Comparing City Street Orientations(geoffboeing.com) |
Comparing City Street Orientations(geoffboeing.com) |
http://www.datapointed.net/2014/10/maps-of-street-grids-by-o...
Where streets are coloured on the map by orientation.
While most US cities are a wash of one colour, Europe is much more chromatic!
6th Ave itself has no direction name, and oddly, streets increment in both directions. North of 6th Ave is 7th Ave North, while south of 6th Ave is 7th Ave South. There is no 1st Ave through 5th Ave.
These directional names persist through Pierce County, so the vast majority of roads in the county have "East" appended to them, all the way out to Mt. Rainier (which is also in Pierce County). North of Tacoma's Narrows Bridge lay Gig Harbor and the Key Peninsula, where streets prepend the direction name with "KP" - i.e. "KPN" for North - to be more clear that they're across Puget Sound from the rest of Pierce County.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma,_Washington#Transportat...
God forbid someone give these streets creative names.
Given most of these cities run streets north or south I'd love the streets to have Lat (N-S) or Long (E-W) followed by the subset of GPS co-ordinates that are unique within the location.
This looks like a good standard to start from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System
For pure estimates 8 digits (within their grid) give 10 meter accuracy which should be enough, so choosing the full "min+second" (truncated, no sub-seconds) listing or the first 4 digits (truncate off 10 thousandths) from the lat or long should suffice.
This would also have a bonus of making anyplace addressable (in a postal sense) by it's GPS co-ordinates.
Same way King County is laid out. Makes navigation quite easy IMHO.
Of course Seattle goes down to 1st before things become "South", the lack of a 1st through 5th is a bit off, but otherwise everything seems consistent. Seattle having named streets is a bit annoying, throughout most of the rest of King County it is possible from anywhere to anywhere else just by being given an intersection. Most of (all of?) Seattle's named streets actually do have the street number on top of them, in rather small print.
(Maybe Denver is including a lot of urban sprawl?)
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Denver,+CO/@39.7488106,-10...
It gets even more confusing on the NE part of the city, where Montreal's "East" is closer to true North and Montreal's North is closer to true West.
Street name suffixes follow the “Montreal convention” too, using East/West (when it should be N/S). My impression is that this is because the city is easier to look at horizontally (it’s closer to a 16:9 movie resolution) than a very vertical portrait.
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MajorSauce, could you please contact me? (email in profile). I’m working in Montréal on a project related to emergency services (which you seem to be doing as well, from your profile). Thanks!
The DC plot would tell a different story then, because the avenues are all off-axis and few in number, but they're big streets with traffic light priority that handle a lot of car traffic.
But maybe there's ways of getting these things while still maintaining street navigability—narrow streets with not necessarily rail straight, but still well-structured grids for the major streets, and maybe non-uniform/unstructred alleys could work to get both in one system.
Such a circular grid has the advantage that it is easy to find its center.
In Poland especially interesting is Szczecin layout. It seems rectangular when you're there, but when you look at it from height it's actually made mostly out of triangles.
You turn right 2 times and you get to where you started :) Messed with my head so much when I was there.
>The street networks are directed and preserve one-way directionality. http://geoffboeing.com/2016/11/osmnx-python-street-networks/
>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. http://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/
Boston also more than tripled in size due to land reclamation, which included leveling some hills. The contours that the current roads follow may have made more sense when Boston Common was a muddy beach and everyone walked to where they were going.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1s92xa/cool_map_of_... https://imgur.com/gallery/0C349u9
The Commissioner's plan is the reason Manhattan has a grid system, and the page for it doesn't reference any fires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811
Finally, the streets before the Commissioner's plan took effect are still rather small and twisty.
In the majority of cities laid out on a grid, you can give an address and a street number, and that is enough to navigate to your destination. Houses are numbered according to the cross street, so on 6th ave and 12th st, if my house faces out towards 6th ave, my house address would be 12xx.
For whatever reason Manhattan neglected that particular part of the grid system algorithm.
First time I visited Manhattan this threw me off. Navigation should be reasonable, but instead it is almost reasonable.
So in most cities if you zoom in on the map you'll see mostly grid-like patterns. But as soon as you start zooming out it fades away into a mash of directions, turns, and swirls. The only places where it's hard to find any kind of straight line is in (centuries) old city centers.
I don't find Weimar particularly "griddy" compared to any other city.
P.S. Barcelona is the "griddiest" big European city I know. Even though at some point the grid changes alignment they have huge chunks with almost perfect squares between streets.
When I visited, I was confused about how the city was configured so oddly until I saw a pre-modernization map, then everything suddenly clicked.