The Joy of Numbered Streets
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The Joy of Numbered Streets
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Re: The Joy of Numbered Streets
#2I love their use of the word legible. A good street naming system makes the city “legible”.
I’m in a suburb of Charleston, SC and it’s so weird how I have no idea how far things are….1 mile? 3 miles? I miss riding my bike on that Portland grid and following the numbers all the way to zero and hitting the Willamette.
Re: The Joy of Numbered Streets
#3Hahaha OMG I lived in Bogota for three months, and boy, it took me a while to wire up my brain to deal with Carreras and Calles. In principle should be easy, just horizontal and vertical coordinates, north, south, east, west... if you live in a chess board is bread and butter for Margnus Carlsen, but cities are not build like that, so you do end up in streets that you mentally mapped in a way and would land you blocks from where you planned to be.
Yes, Google maps can do the job, but often times just walking around feels odd.
I find named streets with odds and evens on each end much, much easier to navigate.
Also I want to add that my country uses a system where new pieces of town going beyond the original city plan and house numbering use zero as a leading number for houses going the other way, which is kind of endearing. That way you can have 20 and 020, which leads you to know which way you should be looking for.
Re: The Joy of Numbered Streets
#4I find some joy in historical street naming. It's nice that you can take a 1746 map of London and pretty much still be able to get around.[1] Would certainly make life easier for time travellers.
While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more interesting.
[1] https://maps.nls.uk/view/245956114#zoom=6.5&lat=3256&lon=625...
Re: The Joy of Numbered Streets
#5I find some joy in historical street naming. It's nice that you can take a 1746 map of London and pretty much still be able to get around.[1] Would certainly make life easier for time travellers. While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more inte…
> Would certainly make life easier for time travellers.
Doesn't one of CS Lewis's books have Merlin transported to modern London and he heads off down the Roman roads?
Grid layouts do have efficiency, but humans aren't built to be efficient - at least not all the time.
The problem is suburbs and modern "inefficient" roads are designed to be inefficient - not designed by and for life.
Re: The Joy of Numbered Streets
#6I find some joy in historical street naming. It's nice that you can take a 1746 map of London and pretty much still be able to get around.[1] Would certainly make life easier for time travellers. While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more inte…
> Would certainly make life easier for time travellers. Doesn't one of CS Lewis's books have Merlin transported to modern London and he heads off down the Roman roads? Grid layouts do have efficiency, but humans aren't built to be efficient - at least not all the time. The problem is suburbs and modern "inefficient" roads are designed to be inefficient - not designed by and for life.
> Doesn't one of CS Lewis's books have Merlin transported to modern London and he heads off down the Roman roads?
Persistence over time wouldn't make any difference to that case; Merlin is omniscient.
Re: The Joy of Numbered Streets
#7I may be very European, and grew up in a relatively chaotic city, but I find quite confusing when I’m on a grid city.
Yes, it’s sort of convenient at a rational level, but everything appears the same, and there’s no way to differentiate one cross from the next. Streets doesn’t have their own “personality” and you have to learn them by name. I don’t know half of the street names of the city I grew in, but I know where I am by the way they intersect and twist around in interesting shapes…
Or perhaps is just the way I’m used to
Re: The Joy of Numbered Streets
#8In Northwest Portlnd, Oregon the East-west streets were originally letters. A st, B st, C st, etc. They were renamed after people but they kept the first letter, so now its Ankeny, Burnside, Couch, Davis, Everett, Flanders, Gleason, Hoyt, Irving, Johnson... They get to have it both ways, and they could be renamed if there was a desire to do so without impeding the general purpose. (One of my joking tests to see if someone is a True Portlander is if they can get up to Marshall, Northrup, Overton, etc.)
Re: The Joy of Numbered Streets
#9In Northwest Portlnd, Oregon the East-west streets were originally letters. A st, B st, C st, etc. They were renamed after people but they kept the first letter, so now its Ankeny, Burnside, Couch, Davis, Everett, Flanders, Gleason, Hoyt, Irving, Johnson... They get to have it both ways, and they could be renamed if there was a desire to do so without impeding the general purpose. (One of my joking tests to see if so…
The alphabetical streets in the Richmond and Sunset districts of San Francisco do a similar thing
Re: The Joy of Numbered Streets
#10I find some joy in historical street naming. It's nice that you can take a 1746 map of London and pretty much still be able to get around.[1] Would certainly make life easier for time travellers. While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more inte…
Yes. Additionally you realise the original purpose of streets (eg “love lane” in the city of London near the old guildhall is a particular favourite of mine).
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/8431660 Happens to be near "wood lane". Make of that what you will.
I studied on "Silk Street" which is nearby. Nearby are also "Oat Street", "Bread Street", "Milk street", "Gutter lane", "Goldsmith street", "Poultry" and many more who have old names relating to their function.