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
Completely awesome content, thanks. I was hoping that some older cities were more random, and I was not disappointed.
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?
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.
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.
Honestly why would the rotation matter at all? Not like the connecting roads are perfectly straight without curves either.
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.
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.
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.
Denver's entire downtown is a 45 degree slant from the rest of the city so the image is questionable...
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.
