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Comment by chihuahua | Hacker News Reader

The 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.

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These 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/

I 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.

This 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.

I 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?

The plots for Chicago and Washington DC are also wrong. They both have lots of diagonal streets.

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