top of that it can easily take a few minutes to even get a walk/cycle signal at an intersection.
In contrast it's very easy to make a grid less hospitable to cars but also still allow pedestrians and cyclists to take the shortest path; just lay bollards diagonally across an four-way intersection that are too narrow for vehicles but large enough for bikes and people.
Re: The Decline of the City Grid
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't see how it's incompatible with walking. I see the article mentions the same: If you are walking in a modern suburb, “You’re always going out of your way,” he says. It is not only people walking who have to take less direct routes. Buses are more effective when roads are in grids, allowing passengers to get anywhere with just one change. All that's required and normal in lots of Europe is for foot paths that c…
In America this is unacceptable both because suburban dwellers don't want to have people walking near their homes (invasion of privacy) and because developers would prefer to sell and build on as much land as possible.
There's no money to be made on "public" land and it lowers the value of the land immediately adjacent to it.