City Street Orientation Visualization

Here's one that includes more cities around the world

God dammit, Rio 💀
Probably correlates fairly tightly to the age of the city.
- More like how organically (or slowly, if you will) it grew and how walkable it is. I suspect the ones that looks like crosses are made mostly for car traffic.
I find the helix-like symmetry in Berlin quite pleasing

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?
- Minneapolis uses the grid and is built along the Mississippi. In large part, the road closest to the river follows it, intersecting the grid. And a good number of the grid roads use bridges.

Ah, that explains Boston.

That’s what happens when a city never gets a chance to burn to the ground and start over.
- There’s still time.
  
  If I ever have to drive in that city again I’ll help start the process.

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.

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.

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.
- A whole half second?
- In this day in age when MFers are on their phone and will sit out a whole ass green light watching some fucking Mojo top ten you bet your ass I’m honking when it goes green
This graph is not even showing the worst part. Many of those streets going higgledy-piggledy into each other are one way. Sometimes, the only way to get from one point to another point on the other side of a neighborhood is to drive out of the neighborhood, go around it, and come back in on the other side.

*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.

Boston and Charlotte need to be defragged.

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.

Boston is actually way worse than Charlotte for driving as most of the roads are 1 way. In some areas if you take a single wrong turn you'll be ejected from the city for several miles before you can turn around.
- Whoever made that happen needs to be beaten with an al dente noodle
Nah Charlotte traffic/drivers are not nearly as bad as Atlanta, having lived several years in both
- Well, never lived in Atlanta, so I'll bow to your expertise. I will say that I didn't have much trouble other than the sheer volume of traffic. But that was just a few visits here and there

Does Denver's downtown just not show up at all? It's at 45 degrees to the rest of the city.

Boston looks as expected. Not familiar with Charlotte. Is the whole city just pavement?

I think this graph is just skewed by which roads are included and which aren't. Like most urban centers Charlotte has a clean grid for its downtown and then a bunch of squiggly roads in the surrounding suburbs. I think the difference is that Charlotte proper extends farther into these suburbs than many other cities but it's definitely less pavement overall than many other cities like Atlanta. The mass transit options are very lacking but that's a different conversation.

Almost as if only the US cities were so planned in advance that everything is in a grid.

this perfectly shows how insanely car brained the US is.