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The Decline of the City Grid

economist.com

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Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#61

Post by JetSetWilly »

bobthepanda wrote: post #49
bernawil wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I don't believe this is true. In fact iirc it has been proven that if you chose any random two points in a non-grid set up (eg, something like London) then the distance by road you have to travel is on average less than it would be in a grid.

This makes intutive sense to me - a grid always means you must travel the entire length of the "opposite and the adjacent" but in a non-grid you can typically find a route that's a bit closer to the hypotenuse and better optimised. So non-grids are particularly better for non-car users as they reduce distance travelled.

As well as that - travel is not typically between entirely random points on a map. In a non-grid roads tend to be optimised after their usage and not historically "planned" so you'll have lots of roads that directly go between areas of major popularity fairly directly.

I find grids to be an inhuman layer forced over a city. They make journeys take longer, they even make car journeys worse because of the endless intersections. The main advantage they used to have (easier navigation when you are a newbie in a city) seems to be made redundant by GPS these days.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#62

Post by burlesona »

tengbretson wrote: post #39

I'm not a big fan of modern, winding, cul-de-sac housing developments, but one upside to their layout that I rarely see addressed is that due to the fact that the layout starts with such a strict distinction between the major connecting roads and the winding residential roads means that you will never find yourself 15 years down the road facing eminent domain from the city taking 20 feet from the front of your proper…

The fact that suburban design is “cased in glass” though makes such neighborhoods very vulnerable to cyclical decline as the styles of a particular decade go out of fashion and nothing is allowed the change. This phenomenon is called “rolling blight” and is widespread across North America.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/9/20/the-suburbs-ar...

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#63

Post by nkrisc »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #58
madcaptenor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salt Lake City encodes latitude and longitude in the street names.

I just looked at a map - it appears that 0 N/S/E/W is the Mormon Temple downtown. It also looks like "newer" streets have names rather than numbers - further from downtown. Is there a date at which they stopped the practice? One thing the parent commenter missed was that the numbers also have larger distance meanings. 3200 North in Chicago means the road is 4 miles north of Madison St in the Loop (100 is 1/8th of a m…

That's one of the most important things I forgot to mention!

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#64

Post by s1mon »

These graphs looked very familiar. I'm still digging to see if these types of polar histograms were used before this 2019 research from Geoff Boeing [0], but I haven't found it yet.

[0] https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orienta...

[edit] yes, they're also called rose diagrams. Here at least one reference from 2013

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258954759_Entropy_a...

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#65

Post by kkfx »

marcosdumay wrote: post #53
kkfx wrote: post #18

The 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 mak…

Well, cities are still growing, and people are still concentrating on fewer and fewer of them... So I'd say that any call for they losing their purpose is way too precipitated. I do agree we seem to be moving on that direction. But we are surely not there.

If you wait to see people fleeing it's way too late to act. Just imaging how many DECADES would be needed to design and built a new "modern polis", adapted to our present and future needs, so renewables, flying logistic, much more rails for heavy packages, future flying "cars" and so far.

Of course this meanwhile the climate change push people a bit northern/southern BUT the need of renewables and low energy consumption do not push MUCH at north/south, so available land prices jumping crazy, new infra need to be built but there is no global agreement nor long consolidated infra in place to follow and so on.

Such change demand AT LEAST a century, so you need to start planning a century before and keep evolving at slow peace correcting anything going wrong on the road. It's not something that can be done like building a new gear in a factory.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#66

Post by burlesona »

The article says that governments began “encouraging” curvy streets and dead ends, but that’s understating things. The FDR administration effectively banned grids by requiring curvilinear streets for new developments to qualify for the new federally subsidized 30-year mortgages (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), aka what we think of now as a “normal mortgage.” It’s hard to compete with a heavy government subsidy, so other forms of financing essentially vanished overnight, and thus no new development would use a grid again.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#67

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

barnabee wrote: post #33
zoklet-enjoyer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to be able to navigate to a location I've never been just by knowing the address. Grids with numbered streets and avenues are my favorite.

I see the appeal but it's not for me. If I need to get somewhere, I have maps and apps and GPS. Spending a day in a city with no agenda, meandering without a constant reminder of where I am relative to where I started or where I might someday be is much more interesting and rewarding IMO.

Yeah that's fine for a vacation or a day off, but not practical day to day

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#68

Post by kgermino »

dionidium wrote: post #45
nkrisc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

As a logic-minded person used to the Chicago system, this kind of thing drives me nuts. Why on earth would you have a numbered street that doesn't represent its own place in the address numbering scheme? 9th should be at 900 W, 10th at 1000 W, etc. The whole benefit of numbered streets is that you don't have to remember where they are in the grid and you throw half of that value away when the number doesn't match their position in the grid!

I know there's no value here. I'm sorry, but... please make it make sense

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#69

Post by hgomersall »

nkrisc wrote: post #21
beej71 wrote: post #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 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…

I can't help feeling that designing transport policy around efficient addressing is perhaps not getting priorities right.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#70

Post by nkrisc »

turtlesdown11 wrote: post #27
nkrisc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Grids are great. But just think of systems like Venice, where you get a building number + district for an address. No street names tied to the buildings at all. Just a number and the sestiere (there are six).

That sounds... difficult.

I lived in Costa Rica for a brief while and outside of San Jose or town centers most addresses were something like "100 meters east of the statue of the Virgin Mary on calle uno" so at least there were some directions attached. Assuming you knew where the statue of the Virgin Mary was in whatever town, and which way North was.

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