17 ms·

The Decline of the City Grid

131 points by andrewl 4y ago

michaelt 4y ago
> In London cab drivers have to spend up to four years learning the street network before they can get around without a map. Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve much the same thing in a day. These days this is less about being able to navigate, and more a way to limit the number of taxi licenses without limiting the number of taxi licenses. Many other cities impose a numerical limit, but London has never had such a limit - they'll issue a license to anyone who can pass the test. It's just a very difficult test.
- spikeagally 4y ago
  I think knowledge of the city is still much better than relying on GPS. The gap may have narrowed significantly but I'd still rather by driven by someone who knows the streets. One example I regularly encounter is Uber drivers following GPS down these extremely narrow (6ft I believe) bollard lined connecting roads. They are easily avoided if you know the area but every Uber driver will take them while we both hold our breath until we get through it.
  - rhdunn 4y ago
    There was a recent Tom Scott video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWREtcDVBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWREtcDVBE) where he was using a GPS and Tom Hutley (a London cabbie) only relied on his London knowledge to get around, travelling the same distance after reaching certain landmarks. It was interesting to watch.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - spikeagally 4y ago
      That was really interesting, thanks for sharing.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Google Maps regularly makes poor decisions to save two minutes. I was reminded of this just yesterday driving in New England where we've had some snow here and there. It took me on a more direct route to a location than I usually take but I let it do its thing. Lots of turns on very secondary roads some of which had some drifting and ice on the road. Nothing very bad but the more main route coming back was definitely better.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    The problem here is that the GPS system doesn't have enough local knowledge encoded into it yet.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  > In London cab drivers have to spend up to four years learning the street network before they can get around without a map. Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve much the same thing in a day. This is such a patently false assertion that it goes well beyond hyperbole. Roads meeting at right angles doesn't mean you magically know how to get to destinations unless the road naming also follows a logical progression. Midtown Manhattan is an example, but that's only a part of New York City, and you still have to worry about things like Central Park and streets that don't span the entire island. It'll still take a cabbie a long time to figure out things like where the corner of Cermak and Bell in Chicago or Willoughby and Marcy are in New York. In fact, they'll learn in the same way I suspect most people do, which is to become familiar with major roads in an area, how they connect, and they learn destinations relative to that.
deleted 4y ago
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twobitshifter 4y ago
Does anyone know the name of this visualization and what tool was used to produce it? Silver Springs is interesting to look at. I think of that as prototypical suburbia and it maps pretty closely to London despite the planning.
- nowardic 4y ago
  I'm not sure what they used for the web visualizations but I have seen this before with the python osmnx tool (https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orientation/ https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orienta...)
- akgerber 4y ago
  Here is a post with an Jupyter notebook producing such visualizations with the OSMnx library: https://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/ https://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
beej71 4y ago
[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 past are palpable. So maybe it is that I just don't like modern US housing overall... but also, the organic city grew that way _unplanned_. And we never do anything unplanned any longer. The "planned organic" look has a fake feel to it, right?
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Old, organic non-grids in my area aren't due to anything other than topography and road construction technology available at the time the area was settled. There are grids too, with a very wide variety of architecture (the city was settled by people from all over europe and the near-east). In both cases, the architecture varies, so it's a nice point of comparison for non-cookie-cutter construction issues. Non-grids tend to have fewer straight lines of sight, so they are more pleasing to live in; trees create an even greater sense of privacy, and people drive a bit slower. They tend to be more pleasing to live in, at least in that regard. On the other hand, they're miserable for commuting if they're big enough. So many slow turns and stops makes it harder to get to a main thoroughfare. If you don't have a good sense of direction or memory, living back in one feels further away than you actually are, which makes the commute feel longer than it actually is. Short trips to the grocery store feel longer if you don't have one inside your non-grid neighborhood.
  - devilbunny 4y ago
    There's an interesting hybrid system in New Orleans proper. The city follows the curve of the river, with original land grants being in the French classic frontage-and-depth layout (each grant received a certain minimum amount of river frontage, for shipping out products, and then extended back as far as was possible given the terrain). Within each original grant, there is a grid, and between them there are major boulevards to permit higher-speed, higher-volume traffic from one part of the city to another. But within each grid section, you're entirely on narrow, mostly residential streets - with a few commercial stretches scattered around, and far more neighborhood bars and restaurants in mostly-residential areas than is common in most of the US. Aside from the weather (it's almost always hot and humid), a very bikeable city. And if you're in a car, it usually only takes a few blocks of travel to get to a major road (e.g., the largely-pedestrian French Quarter bounded by Canal, Rampart, and Esplanade).
twelvechairs 4y ago
The big recent exemplar of street layout for a new place is Houten in the netherlands [0] which is basically focussed on a train station and walkable town square at the centre with a ring road at the edge. Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars making the car network more of a tree with dead ends rather than a grid. And making road speeds slow at the centre and fast at the edges. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/the-dutch-town-of-houten-is-a-case-study-in-bike-friendly-suburban-planning https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/the-dutch...
- josh_carterPDX 4y ago
  That's amazing. It reminded me of Livermore, CA. They have a bike trail that follows a creek. Wherever it crosses a road (in most parts) the trail dips under the road. A few times every decade the creek floods making the trail there unusable, but I always appreciated being able to avoid the traffic as a kid.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Look at how human scale everything is, even the pedestrian underpass under the road. By contrast in the US, even public transit has to be built at massive, oppressive scales, with pedestrian walkways soaring multiple stories above the road: https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/354851.jpg https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/354851.jpg. Awful.
  - msla 4y ago
    And, judging by the comments I've gotten, it would kill anyone who needed emergency medical care.
  - jcoder 4y ago
    Houten has a population of 50,000. Plenty of American cities much larger than that have the sort of human-scale features and transit you’re describing—they’re all over Portland, OR.
    - 4y ago
oxfeed65261 4y ago
https://archive.ph/RujBG https://archive.ph/RujBG
- shagie 4y ago
  As this is one of the "Christmas specials", I believe that it won't hit the paywall. The archive.ph link also misses out on several of the javascript animation tools that integrate with OSM and the city grid explorer at the bottom of the article.
  - madcaptenor 4y ago
    Didn't hit the paywall for me. I was wondering why not.
anikom15 4y ago
I was in NYC recently and the grid layout made it incredibly easy to navigate.
kkfx 4y ago
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 maker decide it's good at cutting glass plates, the neighbor that's good at cut frames and so on. Nowadays urban density surpass the advantage point of economy of scale while the push toward a service economy and bigger and bigger enterprises kill it completely. The final results is simple: cities have no purposes anymore. We still need to be social, to meet other people so we still need to be together but modern cities are not good even in that terms. That's the decline.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  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.
  - kkfx 4y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 4y ago
barnabee 4y ago
I like a city I can get lost in. Grids seem like an anti-pattern to me.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  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.
  - barnabee 4y ago
    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.
    - zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
      Yeah that's fine for a vacation or a day off, but not practical day to day
- davidw 4y ago
  Go to Venice, Italy if you want to get lost. Grids are the best way to lay out a city so you don't end up with ridiculous burbs like this where it's a 1.5 mile walk between adjacent lots. https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ There are far worse examples of that elsewhere in the country. Grids are also very robust to interruptions - like you remove an intersection (a crash, sewer work, whatever) and it slows traffic down, but it can route around it. Take out an arterial in a typical suburb and it's a huge mess.
  - barnabee 4y ago
    These things sound efficient and productive, but I don't think that makes them better.
bee_rider 4y ago
How do you even give directions in Chicago? It seems horribly confusing — go down the straight road, once you’ve passed 15 intersections turn left blah blah. No way to keep track of that kind of junk. Boston is much easier to navigate and get direction, go until you hit the triangular intersection, take the left branch, you’ll eventually find a rotary has brushed up on your road, take that etc etc. Each intersection should endeavor to be a unique, memorable point!
- nwah1 4y ago
  Directions are easier with grids. Numbering systems that ascend and descend from a particular central point make sense. State and Madison is zero. Anything else is a higher or lower number in the direction you are relative to that intersection. 100 numbers is one block. All streets have numbers, even if they also have names. Most of the South side also uses numbers for names of east-west streets... so 30th street is 30 blocks south of Madison, and addresses will be 3000 S. North-south streets you can memorize, and would likely get by with only knowing a half dozen main ones. North side has a bunch of main through streets that you can orient around. You can get a rough sense of how far north or west you are. Or you can fall back to the numbers. 5000 north is 50 blocks north, which is pretty far north. If you don't have google maps you can usually go in two straight lines to just about anywhere. Just keep going until you are at the right east-west spot, and then do the same until you are at the right north-south spot. And use the handful of diagonal streets to be fancy.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Or without a grid: "Take the 3rd left, then the 2nd right, cross the next roundabout at the 2nd exit which is a slight right, keep going for 3.2 miles and it is there on your right"
  - asguy 4y ago
    Or in the English countryside, where signs refer to towns and not to roads.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  It's not true New England directions until you tell someone "turn left where the shop used to be." But you're not going to give directions as "pass 15 intersections." If you want to get to, say, 55th and Cicero from the south, you'd say get off I-57 at 167th street, turn north onto Cicero, and, well, you can watch the streets count down. A savvy navigator would know that Chicago has 8 blocks to the mile (outside of downtown), so 55th is 14 miles north of 167th, but you don't need to know that: every major mile street will have a stoplight, and the stoplight will inform you which street it is. Of course, 55th and Cicero is a bad example, since it's the intersection of two major streets (and the business there is a really, really obvious one that you can't possibly miss). If you're off of a minor street, you might instead say something like "it's the second left after Pulaski"--Pulaski is one of the big north-south mile streets, so one would have a rough idea of how far away that is, and you don't need to start counting until after crossing the main mile street.
tengbretson 4y ago
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 property because they decided the once quite road on the grid you are on now needs to expand into a major roadway.
- burlesona 4y ago
  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-are-a-one-life-cycle-product https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/9/20/the-suburbs-ar...
josh_carterPDX 4y ago
Oh man I can look at this all day. What an interesting take on how we do city planning and how it really hasn't changed over the years. I'd be more interested in taking this a step further to look at the infrastructure overlay and how that has changed over the years.
freeqaz 4y ago
I recently visited Vancouver, BC (Canada) and I was blown away by their urban development planning. They have tons of density, but the city doesn't look dystopian because they've mixed different styles of building well. What this manifests in reality is a less car-dependent city that's extremely walkable (they also have amazing walking paths all over). Overall, I just found the experience to be amazing in comparison to visiting every other city in North America. It actually felt like a "city" and not just a collection of office buildings surrounded by 2-3 story houses (looking at you SF!). Are there any other exemplary examples of good urban development in other cities?
- cperciva 4y ago
  I'm guessing you were downtown? From roughly 15th south -- the majority of the city -- pretty much all you get is suburban wasteland of detached homes.
  - robotresearcher 4y ago
    There are lumps of density around many of the SkyTrain stops. Some of the stops used to be in the middle of nowhere, then gradually developers made them into little dense mini-metros.
    - freeqaz 4y ago
      I found the "clumps of density" fascinating because it seems like the NIMBY culture in SF/Seattle prevents that from happening. You simply cannot build more than 3-4 stories anywhere except downtown. There are some small exceptions to this, but I can't think of any buildings more than ~7 stories that are North of downtown Seattle that have been built in the last 50 years. It's just not a part of the culture here and it blew my mind to see this succeeding in Vancouver. Different priorities, I guess!
    - cperciva 4y ago
      Outside of the City of Vancouver, yes. Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed, Surrey City Center -- but Vancouver itself has been very resistant to development outside of the core. The story of Metro Vancouver development can be summarized as "a city which wants to be a suburb surrounded by suburbs which want to be cities".
quickthrower2 4y ago
What is cool is the search box at the bottom lets you enter any city in the world - but it also works on very small towns too!
s1mon 4y ago
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-orientation/ 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_and_order_in_urban_street_networks https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258954759_Entropy_a...
burlesona 4y ago
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.
- hammock 4y ago
  I’ve never heard this and am fascinated. Where can I read more?
  - nunez 4y ago
    https://www.planetizen.com/node/58690 https://www.planetizen.com/node/58690
  - lstamour 4y ago
    http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/pa-suburbs/post-war/national-trends.html http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/pa-suburbs/po... talks more about it under the heading “Trends in Subdivision Design”. Part of its source material is from a 2002 publication: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/NRB46_Suburbs_part1_508.pdf https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/NRB46_S... (8mb PDF, see page 59 of the PDF, with printed page number of 49.)
gpvos 4y ago
A thing about North-American cul-de-sac suburbs that I don't understand is why there are no footpaths to take shortcuts between the dead-end streets. That would make them much less hostile to pedestrians, would allow you to visit neighbours more easily, and it seems to me that you don't lose anything. Is it just an oversight or is there some reason for that? It should even increase social safety: always an escape route.
- closeparen 4y ago
  Some of the more humane subdivisions are built with walking trails e.g. behind the backyards. A developer may or may not feel that they need to spend the extra money for that to sell the houses. Customers for these very deeply nested cul de sac homes tend to value privacy a lot. They don’t want people they don’t know passing through, and may be even more suspicious of pedestrians than drivers.
  - kqr 4y ago
    > Customers for these very deeply nested cul de sac homes tend to value privacy a lot. They don’t want people they don’t know passing through, and may be even more suspicious of pedestrians than drivers. In which direction does the causation go? If I ended up on a partially closed road I would also become suspicious of people and start to value "privacy".
    - closeparen 4y ago
      I suspect it goes the other way, stroads polarizing people against ever wanting to live near active corridors. But either way, that’s how the vast majority of American housing development has been since the 40s, and it’s the only way people have ever lived in the cities that got their growth in the postwar period. So either way they have the preference.
- markfenton 4y ago
  There is a view held by some that they actually decrease safety by providing somewhere for undesirables to loiter, or a means of escape after committing crime, or simply attract more foot traffic to an area than a cul-de-sac therfore increasing the chance of opportunistic crime. I suspect this is a situation where the benefits of the shortcuts to society may be greater than the possible downsides to the nearby homeowners, but more power lies with the local residents, or developers who want to sell homes. It would be interesting to know if there is any research on whether there is any effect on crime from this sort of development.
mbg721 4y ago
The difference between Cincinnati and St. Louis was stark to me; I grew up assuming that "north" meant "vaguely northeast until it gets inconvenient". The idea that a road can just go on in the same direction for miles and miles seemed like a sinister AI trap. Someplace like New Orleans or Montreal where the direction follows a natural feature makes way more sense in my head.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  If you find your way to Bangkok's central drag Sukhumvit and keep heading east, 500 km down the road you'll find yourself at the Cambodian border, and it's still the same name. This is particularly weird since if you head west, the same road changes its name every couple of blocks!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pronlover723 4y ago
I'm not a fan of grid cities. Yes, they are easier to navigate, but I find them boring. It's much more fun to explore Tokyo's twists (west side) than Osaka's grid. Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Istanbul, ... much more fun that most of them are not on grids.
fmajid 4y ago
Also worth mentioning, Florence Lipsky’s book San Francisco: The Grid Meets the Hills, about how the grid was imposed on some of the most unsuitable topography for it.

131 points by andrewl 4y ago

> In London cab drivers have to spend up to four years learning the street network before they can get around without a map. Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve much the same thing in a day. These days this is less about being able to navigate, and more a way to limit the number of taxi licenses without limiting the number of taxi licenses. Many other cities impose a numerical limit, but London has never had such a limit - they'll issue a license to anyone who can pass the test. It's just a very difficult test.

spikeagally 4y ago
I think knowledge of the city is still much better than relying on GPS. The gap may have narrowed significantly but I'd still rather by driven by someone who knows the streets. One example I regularly encounter is Uber drivers following GPS down these extremely narrow (6ft I believe) bollard lined connecting roads. They are easily avoided if you know the area but every Uber driver will take them while we both hold our breath until we get through it.
- rhdunn 4y ago
  There was a recent Tom Scott video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWREtcDVBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWREtcDVBE) where he was using a GPS and Tom Hutley (a London cabbie) only relied on his London knowledge to get around, travelling the same distance after reaching certain landmarks. It was interesting to watch.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - spikeagally 4y ago
    That was really interesting, thanks for sharing.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Google Maps regularly makes poor decisions to save two minutes. I was reminded of this just yesterday driving in New England where we've had some snow here and there. It took me on a more direct route to a location than I usually take but I let it do its thing. Lots of turns on very secondary roads some of which had some drifting and ice on the road. Nothing very bad but the more main route coming back was definitely better.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  The problem here is that the GPS system doesn't have enough local knowledge encoded into it yet.
fatnoah 4y ago
> In London cab drivers have to spend up to four years learning the street network before they can get around without a map. Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve much the same thing in a day. This is such a patently false assertion that it goes well beyond hyperbole. Roads meeting at right angles doesn't mean you magically know how to get to destinations unless the road naming also follows a logical progression. Midtown Manhattan is an example, but that's only a part of New York City, and you still have to worry about things like Central Park and streets that don't span the entire island. It'll still take a cabbie a long time to figure out things like where the corner of Cermak and Bell in Chicago or Willoughby and Marcy are in New York. In fact, they'll learn in the same way I suspect most people do, which is to become familiar with major roads in an area, how they connect, and they learn destinations relative to that.

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twobitshifter 4y ago

Does anyone know the name of this visualization and what tool was used to produce it? Silver Springs is interesting to look at. I think of that as prototypical suburbia and it maps pretty closely to London despite the planning.

nowardic 4y ago
I'm not sure what they used for the web visualizations but I have seen this before with the python osmnx tool (https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orientation/ https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orienta...)
akgerber 4y ago
Here is a post with an Jupyter notebook producing such visualizations with the OSMnx library: https://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/ https://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

beej71 4y ago

[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 past are palpable. So maybe it is that I just don't like modern US housing overall... but also, the organic city grew that way _unplanned_. And we never do anything unplanned any longer. The "planned organic" look has a fake feel to it, right?

zdragnar 4y ago
Old, organic non-grids in my area aren't due to anything other than topography and road construction technology available at the time the area was settled. There are grids too, with a very wide variety of architecture (the city was settled by people from all over europe and the near-east). In both cases, the architecture varies, so it's a nice point of comparison for non-cookie-cutter construction issues. Non-grids tend to have fewer straight lines of sight, so they are more pleasing to live in; trees create an even greater sense of privacy, and people drive a bit slower. They tend to be more pleasing to live in, at least in that regard. On the other hand, they're miserable for commuting if they're big enough. So many slow turns and stops makes it harder to get to a main thoroughfare. If you don't have a good sense of direction or memory, living back in one feels further away than you actually are, which makes the commute feel longer than it actually is. Short trips to the grocery store feel longer if you don't have one inside your non-grid neighborhood.
- devilbunny 4y ago
  There's an interesting hybrid system in New Orleans proper. The city follows the curve of the river, with original land grants being in the French classic frontage-and-depth layout (each grant received a certain minimum amount of river frontage, for shipping out products, and then extended back as far as was possible given the terrain). Within each original grant, there is a grid, and between them there are major boulevards to permit higher-speed, higher-volume traffic from one part of the city to another. But within each grid section, you're entirely on narrow, mostly residential streets - with a few commercial stretches scattered around, and far more neighborhood bars and restaurants in mostly-residential areas than is common in most of the US. Aside from the weather (it's almost always hot and humid), a very bikeable city. And if you're in a car, it usually only takes a few blocks of travel to get to a major road (e.g., the largely-pedestrian French Quarter bounded by Canal, Rampart, and Esplanade).

twelvechairs 4y ago

The big recent exemplar of street layout for a new place is Houten in the netherlands [0] which is basically focussed on a train station and walkable town square at the centre with a ring road at the edge. Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars making the car network more of a tree with dead ends rather than a grid. And making road speeds slow at the centre and fast at the edges. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/the-dutch-town-of-houten-is-a-case-study-in-bike-friendly-suburban-planning https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/the-dutch...

josh_carterPDX 4y ago
That's amazing. It reminded me of Livermore, CA. They have a bike trail that follows a creek. Wherever it crosses a road (in most parts) the trail dips under the road. A few times every decade the creek floods making the trail there unusable, but I always appreciated being able to avoid the traffic as a kid.
rayiner 4y ago
Look at how human scale everything is, even the pedestrian underpass under the road. By contrast in the US, even public transit has to be built at massive, oppressive scales, with pedestrian walkways soaring multiple stories above the road: https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/354851.jpg https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/354851.jpg. Awful.
- msla 4y ago
  And, judging by the comments I've gotten, it would kill anyone who needed emergency medical care.
- jcoder 4y ago
  Houten has a population of 50,000. Plenty of American cities much larger than that have the sort of human-scale features and transit you’re describing—they’re all over Portland, OR.
  - 4y ago

oxfeed65261 4y ago

https://archive.ph/RujBG https://archive.ph/RujBG

shagie 4y ago
As this is one of the "Christmas specials", I believe that it won't hit the paywall. The archive.ph link also misses out on several of the javascript animation tools that integrate with OSM and the city grid explorer at the bottom of the article.
- madcaptenor 4y ago
  Didn't hit the paywall for me. I was wondering why not.

anikom15 4y ago

I was in NYC recently and the grid layout made it incredibly easy to navigate.

kkfx 4y ago

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 maker decide it's good at cutting glass plates, the neighbor that's good at cut frames and so on. Nowadays urban density surpass the advantage point of economy of scale while the push toward a service economy and bigger and bigger enterprises kill it completely. The final results is simple: cities have no purposes anymore. We still need to be social, to meet other people so we still need to be together but modern cities are not good even in that terms. That's the decline.

marcosdumay 4y ago
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.
- kkfx 4y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 4y ago

barnabee 4y ago

I like a city I can get lost in. Grids seem like an anti-pattern to me.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
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.
- barnabee 4y ago
  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.
  - zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
    Yeah that's fine for a vacation or a day off, but not practical day to day
davidw 4y ago
Go to Venice, Italy if you want to get lost. Grids are the best way to lay out a city so you don't end up with ridiculous burbs like this where it's a 1.5 mile walk between adjacent lots. https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ There are far worse examples of that elsewhere in the country. Grids are also very robust to interruptions - like you remove an intersection (a crash, sewer work, whatever) and it slows traffic down, but it can route around it. Take out an arterial in a typical suburb and it's a huge mess.
- barnabee 4y ago
  These things sound efficient and productive, but I don't think that makes them better.

bee_rider 4y ago

How do you even give directions in Chicago? It seems horribly confusing — go down the straight road, once you’ve passed 15 intersections turn left blah blah. No way to keep track of that kind of junk. Boston is much easier to navigate and get direction, go until you hit the triangular intersection, take the left branch, you’ll eventually find a rotary has brushed up on your road, take that etc etc. Each intersection should endeavor to be a unique, memorable point!

nwah1 4y ago
Directions are easier with grids. Numbering systems that ascend and descend from a particular central point make sense. State and Madison is zero. Anything else is a higher or lower number in the direction you are relative to that intersection. 100 numbers is one block. All streets have numbers, even if they also have names. Most of the South side also uses numbers for names of east-west streets... so 30th street is 30 blocks south of Madison, and addresses will be 3000 S. North-south streets you can memorize, and would likely get by with only knowing a half dozen main ones. North side has a bunch of main through streets that you can orient around. You can get a rough sense of how far north or west you are. Or you can fall back to the numbers. 5000 north is 50 blocks north, which is pretty far north. If you don't have google maps you can usually go in two straight lines to just about anywhere. Just keep going until you are at the right east-west spot, and then do the same until you are at the right north-south spot. And use the handful of diagonal streets to be fancy.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Or without a grid: "Take the 3rd left, then the 2nd right, cross the next roundabout at the 2nd exit which is a slight right, keep going for 3.2 miles and it is there on your right"
- asguy 4y ago
  Or in the English countryside, where signs refer to towns and not to roads.
jcranmer 4y ago
It's not true New England directions until you tell someone "turn left where the shop used to be." But you're not going to give directions as "pass 15 intersections." If you want to get to, say, 55th and Cicero from the south, you'd say get off I-57 at 167th street, turn north onto Cicero, and, well, you can watch the streets count down. A savvy navigator would know that Chicago has 8 blocks to the mile (outside of downtown), so 55th is 14 miles north of 167th, but you don't need to know that: every major mile street will have a stoplight, and the stoplight will inform you which street it is. Of course, 55th and Cicero is a bad example, since it's the intersection of two major streets (and the business there is a really, really obvious one that you can't possibly miss). If you're off of a minor street, you might instead say something like "it's the second left after Pulaski"--Pulaski is one of the big north-south mile streets, so one would have a rough idea of how far away that is, and you don't need to start counting until after crossing the main mile street.

tengbretson 4y ago

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 property because they decided the once quite road on the grid you are on now needs to expand into a major roadway.

burlesona 4y ago
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-are-a-one-life-cycle-product https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/9/20/the-suburbs-ar...

josh_carterPDX 4y ago

Oh man I can look at this all day. What an interesting take on how we do city planning and how it really hasn't changed over the years. I'd be more interested in taking this a step further to look at the infrastructure overlay and how that has changed over the years.

freeqaz 4y ago

I recently visited Vancouver, BC (Canada) and I was blown away by their urban development planning. They have tons of density, but the city doesn't look dystopian because they've mixed different styles of building well. What this manifests in reality is a less car-dependent city that's extremely walkable (they also have amazing walking paths all over). Overall, I just found the experience to be amazing in comparison to visiting every other city in North America. It actually felt like a "city" and not just a collection of office buildings surrounded by 2-3 story houses (looking at you SF!). Are there any other exemplary examples of good urban development in other cities?

cperciva 4y ago
I'm guessing you were downtown? From roughly 15th south -- the majority of the city -- pretty much all you get is suburban wasteland of detached homes.
- robotresearcher 4y ago
  There are lumps of density around many of the SkyTrain stops. Some of the stops used to be in the middle of nowhere, then gradually developers made them into little dense mini-metros.
  - freeqaz 4y ago
    I found the "clumps of density" fascinating because it seems like the NIMBY culture in SF/Seattle prevents that from happening. You simply cannot build more than 3-4 stories anywhere except downtown. There are some small exceptions to this, but I can't think of any buildings more than ~7 stories that are North of downtown Seattle that have been built in the last 50 years. It's just not a part of the culture here and it blew my mind to see this succeeding in Vancouver. Different priorities, I guess!
  - cperciva 4y ago
    Outside of the City of Vancouver, yes. Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed, Surrey City Center -- but Vancouver itself has been very resistant to development outside of the core. The story of Metro Vancouver development can be summarized as "a city which wants to be a suburb surrounded by suburbs which want to be cities".

quickthrower2 4y ago

What is cool is the search box at the bottom lets you enter any city in the world - but it also works on very small towns too!

s1mon 4y ago

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-orientation/ 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_and_order_in_urban_street_networks https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258954759_Entropy_a...

burlesona 4y ago

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.

hammock 4y ago
I’ve never heard this and am fascinated. Where can I read more?
- nunez 4y ago
  https://www.planetizen.com/node/58690 https://www.planetizen.com/node/58690
- lstamour 4y ago
  http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/pa-suburbs/post-war/national-trends.html http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/pa-suburbs/po... talks more about it under the heading “Trends in Subdivision Design”. Part of its source material is from a 2002 publication: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/NRB46_Suburbs_part1_508.pdf https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/NRB46_S... (8mb PDF, see page 59 of the PDF, with printed page number of 49.)

gpvos 4y ago

A thing about North-American cul-de-sac suburbs that I don't understand is why there are no footpaths to take shortcuts between the dead-end streets. That would make them much less hostile to pedestrians, would allow you to visit neighbours more easily, and it seems to me that you don't lose anything. Is it just an oversight or is there some reason for that? It should even increase social safety: always an escape route.

closeparen 4y ago
Some of the more humane subdivisions are built with walking trails e.g. behind the backyards. A developer may or may not feel that they need to spend the extra money for that to sell the houses. Customers for these very deeply nested cul de sac homes tend to value privacy a lot. They don’t want people they don’t know passing through, and may be even more suspicious of pedestrians than drivers.
- kqr 4y ago
  > Customers for these very deeply nested cul de sac homes tend to value privacy a lot. They don’t want people they don’t know passing through, and may be even more suspicious of pedestrians than drivers. In which direction does the causation go? If I ended up on a partially closed road I would also become suspicious of people and start to value "privacy".
  - closeparen 4y ago
    I suspect it goes the other way, stroads polarizing people against ever wanting to live near active corridors. But either way, that’s how the vast majority of American housing development has been since the 40s, and it’s the only way people have ever lived in the cities that got their growth in the postwar period. So either way they have the preference.
markfenton 4y ago
There is a view held by some that they actually decrease safety by providing somewhere for undesirables to loiter, or a means of escape after committing crime, or simply attract more foot traffic to an area than a cul-de-sac therfore increasing the chance of opportunistic crime. I suspect this is a situation where the benefits of the shortcuts to society may be greater than the possible downsides to the nearby homeowners, but more power lies with the local residents, or developers who want to sell homes. It would be interesting to know if there is any research on whether there is any effect on crime from this sort of development.

mbg721 4y ago

The difference between Cincinnati and St. Louis was stark to me; I grew up assuming that "north" meant "vaguely northeast until it gets inconvenient". The idea that a road can just go on in the same direction for miles and miles seemed like a sinister AI trap. Someplace like New Orleans or Montreal where the direction follows a natural feature makes way more sense in my head.

rippercushions 4y ago
If you find your way to Bangkok's central drag Sukhumvit and keep heading east, 500 km down the road you'll find yourself at the Cambodian border, and it's still the same name. This is particularly weird since if you head west, the same road changes its name every couple of blocks!

deleted 4y ago

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pronlover723 4y ago

I'm not a fan of grid cities. Yes, they are easier to navigate, but I find them boring. It's much more fun to explore Tokyo's twists (west side) than Osaka's grid. Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Istanbul, ... much more fun that most of them are not on grids.

fmajid 4y ago

Also worth mentioning, Florence Lipsky’s book San Francisco: The Grid Meets the Hills, about how the grid was imposed on some of the most unsuitable topography for it.