City Street Orientation Visualization
City Street Orientation Visualization
Ah, that explains Boston.
That’s what happens when a city never gets a chance to burn to the ground and start over.
Boston is just the worst to drive in.
At least the drivers don't just sit at lights when they turn green. Your ass is getting honked at in under half a second.
I wish this map weighted streets for density. Seattle is mostly NSEW as portrayed in the plot, but the downtown core famously has two competing grid systems.
Yeah, I think it's something you see in any city built in the last several hundred years that's near water and engaged it maritime transport. Recent enough that we discovered that the grid system makes sense and simplifies things, and near water which gives one rational orientation for the grid, coast aligned centered around the port, ripe to conflict with the other "north south" sensible alignment.
If you look at Detroits roads, it's got three grids, one north-south, one aligned to one part of the coast, and another smaller one aligned to a different part of the coast. It's also fun because you can still see the faint remnants of when the roads were a radial spoke system built around the original french fort that caused the city.
Manhattan never gets far enough from the coast to switch.
It makes me wonder about cities with notable rivers built after the grid system. Do they align to the river, or just build bridges and pretend it's not there?
Showing Atlanta the same as Denver means the level of abstraction is so high as to make this meaningless.
East coast cities are more chaotic than this implies, because of time and growth patterns.
Denver was first aligned along the river, then a NS grid later, which this graphic doesn't show at all. So while it's primarily a grid, it's 2 grids, one that's rotated about 45°.
I've driven in a number of these cities, and this graphic really doesn't reflect the on-the-ground experience.
Charlotte might be earth's most confusing city.
Most places in Europe would have a graph similar to Charlotte. Only new cities in the colonies were build to a rectangular grid.
by this charlotte looks more similar to naturally grown old world citys.
Yo, why is this down in the comments and not the actual post??
Edit: just looked at Charlotte on the map. Geez that's fucked.
Having driven in a handful of these cities, I would say that Charlotte's is grossly inadequate at describing the sheer chaos that city is.
My cousin lives there, and he's a cousin I enjoy very much. It's a running joke that I must love him a lot if I'm willing to get within fifty miles of those roads. I swear by all that's holy, if he ever moves, I will never enter that city again.
DC, Pittsburgh, Philly, Atlanta, Savannah, Baltimore, Cleveland, Asheville, Nashville, Knoxville, I've driven in all of those anything from a week to a year+, and none of them match the sheer psychotic horror that is Charlotte's roads (and drivers).
Any of the cities I've spent a day or two in are the same.
If the graphs here are indicative of anything other than road orientation, I will never go to Boston without a tank and plenty of ammunition for it. No way would I deal with Charlotte level fuckery and a bunch of damn yankees honking in their strange language through their nose as well.
this perfectly shows how insanely car brained the US is.
Hmm. Detroit has basically no streets oriented along cardinal directions. The whole town is oriented 20-25deg off to match the river. It would be hard to find more than 5 continuous blocks of n/s or e/w road anywhere in the city.
Makes me doubt the methodology of the whole thing.
*looks at orlando*
Yeah this data is bullshit lol. Or it’s looking exclusively at the city center and not the city as a whole
Even that doesn't hold up. See Seattle's city center.
Make fun of Charlotte all you want. It's the only one here that passed its standardized Scantron tests, since it's the only one that colored that circle fully in.
