City street orientations around the world | Hacker News Reader

City street orientations around the world

geoffboeing.com

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Funnily 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.

I feel the same sentiment while walking old European cities vs modern cities. I found this tweet very helpful in understanding why I feel that way. The pictures are great, even if you don't agree with the thesis. https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/883181352933236736 "It is time for a thread on traditional urbanism, or town planning 13th-century style. I will dispel some myths of modern dis-urbanism...Traditional urbanism has short blocks. No building takes more than 3-4 seconds to walk past, providing interesting colors, shops, textures...Modern dis-urbanism means massive buildings, long block: takes minutes to walk past with nothing to distract or relieve the tedium. (Zürich) "

Love that post---great examples!

Optimising for tourists is pretty lame, they don't have to live there. In my opinion, I think a balance between the approaches works well. I'm in Philadelphia. I really appreciate that anyone can tell me some event is at "14th and Locust" and I know how to get there without directions. At the same time, roads like Ben Franklin Parkway are wide and open enough, with multiple courtyards along its length, that it opens up a larger part of the city for people to get their bearings in and get a larger part of the city in their visual field. Broad and Market street do the same thing, to a lesser extent.

The reason I said "for tourists" is because a local will learn the layout eventually regardless of what it is. I don't think my experiences in, say, Birmingham where I lived for a decade are comparable to my experiences in Philly, which I have visited once for a few days.

I've been local to Boston for decades and haven't truly learned the layout. I can get to any given place, but without consulting the map I'll often choose a suboptimal route. It's hard to stop my brain from forcing the layout into a grid, which it very much is not.

You live in Center City. The rest of Philadelphia has a very organic layout. Can you get to Frankford & Castor without directions? Germantown & Chelten? Anywhere in NE Philly?

You have a point. However, I am new enough to Philly and have explored those areas little enough that I'm not sure I can be a good judge of them.

As a European, I agree. US cities are confusing to me because streets all look the same. I find it impossible to locate interesting areas without prior knowledge. Maybe what seems easiest to navigate depends on what you’re used to?

I think so. My US colleagues seem to find it very easy to get around unfamiliar US cities but seem to struggle in European cities. I expect we have very different unconscious navigation algorithms.

I am from London and lived in the US for a bit. I struggled to navigate. I think it is because I navigate by modelling the shape of the streets. When all the streets are the same shape, that subconscious system stops working.

I also tend to find I underestimate distances in grid systems. I think it’s because in European cities I estimate distance by the number of distinct shapes I can remember on the way there. In a grid, I think my brain smushes all those identical block shapes into one. In a similar way to how time flies when doing a repetitive task.

You sort of need to know the [scale of] grid in question.

In a similar vein, I find the Las Vegas Strip is incredibly disorienting with respect to distance. You're used to buildings being of size approximately X and in Vegas the casinos are 10X. So you think--oh, that's just a couple of buildings away. 30 minutes later you're still walking (in the sweltering heat).

I found this out the hard way before google maps walking time calculator when I decided to suggest walking a group from Mirage to Rio to watch Penn and Teller. I was not popular that night, especially for those in heels.

Tip for your next visit: The monorail runs on the east side of the the strip and stops off every few buildings or so. There's also a separate free tram that runs between Bellagio, Vdara, and Aria.

I am (mostly sadly) pretty well aquainted with Vegas. Unfortunately, the monorail/tram systems are pretty disjoint. And even if it just involves walking through a casino can still be quite a hike.

And I, by no means mind walking, though there was the time I went to Vegas on a business trip and was on crutches with no weight on foot allowed. Though the high point was that a porter showed me how to use the crutches more effectively; he was an (aspiring?) ballet dancer who had apparently spent more than his share of time on crutches :-)

What is the secret of crutches?

I had the same experience in Macau. The entire Cotai strip is just 3 blocks between Old Taipa and Coloane island. But you wouldn't consider crossing it on foot.

Ironically enough it appears to be very much in contrast with imperial (US) vs metric (EU, generally).

I have similar experiences in both systems. Growing up in China, it is easy for me to navigate in US cities. Beijing is primarily of grid system.

The first time I went to Europe, I got quite lost in the city (Madrid). The second time was in Paris. I got some free time. So I walked around aimlessly in some neighborhoods, away from the popular tourist sites, appreciating the beauty, the history and the local people I ran across. It brought back the feeling I walked around the Hutongs in Beijing, which I enjoyed so much. Since then, I have been feeling very comfortable in navigating European cities with organic layout. In my case, it does seems there are two navigation systems, and I make subconscious switches based on the layouts.

Funnily enough, Paris isn't a particularly organic layout. It was centrally redesigned and "modernized" starting in the reign of Napoleon III. For sure it was designed with horses and pedestrians in mind, so very different from most US cities, but also different from someplace like central Prague, etc.

They may have torn down a bunch of buildings to pave the boulevards, but in between it's a wonderful mix of little streets. Best of both worlds. Get lost in the neighborhood and eventually you'll stumble back onto a boulevard where you can get your bearings.

> In a grids all the roads look the same (they have the same size)

Does not have to be true and often is not true. Some places alternate alley (single lane, one way) with neighborhood (one lane each direction) and every ~4 neighborhood streets, have a larger street, either with wider lanes or more lanes.

Grid does not have to mean all streets look the same or be of equal weight.

This is one thing that Google Maps now solves very well, by highlighting popular areas in pale orange. While I prefer Apple Maps for walking and public transit directions, I must say I love Google Maps for providing the data to achieve strategic serendipity. Thirty minute walk back to the hotel? Let's detour down this parallel road, it looks like there's a lot going on there!

>In an organic layout there are central roads that go to places of interest and the smaller streets flow to the central roads

That doesn't sound organic, it sounds like basic transportation planning and street hierarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_hierarchy. Smaller roads flow into bigger roads which flow into main roads which flow into highways.

"By contrast, in many regular, traditional grid plans, as laid out, higher order roads (e.g. arterials) are connected by through streets of both lower order levels (e.g. local and collector.) An ordering of roads and their classification can include several levels and finer distinctions as, for example, major and minor arterials or collectors."

Organic does not mean random.

Having grown up in a city with a very well defined grid, Chicago, I mainly favor grid layouts. Here you can tell important facts about a location based solely on the address.

Given an address, like 4012 N Pulaski, I immediately know how far it is from me in the North/South direction and also in which direction on that axis. I also know it's on the West side of the street. The only other important bit not included is how far in the East/West direction. So it's not perfect, but once you know which way, East or West, you're on your way.

Yep, I recently learned that Daniel Burnham designed them that way. The Great Fire of 1871 cleared out legacy street systems, so things could start anew. The diagonal transporters like Ogden, Milwaukee etc. mess me up though.

Chicago grid

https://www.domu.com/blog/decoding-the-chicago-street-grid-s...

The diagonals can be a little confusing, especially since they're numbered as if they're North/South, but unlike a true North/South street they have no fixed East/West number (Lincoln is 1600 W at Ashland but 2000 W at Damen).

They always mess my wife up when she's driving as well (think easy right vs. hard right when approaching a three way intersection). What gets me is when driving on a diagonal and the intersecting streets bend right at the intersection so that they meet the diagonal at a 90 degree angle. That messes with my head because it feels like you're driving on one of the normal grid streets.

I think the same way,however there was one city I did enjoy navigating as a pedestrian, and it was a grid layout - Barcelona. I think its because the grid is just for the cars, as a pedestrian you can walk “in between” the grid parallels and there were strange walkways and “diagonal” streets etc. Such a unique place

That's just one of the neighborhoods though. But Barcelona's grid neighborhood Eixample it's a very interesting design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample

Yeah -- the original intent behind Manhattan's grid system was not some sort of usability or urbanist thought, but to "open up" the land for real estate speculation. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811

I 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!

US grid cities are really easy to navigate by car, but at the expense of pedestrians. Old cities like London are easy to navigate on foot, but hard to navigate by car.

Agreed - IMHO favoring the pedestrian is the correct decision

> decision

The thing about London and other old cities is that no one decided. The layout grew up over centuries in an organic manner, well before automobiles. More modern cities that experienced the majority of their growth in the age of automobiles also grew during the age of centralized urban planning.

Especially now that we all use navigation apps in our cars.

To be fair, even with navigation apps central London is a nightmare...

It is a nightmare for cars, but navigation apps do make it an absolute joy for tourists. I can hop around with busses and the the tube like an expert. When on foot I can even find the most interesting detours off the most efficient route.

Cities like London prove that a city designed for pedestrians is better than a city designed for cars, for the simple reason that cars don't scale nearly as well as pedestrians and public transport.

Somewhat ironically, successful future cities are going to look more like London than your typical large US city. More walkable areas. More car restrictions. More car exclusion.

Like a lot of automated things, navigation apps are pretty much designed for the 95% case. Especially somewhere like a city, they fall down on the lack of instructions like "You want to be getting over into the right hand lane soon. You'll be making a turn up at $LANDMARK in a couple of minutes." Or, in London, which of the 5 streets coming off the circle do you want to be taking exactly?

I don't agree with your examples. I've used a few different sat navs over the years and I've found they generally do 2 of the 3 things you suggested:

> You want to be getting over into the right hand lane soon

Granted it's not 100% accurate 100% of the time but you do often get advanced warning to change lanes - particularly on faster roads.

On my VW I have two screens on the satnav (one behind the steering wheel and one on the central entertainment system console). The entertainment system displays a map view and the other display is a turn-by-turn display. The beauty of the turn-by-turn display is it also gives a countdown (in the form of a gauge bar) until you hit a junction so if the map is a bit cluttered or there are a few junctions (or even if the junction isn't clearly visible for whatever reason), you not only get advanced warning about when you're approaching it but you can clearly see which junction it is and precisely when you'll hit it.

Sometimes I'll have that sat nav on even for routes I'm familiar with just so I get a reminder to change lanes on the busier roads and longer journeys where you might lose concentration about the route you're taking.

> You'll be making a turn up at $LANDMARK in a couple of minutes

Yeah, I've not experienced that. It would be a cool feature though.

> Or, in London, which of the 5 streets coming off the circle do you want to be taking exactly?

The sat nav in my VW explicitly gives a junction number. Eg "leave the 2nd exit". It does this both on roundabouts and on straight roads which have a cluster of exits near each other. It also has a display showing which of the multiple exits to take.

I can't emphasis enough just how good the dual-display system is. It means at any point in time you know exactly where you are and where you need to be.

Google Maps recently started using landmarks. Yesterday it told me to turn right after the IHOP.

If you know a city somewhat, organic layouts can tend to channel you toward major squares/circles and other landmarks. London is a good example. On the other hand, it can be fairly easy to get totally turned around. Not that big a deal in an era where everyone has a GPS in their pocket but still.

That said, I'm not sure why someone would find the mostly grid layout of large sections of New York, for example, hard to navigate as a pedestrian. Yes, there are a lot of street crossings but a lot of that is a function of density and you can use the grid to go either up/down or cross-town depending on the lights and traffic. I find it's pretty convenient to more or less know where something is and how far away it is just based on an address/pair of cross-streets.

>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:

http://f2.org/humour/howalien.html#Plan

Redwood City, California has a strange mix of street grids. There's a roughly NSEW grid downtown, with separate grids to the northwest and southeast angled about 45 degrees. The grids meet in confusing jumbles of triangles:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4861576,-122.2356476,15z

It's easy to see where the 45 degree grids came from: one parallels El Camino and the railroad tracks, the other parallels Middlefield Road. But why the abrupt change to a NSEW grid in between?

Downtown Redwood City was once a shipping harbor and a center of the redwood logging trade (thus the name). Redwood Creek ran N-S through this area, and downtown was built up around it. If you're familiar with the area, the multistory parking garage between Broadway/Marshall/Main/Jefferson is located where the "turning basin" was: a wide part of the creek where ships could turn around, with businesses along the banks.

Broadway was originally named Bridge Street, for its drawbridge that connected the two sides of the creek. There's an interesting historical marker on Broadway across from the driveway into the garage, and here are a few pages with maps and photos:

https://1084.myt.li/tours/45512040/stops/1980869008/index.ht...

http://www.redwoodcityport.com/p7iq/Assets/port_history_for_...

http://www.redwoodcity.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=1038 [PDF]

Here's the road orientation graphic for Redwood City: https://i.imgur.com/iueLofq.png

The quirky layout is not at all obvious when you’re on the ground, either I had a few “how did I end up here” moments when driving through the city.

I followed his jupyter notebook [0] and recreated it for all big dutch cities: https://imgur.com/a/EdvDrZY

Lelystad is very symmetric!

[0]: https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx-examples/blob/master/notebo...

Very nice!

I didn't see it on the image, but maybe it got cropped out. Did you give credit to the original author for the code/idea?

Anyone 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.

As I understand it, the grid plan originated in Philadelphia in a stretch of land between the Delaware and Schyulkhill rivers. This portion, which is now generally called Center City, has a grid that aligns itself with the Delaware which runs at that point a little East of North. The rest of the city grew up extending that grid.

Also, that particular point was picked, I believe, because it was the shortest distance between the Delaware and the Schuylkill. (Well, except for a few miles downriver where the Schuylkill flows into the Delaware, but South Philly was basically swamps back then.) See for example https://hiddencityphila.org/2015/08/courtyard-compass-reveal...

The ~same offset appears in Penn's original plan.[0]

Maybe it was based on geomagnetic north? The magnetic declination in Philadelphia is now about -13 degrees, but it was maybe -8 degrees in 1682.[1]

0) http://www.ushistory.org/philadelphia/images/philadelphia1.g...

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_declination

River. The almost-north-south orientation runs parallel to a stretch of the Delaware; same way that Manhattan's uptown/downtown/crosstown are rectangular, but not aligned with the compass points.

It would be interesting to add a color dimension with the average age of buildings registered to each street, I'm thinking about cities that Madrid where a combination of "omnidirectional" and "4-direction grid" patterns is clearly visible.

I wonder how roundabouts in European cities would affect these plots, since in OSM they are often represented as a single way. The original post about this says:

"OSMnx automatically calculates all of the streets’ bearings. Specifically it calculates the compass bearing from each directed edge’s origin node u to its destination node v."

I suppose it depends what they mean by "directed edge". I'd expect it's what most modern routers use i.e. the portion of a way which goes between two junction nodes. Although it might mean literally every section of a way, which in some sense would be more accurate. Either way, you would expect roundabouts to bloat out the plot.

If OSMnx splits each way into sequences of "node N to node N+1", then the results are based on the number of node-node connections, not the number of ways.

That's probably how it's done. Makes some things like this easier, but other things (like routing) slower.

Cool. Out of curiosity, I ran the Jupyter notebook[1] on the five boroughs of NYC + Nassau County on Long Island, and got the following graphic: https://i.imgur.com/LyxP6yQ.png

I'm a bit surprised by the results, since Nassau in particular doesn't have anything resembling a county-wide grid system that I know of. I like the diagram for Queens, since it technically has a grid[2], although it shifts in places to be at a different angle, like Long Island City / Hunters Point, which were originally their own cities with their own design plans. The diagram for Brooklyn is really interesting as well.

[1]: https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx-examples/blob/master/notebo...

[2]: https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm

EDIT: Perhaps scale is a bit deceiving here. The original had every graph on a different scale, so I modified it to have a fixed scale instead, which shows how disproportionately organized Manhattan is compared to the other boroughs / LI: https://i.imgur.com/l3yV1sY.png

some discussion already in the submission of the american cities only article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17507676

Because cities do grow it would be interesting to color parts of the ray depending on the age of the streets/districts with that direction.

If anyone is interested in how the layout of a city affects the way in which people perceive the city mentally, you may find the book The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch a nice read.

The book talks about how people create mental models of the cities in which they live, using certain abstract elements (paths, landmarks et cetra) that are present in their cities.

I live in Seattle. There's a famous story about how we ended up with half of our streets running along one grid that was N,S,E,W and another grid that was aligned with the water front. As they built the city, these two patterns merged to create a total fuster cluck.

I am extremely confident that the graph for Seattle is incorrect.

Washington too, a good chunk of our streets are diagonal.

This is a fun, short video on the different types of city plans (gridiron, organic, radial, loose grid), some examples of each, and some observations on each of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSnt0MTMcbw

And from that video I found these cool visualizations of cities and their street orientations: http://www.datapointed.net/2014/10/maps-of-street-grids-by-o...

Can this visualization ever be non-symmetrical?

Like, a street that goes north tends to go south if you're headed in the other direction. Is it one-way streets that make Charlotte's visualization non-symmetrical?

The most remarkable city I’ve ever visited is Seville, Spain. It has a labyrinth of tiny streets and apparently no grid. As a pedestrian, I felt like I could get “lost” while never really being truly lost. In fact, I think I could still get around in Seville without a map if you dropped me into a random spot.

On the other hand, I live 90 minutes from Charlotte and have been there a dozen times and have absolutely no clue how to navigate that city. It’s a mess.

This is very interesting! I wonder what the chart would look like if the lengths in each direction represented total lengths of streets in that orientation.

Hypothesis for some of the oldest European cities which look like big circles currently - the older parts of the cities which would likely have streets going in all directions are small - so the fat circles would get smaller and we'd start seeing spokes for the newer parts of the cities.

Really 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?!

When a city is 1000 years old or more, the societies that control it will inevitably shift between more and less strongly controlled over the years, so unless it suffered a massive razing that required full reconstruction not long ago, there's only so much a central planner can do.

You can see that in Lisbon, for example; the downtown area is quite grid-like since it was rebuilt by a single leader after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 1755, but the rest either stood or was built later, under a variety of different regimes - the Roman Empire, Visigoths, Caliphates, Christian monarchies, etc.

I was curious about Charlotte as well, best I could find:

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The streets of most newer American cities follow very clear East-West and North-South grid patterns, but not here. The streets of Charlotte have some of the most unusual patterns in the world.

Our city may seem like a new city, but it actually has a very rich history of Native Americans, famous battles, and gold.

We were founded in 1768 (and officially declared independence from England in 1775) at the crossroads of two Native-American trading paths which ran northeast-southwest and northwest-southeast. That intersection is now the center of our city – Trade and Tryon.

Trade and Tryon Streets became the framework for Uptown, which now has blocks that look more like diamonds than squares.

The crazy shape of our highways primarily evolved from the shape of the two major creeks, Irwin Creek (77 and top part of 277), and Little Sugar Creek (bottom part of 277).

I still haven’t figured out why i85 runs west to east at times, and south to north other times, but it most likely also has it’s roots in the Carolina Peidmond geography as well.

The reason for some of the other crazy anomalies in our city (Queens/Providence intersection, Queens loop, all the Sharon rds., etc) stem from the old farmers routes.

The city of Charlotte was never really designed to be a major city, so many of the small winding trails simply grew over time.

http://www.charlottestories.com/heres-why-the-streets-in-cha...

quick glance at google maps confirms that most of the major roads don't seem to be straight lines, and what grids there are, don't appear to follow any consistent directional orientation

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2120603,-80.8169718,11z?hl=e...

Here's a map I made of Queens road in Charlotte.

https://danielvf-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/2018/queens_road...

- In driving down five major roads, you can suddenly be on Queens road.

- It intersects itself.

- Following it requires making constant right or left turns at stop lights, or you end up on a different road.

> Our city may seem like a new city .... We were founded in 1768

So yes then. My mother-in-law's house is older than that.

This is incredibly misleading. Atlanta proper only accounts for a small percentage of the roads in the Atlanta metro area -- but it's the only place that actually has roads on a grid. The rest of Atlanta has roads that go in every damn direction (and would probably look a lot more like Charlotte if plotted)

Very distinctive pattern for Moscow — basically it's a very centralized city with ~15 major radial roads, which segment circular roads into separate streets. It's interesting that the most similar histogram is for Rome, which has also been a center for hypercentralization of power.

Could someone explain some actionable insights that could possibly come from these visualization?

One I pondered is how some cities have a primary axis offset a few degrees from N/S, either more to the East or more to the West and how that might be related to their location in a given time zone with respect to where the sun rises/sets to shine directly down a majority of streets. I think of this in terms of perhaps not placing most streets in a grid where you would have to drive directly into the sun around dawn/dusk for most of the year, but it probably has more to do with the local topography; bodies of water or hills in the way, that kinda thing.

I'd love to see comparisons between Manhatten and New York, or central Kyoto and Kyoto proper, as well as other old Asian capitals that were often based on a grid system, but might not have kept it outside "the old city"

Houston's graph is oriented like +, but the downtown grid in Houston should be represented like x.

How come there appears to be symmetry in Rio de Janeiro?

180 degree rotational symmetry happens because almost all roads are bidirectional -- if there's a road pointing north, it's also a road pointing south.

90 degree symmetry seems like a consequence of the road system consisting more of straightness and 90 degree turns, with no other specific angle being common.

https://www.google.com/maps/@-22.9111837,-43.2566471,14z

Rio fits the bill. There's no overarching grid, but if you zoom into any small area, you'll usually find a pattern of rectangular blocks with 90 degree intersections.

As far as I can see, the only viable way out rotational symmetry would be to use concentric 'ring-blocks' either for local areas or for the city as a whole. The rings would cancel themselves out, and the 'spokes' could be places relatively freely.

So... Canberra might have an interesting distribution?

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Canberra+ACT+2601/@-35.288...

Sydney would be interesting to add, being a harbour city. With weird stuff like it can take a 10km trip by land to get somewhere just 1km away "as the crow flies"

Huh - Sydney's arrangement is a lot 'neater' than I would have expected. I would love to know what area it actually counted. The small CBD is rather grid-like, but once you extend past that it gets a bit higgledy-piggledy.

Sydney is there though....

Oops. Need to get my retinas checked.

This looks mindblowing. I see most popular (world-wide and region-wise) and most unique orientations

What a great idea! Wouldn't have ever thought of that myself. I would love to see more of these and more comparisons. Let's say what are more popular layout for some regions or world-wide or what are most unique. Also, would be interesting to see comparison of same city oldtown to the rest of the city.

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