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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.
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 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.
Downtown Charlotte has a regular grid pattern. What you call Charlotte today includes the suburban sprawl, and those are built around housing developments and roads are built to connect the suburban developments to the city center. Developers don't care about how the roads are constructed, as long as there is a connection to the development. Poor city planning, but that is typical in the Carolinas.
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!
To be fair, many American cities do have plenty of trees. It varies city-by-city, but a lot American cities do have tree-lined streets and large green-areas. There are some cities that lack them and look grey and boring. I can think of plenty of cities back home in Britain that were industrial dump towns with fewer trees and green spaces.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
Maybe he used AI and Blockchain to keep it secure?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
High ground that follows the topography.
Designed by Obi-Wan.
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That's nothing.... You should see Dallas..
We have ONE road that goes, north, south, east and west if you drive all of it in one direction (no U-Turns). It would take you hours. This road passes though nearly a dozen towns, each having their own block numbers. The road is named "Beltline" and it completely circles Dallas. So "101 North Beltline" is the address of multiple places.
Then, we have roads like I-35 East and I-35 West which are different roads that run north and south or the 190/George Bush Turnpike which runs north-south, then east-west before going north-south again.
We have some of the most confusing interchanges I've ever seen too, where five major highways converge just south west of down town. And the highest interchange I've seen that has 5 levels of roadways where one of the ramps takes you nearly 20 stories up from the nearly pancake flat ground.
All this in Texas where it seems the "speed limit" are but friendly suggestions for a minimum, and are set to 70 MPH for most major highways in town and 75 or more outside of population centers. And don't get me started on how we use service roads to put exits AFTER the bridge and merge into traffic BEFORE the bridge.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If by "Downtown Charlotte" you mean a tiny, tiny area of only 12 x 12 city blocks, then you're correct. However suburban sprawl doesn't begin to be a factor when a city is still only 12 x 12 blocks. Something else happened (or more than likely something didn't happen) very early on in the city's development to result in this level of disorganization.
Look for yourself if you don't believe me. Check out "Morehead St", "Central Ave", "N Graham St", "Rt 49" - these seem to be the seeds of disorganization that led to the helter-skelter arrangement of their streets.
https://www.google.com/maps/@3...
Better known as 318230.
How are roads that bend represented in the histogram? For example, a road that follows an arc?