City street orientations around the world
geoffboeing.com
City street orientations around the world
1–10 of 89 posts
Re: City street orientations around the world
#2Funnily enough I find organic street layouts easier to navigate as a tourist than grid systems. In an organic layout there are central roads that go to places of interest and the smaller streets flow to the central roads. In a grids all the roads look the same (they have the same size for example) so I often can't work out how I'm oriented and wandering around doesn't necessarily lead to anywhere interesting.
I also find grids less satisfying to walk. I feel they favour cars over pedestrians. I'm always stopping for traffic lights in New York while I feel I can walk mostly without interruption in London. London roads are also more interesting because you don't know what's around the corner.
Conclusion: these are pretty graphs but I think the claims in the first post are overstated. Experiments are required.
Re: City street orientations around the world
#3Because cities do grow it would be interesting to color parts of the ray depending on the age of the streets/districts with that direction.
Re: City street orientations around the world
#4I grew up in the UK where most towns and cities have roads going in all directions.
I've always found the grid layout of US cities difficult to navigate, which is strange because it's objectively a much simpler system. The sameness of each block and straightness of the roads makes it really hard for me to position myself with sight alone, whereas in the UK there seems to be more uniqueness to each road that makes it easier for me to find my way around.
Interestingly, my US friends who've visited the UK have had the exact opposite experience!
Re: City street orientations around the world
#5Really interesting. I suspect there's something about the political climate more than the age of the city that dictates the orientation of the roads. Where societies where strongly controlled by small group of leaders (religious leaders, monarchs, city planners, etc) the streets ended up much more coherent. Where cities grew organically as needed the layouts are less coherent.
Also, what happened in Charlotte?!
Re: City street orientations around the world
#6[deleted]
Re: City street orientations around the world
#7some discussion already in the submission of the american cities only article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17507676
Re: City street orientations around the world
#8Anyone know why Philadelphia has a kinda NSEW orientation like the other cities but rotated ever so slightly? Manhattan is similar and it makes sense (they are aligned with the island itself), but Philadelphia is so close to the actual compass points and not aligned with anything really else.
Re: City street orientations around the world
#9How come there appears to be symmetry in Rio de Janeiro?
Re: City street orientations around the world
#10I grew up in the UK where most towns and cities have roads going in all directions. I've always found the grid layout of US cities difficult to navigate, which is strange because it's objectively a much simpler system. The sameness of each block and straightness of the roads makes it really hard for me to position myself with sight alone, whereas in the UK there seems to be more uniqueness to each road that makes it…
>I grew up in the UK where most towns and cities have roads going in all directions.
...and - as an observation from an alien - have much more interesting names and shapes :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_be_an_Alien
http://f2.org/humour/howalien.html
How to plan a town: