Slashdot Mirror
A Look at Street Network Orientation in Major US Cities (geoffboeing.com)
Geoff Boeing, a postdoc in the Urban Analytics Lab at the University California, Berkeley, has published a blog post that offers a fascinating look at the street orientation of major cities in the USA and around the world. What is interesting in his findings is how cities from different historical periods form different patterns, and also just how uniformly grid-structured most American cities are. From his post: In 1960, Kevin Lynch published The Image of the City, his treatise on the legibility of urban patterns. How coherent is a city's spatial organization? How do these patterns help or hinder urban navigation? I recently wrote about visualizing street orientations with Python and OSMnx. That is, how is a city's street network oriented in terms of the streets' compass bearings? How well does it adhere to a straightforward north-south-east-west layout? I wanted to revisit this by comparing 25 major US cities' orientations.
Each of the cities is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar's direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings. [...] Most cities' polar histograms similarly tend to cluster in at least a rough, approximate way. But then there are Boston and Charlotte. Unlike most American cities that have one or two primary street grids organizing city circulation, their streets are more evenly distributed in every direction. Boeing published a follow-up to the post to include to compare world cities.
Each of the cities is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar's direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings. [...] Most cities' polar histograms similarly tend to cluster in at least a rough, approximate way. But then there are Boston and Charlotte. Unlike most American cities that have one or two primary street grids organizing city circulation, their streets are more evenly distributed in every direction. Boeing published a follow-up to the post to include to compare world cities.
It is almost like the cities that have a body of water have street orientation that follows the shoreline. Like maybe the shoreline was important and stuff to the city and the city grew from the ports along the shoreline. Interesting stuff.
Tacoma has a bizarre direction pattern for its streets. Every location east of A Street is "East", and west of Division is "West". Between these 2 (and including A and Division streets), everything north of 6th Ave is "North" and south of 6th Ave is "South".
6th Ave itself has no direction name, and oddly, streets increment in both directions. North of 6th Ave is 7th Ave North, while south of 6th Ave is 7th Ave South. There is no 1st Ave through 5th Ave.
These directional names persist through Pierce County, so the vast majority of roads in the county have "East" appended to them, all the way out to Mt. Rainier (which is also in Pierce County). North of Tacoma's Narrows Bridge lay Gig Harbor (where the blacks live, and msmash doesn't like the blacks) and the Key Peninsula, where streets prepend the direction name with "KP" - i.e. "KPN" for North - to be more clear that they're across Puget Sound from the rest of Pierce County.
You can probably guess the age of those cities by those graphs- at least how long they've been a major population centre. The ones under 250 years of age (most of the American ones) are very N-S E-W. Older ones like Rome show the roads go in every direction.
Madrid is interesting because it shows N-S E-W but with a big cluster in the middle. I don't know much about Madrid's history- obviously it is an old city, but the chart would suggest a rapid boom in population in the modern age of proper road planning.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I recall this being taught in my middle school aerial cartography section of Geography. There's different epochs and influences on city layout. The french and spanish tended to build layouts conformal to landscape features like rivers, foothills, and drainages. The spanish ones always were oriented around a major zocolo plaza with the church at one end. Later American cities were Rectilinear grids. For an extreme case look at Salt Lake city which is paced out by distance from the church at the center.
But this is all well known, the design of cities and it's traceability to the varied possible influences used to be well taught
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Most of the US cities were designed by semi-intelligent humans. When you've got a greenfield install, you do it the Right Way.
Boston's streets were designed by cows, according to local lore. But what's up with Charlotte?
I think they should take is PhD away. This has been a known fact for generations.
Can anyone explain Charlotte? It's the only one that looks like an ancient European city on it's graph rather than a city built in the last few centuries. Why are Charlotte's roads going all over the place in every direction. I've been to Charlotte several times and can't think of any geological reason.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I really wouldn't want to live in a city where all the roads are straight and uniform in a grid.
But then I'm from yurp and used to small cities (but real ones: with actual city rights) full of twisty roads and bridges over canals and such like. And trees. A city is not livable if there aren't any trees. Even if it does mean the city'll have to clean up all the dead leaves come autumn. Trees!
I got this in school. And that was so long ago that it was still called New Amsterdam. If you look at e,g. New York and Barcelona, you should compare it to the coastal lines.
And the fact that old cities are build organicaly (e.g. Rome) and newer cities are planned. e.g. Buenes Aires has "Quadra's" of 100m x 100m. Housenumbers even follow that.
To me the singel surprising result is London. I would have thought that that would be much mor chaotic, like e.g. Rome. This could be because the river runs West to East and that will determine initial layout of streets.
I wonder if a honeycomb structure would be more eficient than squares. It would allow traffic to go in 6 directions instead of 4 in a direct line.
But all the rest is basic knowledge to me, although it looks neat.
An other question: You if you have the directions, can you determine the rough age of a city? What about having a gif of a city over time? e.g. how it evolves from beginning to now.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
We have a two-way street in San Jose called Southwest Expressway. That's fine if you're coming off the 280 and heading southwest. If you're traveling in the opposite direction and going northeast towards the 280, how can it still be called Southwest Expressway?
Goodbye, Slashdot!
But this is all well known, the design of cities and it's traceability to the varied possible influences used to be well taught
What this guy did, which is completely revolutionary, is look at how the layouts align to cardinal directions - north, south, east, west. I don't think anyone has done that before. I mean, he used Python!
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
We're moving away from the grid system in many areas, especially suburbs, since we prioritize for cars, not people. People find a dense, small grid system to be easier to navigate, due to shorter distances between most point. While automobiles find the winding suburban roads, with limited egress, to be easier to navigate, due to less intersections.
Unfortunately, we haven't really adapted to the latter. Which leads to some problems for human safety as well as a financial can that we're kicking down the road as we build areas that have problems self-funding their own necessary infrastructure. An old style grid, with smaller plots, is pretty productive. Even older, crappier areas tend to be pretty good at raising tax revenue - which is why old, neglected downtowns often bring more in taxes per square foot than new, large shopping developments on the edge of town. In a few decades, as the infrastructure for the new developments need to be replaced, we're going to run into a huge financial problem. Residential areas can run into similar problems - around here, there's stories about one private development's residents discovering that they had a private road, and the cost to replace it. While another area asked for annexation by a nearby town because they couldn't afford to pay for their necessary sewer repairs.
Unless the cost of infrastructure goes down, we're going to see more and more problems. The best solution would be to set up the tax base now, probably by raising rates, and ensure that these areas are paying into the system enough to maintain and replace their own infrastructure. That way, the free market can decide - we'll still have suburban areas with winding roads, large lots, etc, but we'll probably have less of them as the true cost is passed on to the owners.
But raising taxes is not popular, and most infrastructure can last for decades before it needs a huge bill to replace. So politicians prefer to kick the can down the road and let the future deal with it.
Las Vegas New Mexico was developed in 3 waves. First the spanish settlements on the farmlands west of the river. (1830s) The streets here have spanish surnames and the blocks are not rectangular or uniform. Then the Railiroad era (1880s) where the highlands to the west of the river were settled. This has very rectangular blocks and all the streets have names like "Washington" or numbered avenues. And finally the freeway and strip mall era of development further to the west has long dead straight boulevards.
map:
https://www.google.com/maps/pl...
History:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Las Vegas was established in 1835 after a group of settlers received a land grant from the Mexican government. The town was laid out in the traditional Spanish Colonial style, with a central plaza surrounded by buildings which could serve as fortifications in case of attack. Las Vegas soon prospered as a stop on the Santa Fe Trail. During the Mexican–American War in 1846, Stephen W. Kearny delivered an address at the Plaza of Las Vegas claiming New Mexico for the United States.
A railroad was constructed to the town in 1880. To maintain control of development rights, it established a station and related development one mile (1.6 km) east of the Plaza, creating a separate, rival New Town, as occurred elsewhere in the Old West. The same competing development occurred in Albuquerque, for instance. During the railroad era Las Vegas boomed, quickly becoming one of the largest cities in the American Southwest. Turn-of-the-century Las Vegas featured all the modern amenities, including an electric street railway,
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Many years ago I worked as a copier repairman in rural Northern California (the part of CA that you don't see in the movies). I had three towns in my territory that were so similar that it was sometimes hard to remember which town I was in. On the positive side, once I learned the grid in one of the towns the knowledge was transferable to all three.
I had a simple theory that explained the similarity in these towns. The similarity was the founders. While all three were founded by different people, all were founded at nearly the same time and grew at the same time. That meant that the planning was done by people who had similar educations, life experiences, and biases; they were the products of their time. I later confirmed this by visiting the towns museums on my free time.
The towns were similar because the people who built them were similar.
Maybe he used AI and Blockchain to keep it secure?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If you watch the TV series Longmire, you will see Starbuck frequently driving around Las Vegas New Mexico. It's filmed mostly in the state but fictionally the story is set in Wyoming.
we turned slashdot into reddit.
you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Look closely at the county roads in Oklahoma sometime. There is a grid numbering system for those roads, and most of them are aligned with the property block system. I'm sure this is the result of various factors, such as being mostly plains, and being settled in a short time period with a land rush.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I like how the historic sections of historic cities in Utah are laid out. There are 8 city blocks to the mile and the street numbers increment by 100 for each city block. Center Street divides the city in half. North of Center Street are 100 N, 200 N, etc; south of Center Street are 100 S, 200 S, etc. Main Street divides the city in the other direction flanked by 100 E and 100 W.
Salt Lake County consolidated its street numbers when the cities grew together and emergency services ended up at 200 N 100 W in Salt Lake City instead of 200 N 100 W in Sandy. The central point of Salt Lake County's numbering system is the LDS temple located on Temple Square. Temple Square is flanked by North Temple, South Temple, West Temple, and Main Street. Most of the Valley follows this grid pattern, but things get loose on the foothills and lake shores. It's very easy to find almost any address.
There's no need to be flippant - it's a neat visualization, that's all. Nothing revolutionary but I found it worth a look.
You're correct. I'm just a bit jaded after experience firsthand what absolute garbage doctoral candidates try to pass off as research. I in college at the leading edge of "look I played around with stuff in SPSS and found something!" getting through as doctoral dissertations. I wasn't in the doctoral program, but knew enough that most of what was getting through was junk.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You can see very clearly some environmental influences in some city designs.
Manhattan is very clear since it follows the average orientation of the island it is on. I also love how they orientation leads to that amazing sun view through the streets at the solstice.
Likewise, Glasgow and London you can see the average orientation of the river flowing through the central city regions.
In both cases there, you can see the river flow and the perpendicular roads coming off from said average flow.
Seems this design was decided on very early on as well since you can see it on some pretty major roads.
In Glasgow, you can see they tried to keep the NS EW design simplicity, but you can see the little bits that jump out on the NWW to NW region and 180 degrees around where the average river flow is and the roads which follow it.
Then you have Moscow, Paris, and others with a very clearly defined city center with roads all coming out from it in a noisy but still quite circular layout.
Rome is a bit odd though. The fact it's kept to a reasonably circle-square-like average is quite strange considering its seemingly random layout. Doesn't even seem to show any bias with the river flow. Very strange.
I have been looking at Charlotte for a few minutes. I still can't figure it out either.
I'll probably look at some more of these cities to see how they look compared to the graphs.
Always wanted to see stuff like this as a child and now 31, I finally get to.
Sadly we never saw much city layout analysis in geography beyond some basics.
Maybe they should also consider the layout of their digital network, because right now, it ain't making it.
Most cities in the new world are laid out in grids. All you need to get around Calgary is a ruler. Montreal is very much a grid, but a tilted one that follows geography. And long, skinny ribbon-farm-like blocks, reflecting its French heritage.
The town that makes me shake my head is Bellingham, Washington. A new(-ish) city, but since it was assembled by amalgamating three towns with their own street grids, it always give me a headache when I'm there.
...laura
Seems like diagonal (state-named) streets should be more prominent in the diagram for DC. They carry a lot of the traffic, much of
the grid is just residential blocks.
As soon as you started talking about a weird road in Dallas, I knew you were going to say Beltline. I thought it was really weird until I thought about the name. Belts go around. It's a loop, which isn't uncommon at all. Beltline is kind of a messed up loop, though.
The good news is - wherever you are in Dallas, if you're lost you can ask anyone how to get to Beltline. Follow Beltline long enough and you'll eventually get to your neighborhood - no matter where your neighborhood is.
In the US these trends were heavily influence by sectionalized land surveys beginning in the late 19th century in Ohio.
Prior to that point, roadways were based on prior existing trails (usually followed contour lines to avoid climbing), and properties were largely defined by meets and bounds methods.
Sectionalized land was based on magnetic North, and usually had grid sized of about a mile.
Those one-mile section lines also included right-of-way ownership that was given to the local governments for the building of roads and public utilities.
For the most part you can look at any cities that were developed before sectionalized land and see the effects of contour line trails, and look at cities (or portions thereof), which were developed after sectionalized land and see the effects of the grid systems.
fwiw, these land use planners could have save a lot of time and just asked a freaking surveyor.
The difference is pre-railroad and post-railroad. Pre-railroad cities usually grew from hamlets laid out based on topography and geography, often the nearby river or bay. Post-railroad cities had a plan by the time they grew beyond a single main drag, with roads and blocks laid out on a north/south east/west basis.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
How are roads that bend represented in the histogram? For example, a road that follows an arc?
Had prof in collage teach American history 2 post civil war to now using street maps.
1) ever wound why cities and towns west of the Mississippi all are grids aligned to major transportation water railroads , thank sears & robuck. The amazon of the day. They sold a city founding map the shoes to place 1st along major transportation and main (aka broadway) is main drag from there. And so on.even parks and municipal buildings.
2) hub and spoke - ring roads of today. Crowding and rail trolley. Taking the folks to the suburbs.
3) micro centers were trolleys stopped had bakery butcher and other stores.
4) âoewoodâ fronts with big glass windows to show the wares. Sears and pig iron. Those are mostly cast iron fronts.
Now we are just getting to the 1900s...
Look at a map of the bay area you can still see the rail lines SanPablo ave. Telegraphic ave A few ring roads even show follow grand ave as it makes a loop to end back at 51st and telegraph. Look at the key lines that name over east bay to foot of bay ridge then crossed that bridge to the east bay terminal. They are the Letter lines for the bus system that took them over.
I got this in school. And that was so long ago that it was still called New Amsterdam.
You're not that old.
I wonder if a honeycomb structure would be more eficient than squares. It would allow traffic to go in 6 directions instead of 4 in a direct line.
I first thought, six directions? That's gonna cause more traffic accidents. But then I realised that if your city blocks are six-sided, you only have three roads meeting at an intersection, not six. The downside is that now you can never go straight for more than one side of a block. At each intersection you must choose whether to go left or right, since there's no straight ahead any longer.
So asking for directions is going to get really confusing really quickly. Can you think of an efficient and easily explained way of dealing with that problem? (Other than "let the mighty google talk you through it" or similar, of course.)
THIS is how Atlanta is ACTUALLY laid out:
https://www.zimbokitchen.com/w...
Not too far from the truth, for the freeways. Spokes to drive into town in the morning and drive out toward the suburbs after work. Then three concentric rings to get from the spoke to your neighborhood.
If your able to select your spoke such that when you get to the ring you're on the opposite side of the road from the majority of traffic, it works pretty well.
Your cheekiness may be more appropriate than you think. Almost exactly the same visualization appeared in a different blog post four years ago.
Can't stand east-west aligned roads. I wonder how many studies have shown east-west aligned roads contribute to peak hour traffic congestion and accidents from the sun blinding drivers?
Traffic lights? Oh no no no. Houghi is one of them hoopleheads with the wooden shoes. It'll be a hex grid with roundabouts and prioritized bike/bus lanes.
The most interesting thing to me is how Charlotte NC has a large block of North-only streets. I'd guess the volume of south-ish facing streets would have to equal that extra bulk sticking up north-only.
But as others: how did that develop??
Glasgow has a similar measurement, while Hong Kong and Dubai have smaller non-mirrored north-facing spikes.
Interesting...
captcha: tortured
Looks like St. Louis was done for just the City of St. Louis. The riverfront and downtown are NS-EW, but there are neighborhoods that are maybe 15 or 30 degrees off that.
And the suburbs -- especially towns that were settled not long after the founding of St. Louis -- have their own layouts.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.