The Decline of the City Grid
economist.com
economist.com
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/the-dutch...
It’s big because lots of people transit through; the bridges are high because they go over interstate 66. It’s big because because one of the main purposes of the station is to serve as a transfer point from cars to light rail.
Would you suggest that the bridges over an interstate be 10 feet high? Would you rather the rail system just not service that area?
Tysons is next to a ring road for DC, and the greater DC-Arlington-Alexandria metro area has 6.6M.
It's by n mean the only issue though; A study of the silver-line construction could be a masters class in how boondoggles happen.
It has what appears to be identical segregated cycleways and has done for 60+ years now ( https://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/wp-content/uploads/... ), yet cycle usage is less than 3% despite the town being literally designed around and built with cycleways from day 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenage
Both Milton Keynes and Stevenage are notorious in the UK as a result - people (rightly) view them as soulless hellscapes
I mean I could go on. Don’t get me wrong, Ive done a bike a primary transit for a year or so. But anyone who’s confused why the average American doesn’t want to is probably a little out of touch to say the least.
Does it mean something different in the US? And what would be the French equivalent then?
Here’s a fairly representative picture of the geometry: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS8zguy...
How do emergency vehicles get in and out?
If a doctor is called in to an emergency, walking or biking is too slow. How do they get to the case?
In that area I couldn't come up with a route between two points that took longer than 10 minutes by car. And that was by trying to find the two most inconvenient points in the town. I don't know if Houten has this feature but there are often movable bollards that allow emergency vehicles to take shortcuts.
From their centrally located public health center, I couldn't find a location that was more than 6 minutes by car or 10 minutes by bike.
A 6 minute response time is better than most people can hope for in many major cities in Europe.
Doctors don't drive emergency vehicles, they drive their own cars.
When doctors get called in to hospitals for emergencies, they travel in their own cars. Is that really unknown around here? If it is, none of you are competent to decide who needs a car and how cities should be designed.
On call docs (the ones that would be coming to the hospital) are the specialists that other doctors call to assist after the emergent issue is handled. A 6 minute worst case scenario drive time is perfectly acceptable.
There are hospitals in the states where it will take you longer than 6 minutes to walk to the ED from another location in the hospital after getting paged.
Not always. This might be true in larger hospitals, but I have personal experience in small towns where, yes, someone will get called in to handle an emergency.
Emergency doctors also don’t hang out at home when they are on call. They hang out at hospitals.
They just do. And they do it more easily because they don’t have to fight car traffic to do it.
> If a doctor is called in to an emergency, walking or biking is too slow. How do they get to the case?
In America you’re looking at a 20+ minute drive for any physician so they are already at the hospital or it takes just as long if not longer to drive to the hospital in a typical American layout. It’s not an issue.
On roads where motor vehicles aren't allowed? On roads blockaded so motor vehicles can't access?
That's what "stopped up for cars" means.
Kids being run over is not a common problem, by any standard. You'd struggle to argue that it even qualified as "rare". It's more along the lines of "unheard of".
The 2016 census reports the population of 0-19 year olds as 81,880,000. According to this article in US News ( https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2018-12-19/... ), "motor vehicle crashes" are the leading cause of death in that age group.
There were 4,074 such fatalities in 2016, making for an annual death rate of 0.005%. Every year, one in every 20,000 kids in America dies in a car crash. (Assuming 19-year-olds are "kids".) But "motor vehicle crashes" include cases where the child who died was a passenger in a vehicle that crashed, or where they were a passenger in a vehicle that was hit, or where they were driving a vehicle that crashed, or where they were driving a vehicle that was hit. NHTSA tells us that in 2016, there were just over 7,000 non-vehicle-occupant fatalities from motor vehicle crashes among all age groups combined. ( https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... ) This is about 19% of the total number of traffic fatalities for that year; if we apply that figure to our teen-and-under deaths, the number of kids getting run over in 2016 would be 770 out of almost 82 million kids.
In other words, the annual rate of this problem occurring is estimated at 0.000009; it is, in your terminology, a 99.9991% problem. That's still about 90 times as common as a 99.99999% problem, but I have a sneaking suspicion you were just making that number up. To a first, second, third, and fourth approximation, kids in the United States don't get run over.
Think about it. Do you personally know of any occasion on which a child was run over? In what sense could it be a "common problem"?
> Every year, one in every 20,000 kids in America dies in a car crash.
And I bet that 770 kids dying each year from being directly run over occurs 70x more often than someone dying because a doctor can't make it to the hospital in time. Really optimizing for an unimportant detail at the expense of the entire system.
From the other comments in the thread, it's a huge problem, and it's one that kills.
So doctors won't be allowed to drive to the hospital in emergencies.
That kind of thing kills people.
> So doctors won't be allowed to drive to the hospital in emergencies.
You might as well say "so doctors will be stuck in traffic jams on the way to the hospital, these things kill people".
Also:
> You know they have attending physicians and emergency room staff who work there right?
They don't do anesthesia, they don't do surgery, they are, in general, not specialists.
Don't try to make points in a realm you know nothing about.
When was the last time you were in a hospital ER or ICU? I've been there off and on for the last few weeks and months. Broadly saying that physicians that specialize in anesthesia, surgery, or other specialties are not staffed at a hospital or emergency room is factually incorrect.
It's also not a problem in the first place with the context in this thread. If a specialist was required to be X minutes away from the hospital incase they were on call they'd live or be within X minutes away from the hospital regardless of the mode of transportation. On top of that, any emergency would necessitate emergency hospital staff being on-site to stabilize the patient while a specialist arrives and reviews the case anyway. I bet more doctors die every year in car crashes going to emergency calls like the one you are conjuring up than patients who die as a result of a doctor being late.
Doubling down on this irrelevant point is bizarre, and even more so when you fail to imagine that maybe we could find a solution for this non-problem anyway.
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".
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.
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.
That said, I wouldn't trade it for that kinda "safety". I'd rather just lock my car or not leave valuables in it. Being able to take my kids for a walk and actually do something without a car is more valuable.
People have still come and looked through my car despite the clear lack of escape route.
I love this reasoning: make my own neighborhood so unpleasant to walk in that nobody will, not even me!
I'd say every neighborhood is different.
In my area, the dead-end streets do have walking path connection to the opposite dead-end streets. These also connect to the walk/bike paths that surround the neighborhood.
In the early 2000s, residents realised they could petition the local government to have the footpaths removed and the land would be allocated to the neighbouring properties. Within the space of a few years, the route I used to walk to my school bus stop was completely blocked off because all the footpaths were removed. I went from having 4-5 different routing options to none. Also made it so that instead of riding my bike to my friend's house through parks and away from the road, I had to be driven (because my parents didn't like me riding near a high traffic road which I can understand).
Me and Mum were the only people on the "against" side to show up at the council meetings.
Also, on the topic of North American cul-de-sac suburbs, I made a Twitter bot that is working its way through every census-designated cul-de-sac in America. Here's a good example of one with pedestrian access: https://twitter.com/culdesacbot1/status/1604474398442156033
Part of its source material is from a 2002 publication: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/NRB46_S... (8mb PDF, see page 59 of the PDF, with printed page number of 49.)
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?
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.
Nevertheless I find the area pleasing — partially due to wide sidewalks shaded by mature trees, partially the ways the buildings have changed over time ("How Buildings Learn" is a classic book) and a few vacant lots have been infilled with different buildings, partially due to the wear & texture that come with age, and significantly due to the uninterrupted-except-by-parks walkable street grid for miles in every direction.
Plenty of 1950s suburbs have gotten pretty aesthetically interesting with the texture of age and mature trees grown in at this point, but very few of them are particularly walkable for daily needs.
Very few American cities were unplanned, and many historic gridded neighborhoods sprung up at a shocking pace (many American cities grew at 50% or more a decade for decades on end eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago#Popula...) with a ton of cookie-cutter repetition. The city often engaged in extensive redrawing of farm field property lines and regrades before a street was opened. But such cities were designed primarily for pedestrians at a pedestrian scale, rather than modern 'master-planned communities' that are at best islands of walkability in a sea of car-oriented roadways designed to be incredibly unpalatable to traverse by any other means.
Much of this is due to modern American zoning, which is among the strictest in the world in terms of separating different uses from each other — "residential" zoning in other countries almost never differentiates single-family housing from other housing, and usually permits quiet auxiliary uses like corner stores, doctor's offices, childcares, etc. (Interestingly, such zoning is known as "Euclidean Zoning" not for any geometric reason but with the town of Euclid, Ohio as its namesake, the plaintiff in a Supreme Court Case establishing such zoning as a legitimate use of the police power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Re....)
So while Brooklyn started out as wall to wall sameness it’s very easy, and predictable, for one person to sell and that particular plot to become individual again.
This is not generally true in American subdivisions, where locations are much more varied in shape, available infrastructure, etc. and so development has to be much more context dependent. And of course single use zoning was not introduced into NYC until 1961 so that helps the ease of redevelopment as well.
You see something similar in Boston's Back Bay which is a rare example of a grid in Boston because it was constructed on new landfill in the mid-1800s.
But it's definitely correct that the modern non-grid is definitely not suitable to walking/biking, but that's more due to zoning and centralization of systems (e.g. schools) rather than grid vs. non-grid. It's not like a cul-de-sac for a car couldn't contain an off-shoot to a pedestrian/biking path that cuts a trip significantly for a non-car.
Postwar suburbs have more car traffic in total, but it's okay because it's not in front of your house. But once you go outside of the residential subdivisions, to the places where the traffic has been exiled, they're nightmares.
Grids were "pretty good" with horses and buggies, pretty good with cars, pretty good with eBikes, and will probably be pretty good with whatever the future holds, rather than being "perfect" for any one way of getting around.
Grids are made for cars. And buses, trucks (garbage trucks too), semis. They are ok at moving vehicles from houses to the highway, but you can walk them too.
Non-grids are for people and (few) cars. They are intentionally designed to discourage non-residents from driving through them. They optimize for selling the maximum amount of land and delivering the minimum conveniently drivable surface so other people don't drive near your house but you can go drive through theirs.
Grids are bad for cars because four way stops are really inefficient at processing them. You'll notice in American suburban planning that there are as few four-way stops as possible inside a subdivision.
Non-grids extend the distance of a lot of trips and are thus hostile to slower non-motorized users. Driving an extra 500m is not a big deal for a car but is an additional several minutes for slower users. And non-grids in the US funnel onto very big roads with few crosswalks, so that's even more diversion distance; and then on top of that it can easily take a few minutes to even get a walk/cycle signal at an intersection.
In contrast it's very easy to make a grid less hospitable to cars but also still allow pedestrians and cyclists to take the shortest path; just lay bollards diagonally across an four-way intersection that are too narrow for vehicles but large enough for bikes and people.
I don't believe this is true. In fact iirc it has been proven that if you chose any random two points in a non-grid set up (eg, something like London) then the distance by road you have to travel is on average less than it would be in a grid.
This makes intutive sense to me - a grid always means you must travel the entire length of the "opposite and the adjacent" but in a non-grid you can typically find a route that's a bit closer to the hypotenuse and better optimised. So non-grids are particularly better for non-car users as they reduce distance travelled.
As well as that - travel is not typically between entirely random points on a map. In a non-grid roads tend to be optimised after their usage and not historically "planned" so you'll have lots of roads that directly go between areas of major popularity fairly directly.
I find grids to be an inhuman layer forced over a city. They make journeys take longer, they even make car journeys worse because of the endless intersections. The main advantage they used to have (easier navigation when you are a newbie in a city) seems to be made redundant by GPS these days.
London is not on one fixed grid, but there are certainly grid-like things in many areas, for the simple reasons that
* above 4 ways at an intersection tends to be really poor throughput
* people like right or almost right angles for building construction, and that tends to be reflected in lot lines; acute angles are quite bad
This is a non-issue. Where I'm from, grid neighbourhoods are the norm and stop signs are not a thing. First, the grid spreads out traffic inside it. Then, you're supposed to drive at around 35 km/h. Last, narrower/streets with more traffic tend to be one way. Most of the driving takes place at arteries, still part of the grid. Those have semaphores.
Also, grids add A TON of public street parking. Get off your arterial road close to your destination and into the neighbourhood and look for parking. That also means there's street and sidewalk space for bus stops and space for laying out utilities (electric, water and sewers).
What I'm trying to say is that grids are meant for cars among all the other things. The thing about non-grids is they are upscale: less public surface means bigger lots and worse transportation means leans non-residents around.
America is also a country in which road engineers will spend hundreds of millions of dollars eliminating mere seconds at a single intersection. In that context, a four way stop is "inefficient" or dangerous and as many internal intersections as possible in non-grids are just three way T's.
> streets are certainly wide enough for street-parking but a lot of them don't allow it for reasons.
If I had to guess, because they're hostile to non-residents and they are optimizing for residential property values.
Grids with free parking are welcoming to non-residents and optimizing for business revenue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan#Ancient_grid_plans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Chinese_urban_planning
If you are walking in a modern suburb, “You’re always going out of your way,” he says. It is not only people walking who have to take less direct routes. Buses are more effective when roads are in grids, allowing passengers to get anywhere with just one change.
There's no money to be made on "public" land and it lowers the value of the land immediately adjacent to it.
Nobody wants to have their yard directly on the path, where people walk all the time, including with their dogs and for every so many dogs that get walked there and where the owner picks up after them, there will be one that doesn't. Even in the best neighbourhood you'll have teenagers being loud in those places at night etc.
Just like everyone wants to live in close walking range to the park/playground so that the kids can easily get there by themselves i.e. that public land does increase in attractiveness to families but nobody really wants to live right next to it. Public walking and biking paths increase attractiveness to families again, because the kids don't have to bike on the road, they're on a safe path. But again, nobody really wants to live right next to it.
And he's also correct in that developers won't like that and every square foot of path adds up over an entire project. However it doesn't mean that it isn't overall a good thing for many reasons. It's a give and take like many things in life but it does mean that it's a solvable problem.
What exactly is "parkland"? I know some examples that I wouldn't mind being across from or backing onto with enough thick brush/tree border and others I would definitely avoid at much cost. When you say premium, is all of it premium? Asking because of course even in a premium only development someone will live next to public places. I definitely know how I would choose which place to buy if I could have any of them.
I only have anecdata but I've lived in a few places in my life so far and I can tell you that one place for example we specifically didn't buy because it was right across from an open field park with playground, baseball field and a skate park even though it was otherwise very nice. We are still close to it but we don't hear or see it except when there's a festival and live music and such. Of course someone does live there even today and there's other much larger and more luxurious houses than I could afford right next to another playground close to me. But who knows, if I hadn't found that other place I may have opted to live with the park because it was still better than what I was trying to get away from.
Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning. Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the building is on the East side of the street. The "31" tells you it's on the thirty-one hundred block of Sheffield, which once you learn the streets, tells you it's on the block immediately south of Belmont (3200 North). The "45" tells you it's likely at the very North end of the block, because the typical Chicago block only goes up to about XX60 in addresses.
The one thing lacking is the latitude for East/West streets and the longitude for North/South street being encoded in the street name, but you could encode an address as an X,Y pair. The above example address could be: 1000 W, 3145 N.
Now I live in suburbia elsewhere in the country and street numbers are essentially meaningless, except to differentiate buildings on the same street. Which I suppose is their most basic purpose, but I'm used to addresses being useful for city-wide navigation, so it always felt a bit lacking to me.
And don't get me started on my love for and the current lack of alleys where I live now. Chicago alleys are the unsung hero of the city's layout.
Just in time edit: It was pointed that I forgot one of the most important things: the numbering system encodes distance as well. Every 100 on the grid, or one full block, is 1/8 of a mile.
I lived in Costa Rica for a brief while and outside of San Jose or town centers most addresses were something like "100 meters east of the statue of the Virgin Mary on calle uno" so at least there were some directions attached. Assuming you knew where the statue of the Virgin Mary was in whatever town, and which way North was.
One thing the parent commenter missed was that the numbers also have larger distance meanings. 3200 North in Chicago means the road is 4 miles north of Madison St in the Loop (100 is 1/8th of a mile). If the guy was trying to get to the Vic Theatre and accidentally got off the train at Fullerton (2400 N), he'd know that it's only a mile walk - maybe it's faster to just hike it than wait for the next train.
EDIT - Diversey is 2800; Fullerton is 2400. Whoops, I haven't been over there in a long time!
EDIT 2 - The SLC scheme reminds me of the "rural grid" common in some old NW territory states, such as Indiana, where the county roads and addresses are numbered as the distance from the county courthouse. IE a road named 500N would be an east-west road 5 miles north of the courthouse, which was typically as close to the center of the county as possible.
In the spirit of this observation, here are some fun ways to place addresses in (some of) Manhattan.
- First of all, "evens go east," so 20th St runs to the East and 21st to the West (14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, and 59th are the primary two-way, E/W thoroughfares (I think you just have to memorize those, but note that they line up with the stops on many of the N/S subway lines))
- Street numbers pivot on 5th Ave and increase in each direction from there, so if you know the street number, you know which two avenues it's between. For example, when I lived at 4xx W 45th St, that was between 9th and 10th, which can be deduced from the first number of the address added to 5 (5 + 4 = 9, so the address is West of 9th).
- If you need to remember the order of Lexington -> Park -> Madison, just remember, "Let's party, motherfucker" :)
As a logic-minded person used to the Chicago system, this kind of thing drives me nuts. Why on earth would you have a numbered street that doesn't represent its own place in the address numbering scheme? 9th should be at 900 W, 10th at 1000 W, etc. The whole benefit of numbered streets is that you don't have to remember where they are in the grid and you throw half of that value away when the number doesn't match their position in the grid!
</rant> I know there's no value here. I'm sorry, but... please make it make sense
It used to be every bit as unusual as Manhattan.
That is true, but 34-15 61st Street is a very different place than 34-15 61st Road, 34-15 61st Avenue and 34-15 61st Place.
Which is even more confusing and annoying than Manhattan addresses. About which I'd point out that there are other smart things and other confusing things too: On side streets (not avenues), odd-numbered addresses are on the north side of the street and even-numbered ones on the south side. And on avenues, addresses are generally odd-numbered on the east side of the street and even-numbered on the west side.
Where it exists (north of West 4th Street) the East Side/West Side divide is 5th Avenue, so 5 East 23rd Street is just east of Fifth Avenue and 5 West 23rd is just west of Fifth.
And my favorite: Uptown is (generally) north and downtown is (generally) south, so by walking one block and seeing how the street numbers increase/decrease (and remembering the avenue layout from river to river), you can pretty much determine your whereabouts pretty quickly.
Also (with some variation) one city block (say from 43rd to 44th street, rather than avenue blocks, e.g., from Park to Lexington which have much more variable lengths) is approximately 1/20th of a mile.
I've even been on some suburban streets where there was no rule to the numbering scheme at all! Houses next door having radically different numbers, even and odd numbers being on both sides of the same street, etc. Drove me nuts.
The grid layout is not the cause of Chicago’s transport issues. In fact, many of Chicago’s neighborhoods have their commercial centers where you can get groceries and just about everything else you need, without a car. Everywhere I lived in Chicago I was walking distance from a grocery store and did all my shopping each day after work, walking home from the train station. I rarely drove anywhere in the city. Buses are regular and frequent and run on most major roads (every half mile).
Chicago is not a paragon of public transit, but it’s not as bad as you seem to be making it sound and it’s not because of the addressing system.
The issues it has are mostly a matter of investment and underserved areas that mirror Chicago’s history of racist planning policies.
Seriously, a few days ago I actually did a four-mile drive that at one point had me take Peachtree Industrial Boulevard to North Peachtree Road to Peachtree Road, and ended on New Peachtree Road. I didn't do this because I wanted to drive on lots of roads named Peachtree, I just wanted some ma po tofu.
<https://hotspotatl.com/3699042/atlanta-how-many-peachtree-st...>
Except for the first three miles south of Madison St., which are 1200 S (Roosevelt Rd.), 2200 S (Cermak Rd.), and 3100 S (31st St.) - which also gives the numbered streets southward their pattern of having each mile being an odd number (63rd, 71st, 79th, 87th, 95th, 103rd, 111th...).
The Chicago grid extends far beyond the city as well, with many suburbs using it. Will County also uses it for unincorporated areas, so it extends to 37500 South in Reed-Custer Township. There are still many suburbs that prefer to roll their own grids, though, and at least one (Harvey) that uses its own numbering on east/west streets and Chicago numbering on north/south.
https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Sapporo#Get_around
Kyoto is similar, but unfortunately the rest of Japan is a mess: most streets have no name at all and house numbers are in construction order.
But then, I went and zoomed in on Nauvoo, IL and it has the exact same squared grid, quite possibly even the same size squares. But if you look at the 3 cities on the Iowa side of the river - Burlington, Fort Madison and Keokuk - they also have pretty close to that same grid. Did the church pick it up there and take it with them? Because if I’m not mistaken, those cities predate the church presence.
As an aside, generally all of the Iowa cities along the Mississippi have astonishingly good grids and urbanity despite giving the feeling that they are part of America from long ago (the Illinois side too - go visit Quincy IL sometime). Burlington even has their own crooked-road-on-steep-hill, built 30 years before Lombard Street
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Alley_(Burlington,_Iow...
Just about every town in Utah is centered around the intersection of Center and Main. Every other street is a numerical reference to that intersection. So E 100 South Is the street running parallel to center street 1 block south, to the east of Main. There is an E 100 South in just about every town in the state.
For the history look up the Plat of Zion by Joseph Smith. 99pi has a great episode about it.
There were likely finer details, but you didn't need to know them to get around.
I've had people say that such a system is boring, or that it robs a city of its history. In my books, boring is a lot better than asking a dozen people how to get to some obscure named roads. Historic names are also pointless when virtually no one recognizes or looks up the significance of the road name, and when they do ... well let's just say the heroes of a century ago are controversial figures today. Besides, my home town did name the major roads. They simply weren't so abundant that people lost track of all of the names.
But the new subdivisions ... those were a shock to navigate through. Not only was the grid disrupted, but virtually all of the streets were minor variations of the subdivision's name (thus very easy to confuse).
'Cookie cutter' construction has a bad reputation, BTW, but cookie cutters are how you get lots of cheap cookies, which a lot of places need right now.
The problem is where you don't allow those areas to adapt and change over time, by, say, turning one lot into a corner store or a small cafe or people to adapt their houses over time so they take on their own unique character.
I'm not going to say her insights are universal for everyone, but it might help you understand why you like that grid you like.
Jacobs is really interesting. My one caveat is that I think a lot of people who applaud her helping to block Moses' highway plans for Washington Square Park would probably be less enthusiastic about her support for what was effectively community self-determination. I suspect many would call it NIMBYism because I'm pretty sure making the West Village more affordable wasn't her top priority.
(That said, it was a very different environment in NYC in the 1950s than it became in the 70s/80s than it is today.)
Now you see NIMBYs who are attached to the "modern" suburban planning regime she helped to fight off, using the same rhetoric to prevent the formation of the same kind of neighborhood she was defending, now that it's back in style.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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".
This is particularly weird since if you head west, the same road changes its name every couple of blocks!
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.
[0] 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_a...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/9/20/the-suburbs-ar...
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.
I do agree we seem to be moving on that direction. But we are surely not there.
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.
Silver Springs is interesting to look at. I think of that as prototypical suburbia and it maps pretty closely to London despite the planning.
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.
That's an extreme example. "Non-grid" isn't a proper category, there are lots of ways of organizing streets that aren't regular grids. The important feature is permeability and alternative routes, not rectilinear structure as such.
Sprawl suburb layout is bad because it goes out of its way to limit the number of alternate routes. Literally goes out of its way -- the roads twist and turn like a space-filling curve, often with all traffic funneled into just a few entrances/exits from the development onto the larger road network. That doesn't happen by accident, it's planned that way, to limit through-traffic that residents have to endure (meanwhile they impose through-traffic on everyone else who doesn't live in those developments). Whereas organic non-grid layouts still have plenty of redundancy. Check out the street pattern of London or Manchester or any British city that isn't Milton Keynes.
The geometric advantage of grids is most acute at the smaller scales: they maximize the amount of area that is within walking distance of any given point. Public transport stops, shops, schools, etc.
You can still end up with a long drive between adjacent blocks, but the walk or ride should be much shorter.
I think that's what I like about a grid. It doesn't have to be 100% right. You can change and shape and adapt it as needs be.
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.
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!
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.
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.