The Decline of the City Grid

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 &#x27;soft grid&#x27; 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.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-06-17&#x2F;the-dutch-town-of-houten-is-a-case-study-in-bike-friendly-suburban-planning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-06-17&#x2F;the-dutch...</a>

A thing about North-American cul-de-sac suburbs that I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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.

[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead]<p>I like grids... but I&#x27;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&#x27;t like.<p>But do I not like it because of the lack of grid? Or because of the new modern wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction?<p>I look at an old organically-grown city and it&#x27;s fascinating to me; its ties to the distant past are palpable. So maybe it is that I just don&#x27;t like modern US housing overall... but also, the organic city grew that way _unplanned_. And we never do anything unplanned any longer. The &quot;planned organic&quot; look has a fake feel to it, right?

<i>&gt; 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.</i><p>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&#x27;ll issue a license to anyone who can pass the test. It&#x27;s just a very difficult test.

I recently visited Vancouver, BC (Canada) and I was blown away by their urban development planning. They have <i>tons</i> of density, but the city doesn&#x27;t look dystopian because they&#x27;ve mixed different styles of building well.<p>What this manifests in reality is a less car-dependent city that&#x27;s extremely walkable (they also have amazing walking paths all over).<p>Overall, I just found the experience to be amazing in comparison to visiting every other city in North America. It actually felt like a &quot;city&quot; and not just a collection of office buildings surrounded by 2-3 story houses (looking at you SF!).<p>Are there any other exemplary examples of good urban development in other cities?

The difference between Cincinnati and St. Louis was stark to me; I grew up assuming that &quot;north&quot; meant &quot;vaguely northeast until it gets inconvenient&quot;. 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.

I was in NYC recently and the grid layout made it incredibly easy to navigate.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;RujBG" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;RujBG</a>

These graphs looked very familiar. I&#x27;m still digging to see if these types of polar histograms were used before this 2019 research from Geoff Boeing [0], but I haven&#x27;t found it yet.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geoffboeing.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;urban-street-network-orientation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geoffboeing.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;urban-street-network-orienta...</a><p>[edit] yes, they&#x27;re also called rose diagrams. Here at least one reference from 2013<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;258954759_Entropy_and_order_in_urban_street_networks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;258954759_Entropy_a...</a>

I&#x27;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.

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!

I&#x27;m not a fan of grid cities. Yes, they are easier to navigate, but I find them boring. It&#x27;s much more fun to explore Tokyo&#x27;s twists (west side) than Osaka&#x27;s grid. Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Istanbul, ... much more fun that most of them are not on grids.

Oh man I can look at this all day. What an interesting take on how we do city planning and how it really hasn&#x27;t changed over the years. I&#x27;d be more interested in taking this a step further to look at the infrastructure overlay and how that has changed over the years.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s good at cutting glass plates, the neighbor that&#x27;s good at cut frames and so on.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That&#x27;s the decline.

Also worth mentioning, Florence Lipsky’s book <i>San Francisco: The Grid Meets the Hills</i>, about how the grid was imposed on some of the most unsuitable topography for it.

Does anyone know the name of this visualization and what tool was used to produce it?<p>Silver Springs is interesting to look at. I think of that as prototypical suburbia and it maps pretty closely to London despite the planning.

I like a city I can get lost in. Grids seem like an anti-pattern to me.

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.<p>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!