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City Street Orientations Around the World
- 082349872349872 3y agoI recall walking down a new road in the middle of condos on the way to the Western Wall in J'lem. Like all the other cheap construction in the city, the buildings were stone (wood is found in the five-stars) and the road zig-zagged on its way. "Good way to prevent enfilade," I joked with my hosts, and they replied seriously: "exactly".
- tomjakubowski 3y agoSome of the best city street views can be had wherever the grid changes orientations. As you approach, broadsides of buildings come peeking out around the corner.
- wnc3141 3y agoGreat tip! I'm going to play with that idea
- wolverine876 3y agoIt's a short exerpt from this link, which probably should be the OP: https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orientation/ https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orienta...
- merek 3y agoIf I understand correctly, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, Mexico City, Tehran and St Louis have a majority streets running slightly askew from due North - South or due East - West. Any ideas why that may be the case?
- merek 3y agoI found a promising answer in a comment from "Nathan": > Most of Melbourne’s grid was laid out according to magnetic north, not true north, hence the ~8 degree rotation.
- gumby 3y agoAnd Melbourne is too lazy to update their streets as the magnetic north moves.
- pimlottc 3y agoCouldn’t they just rotate their continent? It is an island, after all.
- madcaptenor 3y agoThey try but people in Sydney keep rotating it back.
- wizardwes 3y agoCould be a variety of reasons. Maybe they point to geographic north instead of magnetic north, or it could be just simple measurement error when the city was constructed, or a natural feature of the terrain, similar to the Manhattan and Detroit graphs
- lainga 3y agoToronto is aligned to the long straight stretch of Lake Ontario's Northern shore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Ontario#/media/File:ISS-36_Lake_Ontario_(horizontal).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Ontario#/media/File:ISS-3...
- ks2048 3y agoMexico City was originally on an island [1]. I wonder if, like Manhattan, that has something to do with it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan#/media/File:Painting_of_Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco_on_Lake_Texcoco_(9755215791).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan#/media/File:Paint...)
- frogulis 3y agoAnother tidbit about Melbourne (I'm a fan): while most of greater Melbourne orients ~8 degrees clockwise of true north, the Hoddle Grid right in the middle and South Melbourne instead orient ~20 degrees counterclockwise of true north, in order to align with the adjacent stretch of the Yarra River. Naturally, as a lifelong resident, I lean 8 degrees to the right when reading any map.
- athrun 3y agoOoh. I would never had noticed. And now I can't unsee it!
- lainga 3y agoIt would be interesting to see these diagrams folded in half and into quarters. Which cities have the greatest fourfold symmetry breaking? Which cities have more streets running north than south? (the only case I can think of would be many small one-way streets in a cardinal direction, and one big counterflowing one-way street)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kevindamm 3y agoI feel like SF is a lot of parks and sharp 170° turns somehow nestled into a grid.
- gottorf 3y agoBoston: because fuck you, that's why. Though I am surprised to see that Charlotte is such a well-rounded player here.
- roarcher 3y agoI used to live in Charlotte. Always wondered why the traffic was so uniquely awful there. Today I got my answer.
- codewiz 3y agoLooking at downtown Charlotte in Google Maps, I see the typical grid pattern of other US cities, just tilted by 45 degrees. The suburbs follow a similar pattern, but appear to be at slightly different angles. I'm not sure if this would explain the even distribution of road orientations.
- roarcher 3y agoHuh? Having a bunch of roads at random angles explains the "even distribution of road orientations", by definition. How would it not? That's my point. The city is fragmented into tiny grids oriented at random angles. Wherever these grids meet, there are odd intersections and traffic patterns that are difficult to optimize.
- kmarc 3y agoSlightly related: I'm on a trip visiting many maya ruins, and I find it fascinating that they were really good at astronomy, their buildings are off by around 1 degree. Tectonic plates moved? What am I missing?!
- ks2048 3y agoAre you referring to something on this page or data from elsewhere? The only one close is Mexico City, which wasn't Mayan, but Aztec (and others before that). It was originally an island, so maybe that had something do with the original orientation.
- kmarc 3y agoNo, I wasn't, so risking all the down votes for being off-topic. Just in general, I had this observation by looking at (openstreet)maps. A nice inclusion in this list would be though the planned, checker board colonial towns (like Antigua, Cuenca, or Alejuela), which are surprisingly also off by some degrees, and probably all have their explanation (nearby volcano, river, etc)
- defrost 3y ago> their buildings are off by around 1 degree. Maybe this statement needs to be clarified a little ... "Off by one degree" with respect to what? * the modern rotational polar north * the modern GPS north * the modern sunset | sunrise on { longest | shortest } day of year Or any of these back calculated to the time of the city in questions founding? It's not clear what it is you think these cities should be aligned to, and are deviating from.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoMost of the major Maya sites (e.g. Palenque, chich'en itza) have fairly well supported astronomical alignments, usually with the sun around equinoxes and solstices. It's usually at the level of individual buildings though, as the roads are rarely very straight except near the major ceremonial complexes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chihuahua 3y agoThe article claims that Seattle is strictly North/South/East/West, which is incorrect. The downtown area (the oldest part of town) has 3 different grids, one is NSEW, and the other two are at angles near 45 degrees. I don't know how much of the other claims of this article can be trusted.
- ShakataGaNai 3y agoI would guess its based on the number of named streets. To the north and south of downtown you've got hundreds and hundreds of tiny streets all NESW, and not that many in downtown that are "off" the cardinal.
- Izkata 3y agoThis is basically it, and Chicago is the same: If you click on the image and zoom in, these diagonal streets are represented, their spokes are just so small you can't see them on the zoomed-out version on the page.
- NoPedantsThanks 3y ago[dead]
- alejohausner 3y agoThe plots for Chicago and Washington DC are also wrong. They both have lots of diagonal streets.
- tasuki 3y agoI looked at Warsaw and it also looks off. The "main" grid in Warsaw is the tilted one, which the article shows as secondary. There are very few streets in Warsaw that are pure N/S and E/W. I guess this might be an artifact due to some missing data?
- Kon-Peki 3y agoThese things are all about intersections and the intersections they connect with. The angled portions of Seattle's downtown just doesn't have anywhere near the number of intersections as the NSEW part of the whole city. [1] > it calculates the compass bearing from each directed edge’s origin node u to its destination node v. Now we can visualize these bearings, binned together as a histogram to get a sense of the relative frequency of the streets’ spatial orientations. [1] https://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/ https://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/
- pimlottc 3y agoIt would be really cool if there was an interactive version of these visuals [0] that show the histograms next to the street maps. You could hover over an arc on the histogram and it would highlight the corresponding streets, and vice verse. It could be a fun way to explore how the grid angles vary by area within each city, like lower vs upper Manhattan. I'm probably not going to get around to doing it myself but maybe someone else might get inspired... 0: https://i0.wp.com/geoffboeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/manhattan-boston-street-network-orientation.jpg?ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/geoffboeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09...
- elihu 3y agoA random bit of trivia about Portland (and it probably explains a lot of the off-axis streets in other cities) is that there was a section laid out to align to true north, and another section of town that aligns with magnetic north. Eventually, those parts merged so now there's some weird pizza-slice shaped blocks (near Powell's, for instance). Magnetic north changes over time, so effectively our city streets become an effectively permanent record of the Earth's magnetic field at a specific moment in time, not all that unlike the rocks that store the magnetic alignment when lava cooled and we use to correlate seafloor spreading with magnetic field reversals.
- stn8188 3y agoThis might sound like a dumb question, but I always thought that the streets south of Burnside were aligned with the Willamette River? I love learning about any history/geography stuff, so your comment is super interesting. I grew up outside of Portland, but have only been back a handful of times in the last decade and a half.
- mattlondon 3y agoAs an aside, I wonder how these sorts of road layouts affects people who grow up there in terms of spatial awareness. The article and linked paper talks about "legible cities" and people struggling to navigate a non-legible city because they don't know which way they are facing if there is not a grid. Do people who grew up in a rigid grid system have a different way of viewing the world compared to those who are used to more chaotic and organic layouts? If folks don't know where they are going or which way they are facing without relying on the roads being a grid, what other aspects of their lives are impacted by under-developed spatial reasoning?
- eszed 3y agoThat's a really interesting question! The two cities with which I am most familiar are San Francisco and London, and (though I'd never thought about it before) my navigational concepts of them are very different. Getting around San Francisco is, uh, grid-like: I think in terms of "corner of X and Y", and then the relationship between myself and my destination on a coordinate plane. Getting there becomes a series of maneuvers - some of them indirect, for route-efficiency reasons (like, this street has timed lights, or this one permits left turns) - which carry with them very few (street-level, at least) visual images of the route. London is all about pathways, a choice between more and less direct connections between my location and where I'm going. Just about every landmark and decision-point triggers a visual memory of that specific location and choice. In San Francisco I can point fairly confidently towards a given destination, drive that direction, and find it by "feel" - eg, by intersecting one of the two cross streets on the coordinate plane. In London, I couldn't do that on a more granular than borough / neighborhood level - like, I'd know how to get to, say, Camberwell from a given location, but not in precisely which cardinal direction it lies, and once I get there I'd need to rely on landmark-based directions (or nowadays, GPS). Navigation in London is more complex, I suppose (San Francisco has its quirks!), but the conceptual framework it requires leaves me with a more detailed and enjoyable sense of the city itself. That's one person's experience. I'd be curious to know the extent to which it generalizes.
- arethuza 3y agoMy mental model of London is basically the Tube map - when I look at a map of where the Tube lines and stations are physically located I find it quite disturbing.
- GrumpyNl 3y agoJust a little info, whenever youre in a Dutch city, the house numbers are numbered from the center. So you wanna go to the center of the city, you can use the numbers as orientation.
- maxglute 3y agoI wish there was option on maps programs to set default tilt, I live in one of the cities with strong axial orientation and it's annoying maps is always slightly rotated.