source: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15uz539/city_street_network_orientation/
From the post:
Urban spatial order: street network orientation, configuration, and entropy
By: Geoff Boeing
This study examines street network orientation, configuration, and entropy in 100 cities around the world using OpenStreetMap data and OSMnx.
See full paper: https://appliednetsci.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s41109-019-0189-1
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This is a pretty cool visualization, thanks for sharing!
Also I’m glad I’ve never lived in a grid city, feels off somehow.
I feel constantly lost in non-grid cities. The Grid makes navigation so easy.
I’ve never felt anywhere near lost in a good non-grid city, particularly in the Netherlands and close-by of course.
I’ve lived in Boston and Detroit. Detroit is so much better to navigate in. I think if Boston included Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline and the other outskirts that are really greater Boston, it would be even more circular. It’sa mess getting around there.
2yrs in Boston. Felt constantly lost
Figured out th important parts around year 4-5. Still stayed for almost 15 more years for some reason and still got turned around some places.
Only miss the good food (at least relative to where I live now).
The reverse is true for non grid dwellers.
My main worry is if they’re intersections everywhere
Completely awesome content, thanks. I was hoping that some older cities were more random, and I was not disappointed.
I wish they’d have done a full NYC analysis. Just doing Manhattan has an obvious outcome, but including Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx would yield a more interesting result.
Weird selection of cities. Very U.S. centric considering they claim “geographical diversity”.
To better understand urban spatial order and city street network entropy, we analyze 100 large cities across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Our sampling strategy emulates Louf and Barthelemy’s (2014) to select cities through a balance of high population, regional significance, and some stratification to ensure geographical diversity within regions.
My city is on there! And it nearly fills in the whole circle. Unsurprising, as we effectively have streets that intersect with themselves. East coat USA is a clusterfuck of city planning.
Charlotte over there trying to color the whole circle hahaha
Denver’s entire downtown is a 45 degree slant from the rest of the city so the image is questionable…
If you zoom in it does show some off axis stuff, and downtown is only a small portion of the entire city so it seems reasonable. Though it’s definitely inconsistent, like if it uses all of Denver city limits but for NYC only shows Manhattan and ignores the other 4 boroughs
Yeah, that was one of the first things I noticed. I thought I might have remembered incorrectly.
Washington is a nice planned grid with lots of annoying diagonal avenues that don’t seem to be represented.
The only major parts of Seattle that are not NS/EW are downtown and Belltown. Crackheads Denny and Boren each wanted their plots of land to have roads following different parts of the bay. Maynard called them a bunch of dumbasses and used true cardinal directions for roads.
Is there an advantage to having a city’s grid be perfectly oriented along NSEW? I get that if a city has a coast or waterfront, you’d want to align the grid with that, but would it mess anything up if a city’s grid were rotated like 15 degrees clockwise?
There’s a concept called street canyons that deals with the region’s prevailing winds and sunlight. Might end up with your very own Manhattenhenge.
In America, it makes it line up with existing lots. Remember that the homestead act gave a lot of people 40 acres, and those lots were oriented properly. A lot of American cities were built around those lots.
Honestly why would the rotation matter at all? Not like the connecting roads are perfectly straight without curves either.
As someone who just drove through Oslo Centrum today, yeah, it’s indeed accurate. A fucking mess is what it is.
Johannesburg lmao. The disorganization and urban sprawl there, that also connects Joburg to Pretoria should be a crime against urban planning. The East Rand, Midrand, Wits, all of it. Apartheid spacial planning and our failure to address it has really messed us up.
Where’s Zurich?
Switzerland, last time I checked.
Neat chart, thx
I’ve always wondered why Pennsylvania was slanted
Because it is oriented between two rivers that are fairly parallel to the not-exactly-north-south roads
No San Diego?
