[HN Gopher] The Decline of the City Grid
___________________________________________________________________
The Decline of the City Grid
Author : andrewl
Score : 83 points
Date : 2022-12-21 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| kkfx wrote:
| The decline is in served purposes not a specific design: cities
| in the very past was needed for various reasons, in the modern
| age most reasons was economy of scale, witch means: lower prices
| because your neighbor competitor try to lower it's prices a
| little bit to compete against you and so you do until the lowest
| possible denominator in the current state of thing, than
| companies specialize and split, one window maker decide it's good
| at cutting glass plates, the neighbor that's good at cut frames
| and so on.
|
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, cities are still growing, and people are still
| concentrating on fewer and fewer of them... So I'd say that any
| call for they losing their purpose is way too precipitated.
|
| I do agree we seem to be moving on that direction. But we are
| surely not there.
| kkfx wrote:
| If you wait to see people fleeing it's way too late to act.
| Just imaging how many DECADES would be needed to design and
| built a new "modern polis", adapted to our present and future
| needs, so renewables, flying logistic, much more rails for
| heavy packages, future flying "cars" and so far.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Things do shift over long enough time horizons. 25 years or
| so ago quite a few of the cities we generally consider
| "elite" today were still losing population.
| [deleted]
| bee_rider wrote:
| How do you even give directions in Chicago? It seems horribly
| confusing -- go down the straight road, once you've passed 15
| intersections turn left blah blah. No way to keep track of that
| kind of junk.
|
| 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!
| nwah1 wrote:
| Directions are easier with grids. Numbering systems that ascend
| and descend from a particular central point make sense. State
| and Madison is zero. Anything else is a higher or lower number
| in the direction you are relative to that intersection. 100
| numbers is one block. All streets have numbers, even if they
| also have names. Most of the South side also uses numbers for
| names of east-west streets... so 30th street is 30 blocks south
| of Madison, and addresses will be 3000 S.
|
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Or without a grid: "Take the 3rd left, then the 2nd right,
| cross the next roundabout at the 2nd exit which is a slight
| right, keep going for 3.2 miles and it is there on your right"
| asguy wrote:
| Or in the English countryside, where signs refer to towns and
| not to roads.
| jcranmer wrote:
| It's not true New England directions until you tell someone
| "turn left where the shop used to be."
|
| 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.
| s1mon wrote:
| These graphs looked very familiar. I'm still digging to see if
| these types of polar histograms were used before this 2019
| research from Geoff Boeing [0], but I haven't found it yet.
|
| [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...
| twelvechairs wrote:
| The big recent exemplar of street layout for a new place is
| Houten in the netherlands [0] which is basically focussed on a
| train station and walkable town square at the centre with a ring
| road at the edge. Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and
| cyclists but stopped up for cars making the car network more of a
| tree with dead ends rather than a grid. And making road speeds
| slow at the centre and fast at the edges.
|
| [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/the-
| dutch...
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| That's amazing. It reminded me of Livermore, CA. They have a
| bike trail that follows a creek. Wherever it crosses a road (in
| most parts) the trail dips under the road. A few times every
| decade the creek floods making the trail there unusable, but I
| always appreciated being able to avoid the traffic as a kid.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| you know what else is a tree with dead ends? The thousands of
| suburban cul-de-sacs throughout the US. It makes me wonder if
| there's an opportunity to rework them into something other than
| houses.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Check out Stevenage in the UK. It ain't no paradise.
|
| 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
| rayiner wrote:
| Look at how human scale everything is, even the pedestrian
| underpass under the road. By contrast in the US, even public
| transit has to be built at massive, oppressive scales, with
| pedestrian walkways soaring multiple stories above the road:
| https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/354851.jpg. Awful.
| jcoder wrote:
| Houten has a population of 50,000. Plenty of American cities
| much larger than that have the sort of human-scale features
| and transit you're describing--they're all over Portland, OR.
| rayiner wrote:
| The place I linked (McLean/Tyson's Corner) has about 50,000
| people.
| barney54 wrote:
| The picture you linked to is where they added metro to
| into the island of a highway. They shouldn't have built a
| subway, they should have created express lanes for
| express buses instead of these monster metro stops.
| barnabee wrote:
| I like a city I can get lost in. Grids seem like an anti-pattern
| to me.
| davidw wrote:
| Go to Venice, Italy if you want to get lost. Grids are the best
| way to lay out a city so you don't end up with ridiculous burbs
| like this where it's a 1.5 mile walk between adjacent lots.
|
| 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.
| barnabee wrote:
| These things sound _efficient_ and _productive_ , but I don't
| think that makes them better.
| davidw wrote:
| At the end of the day, it's better for people, too, to live
| in a place that can grow and adapt, where they can walk to
| a coffee shop, or ride their bikes on a quieter side street
| instead of being shunted into a nasty collector street with
| deadly 40mph traffic.
| barnabee wrote:
| I feel like London, for example (along with many other
| European cities), achieves this goal as well or better
| than any rigidly grid based city I've ever visited.
| davidw wrote:
| Ah, I see where you're coming from. Someplace like London
| has a core that was laid out as a grid by the Romans
| (Londinium) and then that sort of medieval 'hodge podge'
| that grows out organically. Still very human oriented, if
| a bit more confusing, and definitely 'interesting'. I
| lived in Padova, Italy for many years, which has a
| similar pattern, albeit on a smaller scale. It's pretty
| nice, although a grid is still probably more convenient
| for a lot of day to day life things.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >Grids are the best way to lay out a city so you don't end up
| with ridiculous burbs like this where it's a 1.5 mile walk
| between adjacent lots.
|
| 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.
| strken wrote:
| I think there's a middle ground. If you look examples of
| walkable suburbs (Houten from one of the other replies, the
| north of Canberra in Australia) they don't just shove cul-de-
| sacs everywhere with no thought. Canberra in particular uses
| looping streets rather than dead ends, runs footpaths between
| houses at the midpoint of many loops so pedestrians and
| cyclists can move like they're in a grid, and doesn't have
| multiple levels of branching dead-end streets like your
| example.
|
| You can still end up with a long drive between adjacent
| blocks, but the walk or ride should be much shorter.
| davidw wrote:
| With a good grid, you could always close off some of the
| side streets to cars and let bikes and pedestrians through.
| With the big up front design... you better hope you got it
| right the first time because you are going to have more
| trouble changing it later.
|
| 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.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I like to be able to navigate to a location I've never been
| just by knowing the address. Grids with numbered streets and
| avenues are my favorite.
| barnabee wrote:
| I see the appeal but it's not for me.
|
| 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.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Yeah that's fine for a vacation or a day off, but not
| practical day to day
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Agree, it's much more fun to just walk around when you can't
| really what lies ahead.
| burlesona wrote:
| The article says that governments began "encouraging" curvy
| streets and dead ends, but that's understating things. The FDR
| administration effectively banned grids by requiring curvilinear
| streets for new developments to qualify for the new federally
| subsidized 30-year mortgages (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), aka
| what we think of now as a "normal mortgage." It's hard to compete
| with a heavy government subsidy, so other forms of financing
| essentially vanished overnight, and thus no new development would
| use a grid again.
| [deleted]
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/RujBG
| shagie wrote:
| As this is one of the "Christmas specials", I _believe_ that it
| won 't hit the paywall.
|
| 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.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Didn't hit the paywall for me. I was wondering why not.
| beej71 wrote:
| [freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead]
|
| 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?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Old, organic non-grids in my area aren't due to anything other
| than topography and road construction technology available at
| the time the area was settled. There are grids too, with a very
| wide variety of architecture (the city was settled by people
| from all over europe and the near-east). In both cases, the
| architecture varies, so it's a nice point of comparison for
| non-cookie-cutter construction issues.
|
| 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.
| devilbunny wrote:
| There's an interesting hybrid system in New Orleans proper.
| The city follows the curve of the river, with original land
| grants being in the French classic frontage-and-depth layout
| (each grant received a certain minimum amount of river
| frontage, for shipping out products, and then extended back
| as far as was possible given the terrain). Within each
| original grant, there is a grid, and between them there are
| major boulevards to permit higher-speed, higher-volume
| traffic from one part of the city to another. But within each
| grid section, you're entirely on narrow, mostly residential
| streets - with a few commercial stretches scattered around,
| and far more neighborhood bars and restaurants in mostly-
| residential areas than is common in most of the US. Aside
| from the weather (it's almost always hot and humid), a very
| bikeable city. And if you're in a car, it usually only takes
| a few blocks of travel to get to a major road (e.g., the
| largely-pedestrian French Quarter bounded by Canal, Rampart,
| and Esplanade).
| davidw wrote:
| This might look familiar to you, beej:
| https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ - goes into some
| of why grids are good.
|
| '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.
| nkrisc wrote:
| You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great.
|
| 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.
| rippercushions wrote:
| I suspect you'd like the grid system in Sapporo, Japan, where
| every address has Cartesian grid coordinates in the form
| "North 3, West 5":
|
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Try living, working, or shopping on Peachtree in Atlanta
| sometime.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Which one?
|
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| As a former Atlanta resident this checks out.
| terribleperson wrote:
| Where'd you get your mapo tofu? I like what I get from
| S.H. Spicy Garden, but I'm open to trying somewhere new.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That is in fact the point.
|
| <https://hotspotatl.com/3699042/atlanta-how-many-
| peachtree-st...>
| dionidium wrote:
| > _It made addresses have real meaning._
|
| 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" :)
| kgermino wrote:
| > 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).
|
| 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
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I share your complaints about Manhattan. I guess when
| they did Manhattan they had figured out "numbered streets
| are good" but not "having the addresses work nicely with
| the numbered streets are good". By the time they put
| addresses on the streets in Queens they did what you want
| them to.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| The Chicago grid system is the result of a 1908
| renumbering and a 1913 street renaming. All of this
| _after_ the grid was built.
|
| It used to be every bit as unusual as Manhattan.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| North Ave and Roosevelt Rd, as named, extend all the way
| west from the lake to the Kane County line. But the roads
| themselves go all the way to Ogle County - 2/3 of the way
| to Iowa. North Ave ends at a T-junction in the middle of
| corn fields, while Roosevelt ends kind of unceremoniously
| at a messed up intersection at a baseball field in
| Rochelle.
| bombcar wrote:
| Seattle's grid is similarly informative with additional
| information just from the numbered street name.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Many of the street names are not numbered though,
| particularly in the Denny grid area.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I can't help feeling that designing transport policy around
| efficient addressing is perhaps not getting priorities right.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Grids are great. But just think of systems like Venice, where
| you get a building number + district for an address. No
| street names tied to the buildings at all. Just a number and
| the sestiere (there are six).
| nkrisc wrote:
| That sounds... difficult.
|
| 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.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Salt Lake City encodes latitude and longitude in the street
| names.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| I just looked at a map - it appears that 0 N/S/E/W is the
| Mormon Temple downtown. It also looks like "newer" streets
| have names rather than numbers - further from downtown. Is
| there a date at which they stopped the practice?
|
| 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.
| nkrisc wrote:
| That's one of the most important things I forgot to
| mention!
| prottog wrote:
| > Now I live in suburbia elsewhere in the country and street
| numbers are essentially meaningless, except to differentiate
| buildings on the same street.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Can you provide an example of a "modern non-grid"?
| akgerber wrote:
| Many old neighborhoods were originally literal wall-to-wall
| cookie-cutter construction, with Brooklyn brownstones being a
| prime example. My Brooklyn block was originally basically 4
| different groups of identical buildings, with the new-law
| tenement I live in being substantially identical to 10 others
| it was built in a cluster with (except, now, to one that has
| had two stories added on top).
|
| 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/wi
| ki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Re....)
| ghaff wrote:
| >with Brooklyn brownstones being a prime example
|
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The origin of the land grid in the US is to facilitate land
| transactions with standard land plot sizes.
|
| 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.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| Exactly, grids are not perfect, but they are much much better
| than modern non-grid. Modern non-grid is not made for people,
| it is made for cars, and is incompatible with walking. More
| specifically, it is the result of optimizing for the wrong
| thing, it optimizes for getting cars from their houses to the
| highway and back, sacrificing all local connection and mobility
| in the process.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| While the modern non-grid is "made for cars", most examples
| I've seen is also really inefficient at working for cars, in
| that most non-grid areas I've seen also suck at moving
| traffic. Inefficient intersections, poorly designed
| directional conflicts, etc. all exist heavily in a non-grid
| area, and the response is typically larger, even more
| inefficient intersections and more poorly designed
| directional conflicts. Sometimes the lack of space that a
| grid typically causes actually brings better traffic
| engineering.
|
| 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.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I don't see how it's incompatible with walking. I see the
| article mentions the same: 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.
|
| All that's required and normal in lots of Europe is for foot
| paths that cut through all of this. This means some
| properties won't be next to each other and instead have a
| public foot path in between. This also allows public transit
| not to have to go into the cul-de-sacs and stay on a main
| artery while allowing for an entire neighborhood of cul-de-
| sac houses to have easy access.
| brewdad wrote:
| In America this is unacceptable both because suburban
| dwellers don't want to have people walking near their homes
| (invasion of privacy) and because developers would prefer
| to sell and build on as much land as possible.
|
| There's no money to be made on "public" land and it lowers
| the value of the land immediately adjacent to it.
| gpvos wrote:
| You could make the roads less laughably wide.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I'm fairly sure municipal, non-road space increases the
| value of land adjacent to it
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I think brewdad is actually right about the fact that it
| lowers the value directly adjacent to it. But you're also
| correct in that it increases the value of land _close_ to
| it overall.
|
| 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.
| hgomersall wrote:
| That's definitely a hypothesis. I'd like to see what the
| evidence says. Certainly, all the most premium new builds
| around me are those that back straight onto the parkland
| (that often forms part of the development).
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Fair enough. Different people have different tolerances,
| preferences and let's face it: financial options.
|
| 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.
| anon291 wrote:
| They're not even made for cars. With the non-grids in many
| suburbs, you have to drive for more than five minutes just to
| reach something that ought to be a two minute walk or a 30
| second drive. Endless cul-de-sacs and branches make it
| unfriendly to everything.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Modern best practice is to have permeable neighbourhoods,
| with lots of active transport routes between nodes. Cul-de-
| sacs should only be cul-de-sacs for cars, not people.
| davidw wrote:
| Grids are not perfect, but they are "pretty good" in a lot of
| different circumstances, and far more adaptable than other
| street patterns. Living on a cul-de-sac is nice in some ways,
| but it doesn't do well at all with change or adaptation.
|
| 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.
| bernawil wrote:
| it's the other way 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.
| akgerber wrote:
| Grids are not made for cars. Grids are made for the
| legibility of a centralized administration and ease of
| property subdivision. They are common features of Roman and
| Greek colonial cities as well as Chinese cities unto time
| immemorial (in locations where topography allowed):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan#Ancient_grid_plans
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Chinese_urban_plannin
| g
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I would disagree.
|
| 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.
| JetSetWilly wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Grids are certainly better than what I was more referring
| to, and what is discussed in the article, which is the
| modernist suburban tree-like structure.
|
| 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
| gpvos wrote:
| Four-way stops are yet another American pessimization.
| You won't find them in any European country.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not sure why. In low traffic situations in both
| directions, it seems it's probably safer to have everyone
| to have everyone stop rather than have traffic in one
| direction blast through.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| We generally have mini roundabouts for that situation or
| give way signs for rolling stops.
| ghaff wrote:
| Mini-roundabouts are way overkill for a lot of situations
| and 4 way stops are often effectively rolling stops
| anyway in my experience.
| bernawil wrote:
| > four-way stops are really inefficient at processing
| them
|
| 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.
| lifefeed wrote:
| Tucked away in the middle of any urban planning article is a
| reference to Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American
| Cities". It's a great book that puts into words why certain
| neighborhoods cities feel alive and fit for humans. From mixed-
| use buildings to small blocks to sidewalks to parks to
| landmarks.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.)
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| What is cool is the search box at the bottom lets you enter any
| city in the world - but it also works on very small towns too!
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Does anyone know the name of this visualization and what tool was
| used to produce it?
|
| Silver Springs is interesting to look at. I think of that as
| prototypical suburbia and it maps pretty closely to London
| despite the planning.
| [deleted]
| nowardic wrote:
| I'm not sure what they used for the web visualizations but I
| have seen this before with the python osmnx tool
| (https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-
| orienta...)
| akgerber wrote:
| Here is a post with an Jupyter notebook producing such
| visualizations with the OSMnx library:
| https://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| Oh man I can look at this all day. What an interesting take on
| how we do city planning and how it really hasn't changed over the
| years. I'd be more interested in taking this a step further to
| look at the infrastructure overlay and how that has changed over
| the years.
| freeqaz wrote:
| I recently visited Vancouver, BC (Canada) and I was blown away by
| their urban development planning. They have _tons_ of density,
| but the city doesn 't look dystopian because they've mixed
| different styles of building well.
|
| 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?
| cperciva wrote:
| I'm guessing you were downtown? From roughly 15th south -- the
| majority of the city -- pretty much all you get is suburban
| wasteland of detached homes.
| freeqaz wrote:
| Yeah, it was downtown. But compared to SF or Seattles
| "downtown", it was absolutely bustling even at 2am in
| December. That's what blew my mind. (It's a ghost town in
| most cities because it's all commercial -- no mixed use tall
| buildings)
| ghaff wrote:
| There are probably cultural aspects to that as well. Can't
| really speak to Seattle, but SF is just not really a late
| night city in general. Boston, which is pretty European and
| mixed use in general, would also be pretty much shutdown at
| 2am as well even outside the Financial District.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| There are lumps of density around many of the SkyTrain stops.
| Some of the stops used to be in the middle of nowhere, then
| gradually developers made them into little dense mini-metros.
| freeqaz wrote:
| I found the "clumps of density" fascinating because it
| seems like the NIMBY culture in SF/Seattle prevents that
| from happening. You simply _cannot_ build more than 3-4
| stories anywhere except downtown.
|
| 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!
| cperciva wrote:
| Outside of the City of Vancouver, yes. Metrotown,
| Brentwood, Lougheed, Surrey City Center -- but Vancouver
| itself has been very resistant to development outside of
| the core.
|
| 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".
| tengbretson wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of modern, winding, cul-de-sac housing
| developments, but one upside to their layout that I rarely see
| addressed is that due to the fact that the layout starts with
| such a strict distinction between the major connecting roads and
| the winding residential roads means that you will never find
| yourself 15 years down the road facing eminent domain from the
| city taking 20 feet from the front of your property because they
| decided the once quite road on the grid you are on now needs to
| expand into a major roadway.
| burlesona wrote:
| The fact that suburban design is "cased in glass" though makes
| such neighborhoods very vulnerable to cyclical decline as the
| styles of a particular decade go out of fashion and nothing is
| allowed the change. This phenomenon is called "rolling blight"
| and is widespread across North America.
|
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/9/20/the-suburbs-ar...
| michaelt wrote:
| _> In London cab drivers have to spend up to four years learning
| the street network before they can get around without a map.
| Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve much the same thing
| in a day._
|
| 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.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > In London cab drivers have to spend up to four years learning
| the street network before they can get around without a map.
| Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve much the same
| thing in a day.
|
| 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.
| spikeagally wrote:
| I think knowledge of the city is still much better than relying
| on GPS. The gap may have narrowed significantly but I'd still
| rather by driven by someone who knows the streets. One example
| I regularly encounter is Uber drivers following GPS down these
| extremely narrow (6ft I believe) bollard lined connecting
| roads. They are easily avoided if you know the area but every
| Uber driver will take them while we both hold our breath until
| we get through it.
| rhdunn wrote:
| There was a recent Tom Scott video
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWREtcDVBE) where he was
| using a GPS and Tom Hutley (a London cabbie) only relied on
| his London knowledge to get around, travelling the same
| distance after reaching certain landmarks. It was interesting
| to watch.
| spikeagally wrote:
| That was really interesting, thanks for sharing.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| Google Maps regularly makes poor decisions to save two
| minutes. I was reminded of this just yesterday driving in New
| England where we've had some snow here and there. It took me
| on a more direct route to a location than I usually take but
| I let it do its thing. Lots of turns on very secondary roads
| some of which had some drifting and ice on the road. Nothing
| very bad but the more main route coming back was definitely
| better.
| anikom15 wrote:
| I was in NYC recently and the grid layout made it incredibly easy
| to navigate.
| gpvos wrote:
| A thing about North-American cul-de-sac suburbs that I don't
| understand is why there are no footpaths to take shortcuts
| between the dead-end streets. That would make them much less
| hostile to pedestrians, would allow you to visit neighbours more
| easily, and it seems to me that you don't lose anything. Is it
| just an oversight or is there some reason for that? It should
| even increase social safety: always an escape route.
| closeparen wrote:
| Some of the more humane subdivisions are built with walking
| trails e.g. behind the backyards. A developer may or may not
| feel that they need to spend the extra money for that to sell
| the houses.
|
| 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.
| markfenton wrote:
| There is a view held by some that they actually decrease safety
| by providing somewhere for undesirables to loiter, or a means
| of escape after committing crime, or simply attract more foot
| traffic to an area than a cul-de-sac therfore increasing the
| chance of opportunistic crime.
|
| 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.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| We have a creek trail at the end of our cul-de-sac, and it
| definitely has been used by people who walk up and down
| neighborhoods to check for open cars. It's especially useful
| in the day of home security cameras - people that drive tend
| to get their license plate lifted.
|
| 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.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| >...or simply attract more foot traffic to an area than a
| cul-de-sac therfore increasing the chance of opportunistic
| crime.
|
| I love this reasoning: make my own neighborhood so unpleasant
| to walk in that nobody will, not even me!
| mbg721 wrote:
| The difference between Cincinnati and St. Louis was stark to me;
| I grew up assuming that "north" meant "vaguely northeast until it
| gets inconvenient". The idea that a road can just go on in the
| same direction for miles and miles seemed like a sinister AI
| trap. Someplace like New Orleans or Montreal where the direction
| follows a natural feature makes way more sense in my head.
| rippercushions wrote:
| If you find your way to Bangkok's central drag Sukhumvit and
| keep heading east, 500 km down the road you'll find yourself at
| the Cambodian border, and it's still the same name.
|
| This is particularly weird since if you head west, the same
| road changes its name every couple of blocks!
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