I may be very European, and grew up in a relatively chaotic city, but I find quite confusing when I’m on a grid city.
Yes, it’s sort of convenient at a rational level, but everything appears the same, and there’s no way to differentiate one cross from the next. Streets doesn’t have their own “personality” and you have to learn them by name. I don’t know half of the street names of the city I grew in, but I know where I am by the way they intersect and twist around in interesting shapes…
Or perhaps is just the way I’m used to
nickserv 18 hours ago [-]
The approach is fundamentally different: in Europe it's organized by where you want to go (or do), in the US it's organized by cardinal directions.
In the US, if you're on 89th Street and 5th Avenue, and you want to visit your friend on 10th and 1st Avenue, you'll know exactly which direction to drive. Need to go to another city? Take the highway following the direction the other city is. Americans are typically good at knowing where the sun rises, or are always getting lost.
In Europe, you know your friend lives by the main hospital, so you follow the signs indicating the hospital, and then (if you're lucky) signs to your friend's neighborhood. From there you need to know how to get to the street they live on. Need to get to another city? Follow the highway signs indicating that city, if it's close by, otherwise you'll need to know what cities are on the way to it.
When we lived in the US, I could easily find any address in most cities. My wife was always getting lost, sometimes going to the complete other side of town.
We've been in Europe for over a decade now. She has no problems getting around to most places she needs to. I'm always getting lost going someplace new.
silvestrov 15 hours ago [-]
I'm in Northern Europe and 100% of my many many taxi tours have used GPS for driving directions.
Taxi drivers don't use road signs anymore for figuring out which direction to take.
jghn 13 hours ago [-]
Not everywhere in the US. Boston for instance is a notable exception
entropicdrifter 9 hours ago [-]
I'm personally convinced that the road systems of New England were of some influence on Lovecraft in his conception of cosmic horror. A map of Boston roads does tend to evoke the concepts of non-Euclidean geometry and tentacle monsters
jghn 7 hours ago [-]
I'll never be able to not think of this whenever I'm in the maze of roads downtown Boston!
bryanrasmussen 16 hours ago [-]
>Streets doesn’t have their own “personality” and you have to learn them by name.
I've lived in both types of cities, and actually even the most grid cities like Salt Lake City, have parts that are named as opposed to just numbered.
I prefer the numbered cities for finding way around.
Finally I don't think the everything appears the same is integral to it being a grid city, that is instead a side effect of American habits of rebuilding often so you end up with everything relatively new and in the same styles. That is to say the stylistic affect is orthogonal to the grid, although they are both found to coexist this is just a historical coincidence.
>I don’t know half of the street names of the city I grew in, but I know where I am by the way they intersect and twist around in interesting shapes…
I don't know where your city is, but I did notice many years before everyone had a phone I was in a class in Copenhagen and everyone in the class had lived in Copenhagen their whole life and then someone talked about an address and nobody knew where it was so someone had to go out to their car and get a book of maps.
Of course Copenhagen was also built to be potentially confusing to invaders, as I understand it, and I have often thought I was walking towards a particular destination to find I have either been walking away from it or perpendicular to it.
I also find that I prefer websites that are easy to navigate than ones that have character but are confusing. But I do prefer art that is apt to be confusing and intellectually stimulating to things that are simple and clear cut.
I think perhaps the problem is I just don't want going shopping in an unfamiliar part of town to feel like a surrealistic event.
Modified3019 19 hours ago [-]
I did agronomy work out in Kansas for a while, which is basically a big grid of very similar crop circles.
Thinking on it, there were lots of places I passed by often on the roads, but would never remember, but wherever I stopped and entered a field on foot and discovered all the little differences in terrain that made each quarter unique, I was much more able to have a better mental map of where I was, even if I was only there a few times in a year.
Could it be that you learned the chaotic city better because you were more likely to go around on foot and experience little things, rather than just driving to a box store?
atoav 18 hours ago [-]
I think this is more about the map. It is easier to remember that you have been at the crossing where that triangle street hits the half-circle road than to remember your position in an isomorphic grid, just like it is easier to know you stood next to that tree in a park (a point of interest) than to remember your exsct position in a lawn where every spot looks more or less the same as the other.
thebrid 22 hours ago [-]
I find some joy in historical street naming. It's nice that you can take a 1746 map of London and pretty much still be able to get around.[1] Would certainly make life easier for time travellers.
While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more interesting.
Yes. Additionally you realise the original purpose of streets (eg “love lane” in the city of London near the old guildhall is a particular favourite of mine).
I studied on "Silk Street" which is nearby. Nearby are also "Oat Street", "Bread Street", "Milk street", "Gutter lane", "Goldsmith street", "Poultry" and many more who have old names relating to their function.
riffraff 19 hours ago [-]
The "odd" location names in London are a fun plot point in Garman's "neverwhere" novel, tho he focuses on tube stops (black friars, shepherd's bush, kings cross etc).
I like those but IME most people have no clue what old names mean, they are just sounds associated with a place most of the time.
Sounds like a good name for renaming the President Donald J. Trump Boulevard leading up to Mar-A-Lago when the current bout of totalitarianism over there ends.
finghin 15 hours ago [-]
> In "The Miller's Tale", Geoffrey Chaucer writes "And prively he caughte hire by the queynte" (and intimately he caught her by her crotch),[14] and the comedy Philotus (1603) mentions "put doun thy hand and graip hir cunt."
It turns out “grab her by the pussy” has surpringly robust precedent.
seanhunter 17 hours ago [-]
Indeed.
bombcar 22 hours ago [-]
> Would certainly make life easier for time travellers.
Doesn't one of CS Lewis's books have Merlin transported to modern London and he heads off down the Roman roads?
Grid layouts do have efficiency, but humans aren't built to be efficient - at least not all the time.
The problem is suburbs and modern "inefficient" roads are designed to be inefficient - not designed by and for life.
graemep 18 hours ago [-]
Modern England, but not London. Revived from hibernation like sleep. The book is That Hideous Strength. The last book in a trilogy and unfortunately the best IMO - and it feels very relevant and farsighted to me now.
thaumasiotes 21 hours ago [-]
> Doesn't one of CS Lewis's books have Merlin transported to modern London and he heads off down the Roman roads?
Persistence over time wouldn't make any difference to that case; Merlin is omniscient.
freetanga 17 hours ago [-]
Some Latin American cities were designed as grids (100m x 100m squares), and numbering of blocks spans a hundred per block (first block is 0 to 100 house numbers).
So if you are at 200s in one street and are looking for a house at 1200s, you know you are a kilometer away.
This with numbered streets is awesome to navigate. Buenos Aires has the first, but named streets. La Plata in Argentina has both.
Chicago is like this, there are numbered streets on the south side, but all the streets on the north and west sides are named, however they're very good about putting the grid numbers on the named street signs, so it's easy to figure out where you are. 100 addresses per block, 8 blocks to a mile, so if I'm at Western and Belmont, that's 2400W 3200N, so 3 miles west and 4 miles north of downtown. All the Metro stations list the grid numbers on the signs at the exits too
tamad 13 hours ago [-]
> But before we do that, we should think for a moment about what streetnames are for. They are for helping people navigate the city.
People name streets (and other things) for other reasons too, often for internal or local reference. This perspective reduces the meaning of naming to a single focus, like saying we name dogs only to allow our guests to refer to them as needed when visiting our homes. We name things for many reasons, and those reasons are more about endearment and culture building at the local level. I recommend Seeing Like a State by James Scott for more discussion, including about street names, exploring this perspective.
galago 20 hours ago [-]
In Northwest Portlnd, Oregon the East-west streets were originally letters. A st, B st, C st, etc. They were renamed after people but they kept the first letter, so now its Ankeny, Burnside, Couch, Davis, Everett, Flanders, Gleason, Hoyt, Irving, Johnson... They get to have it both ways, and they could be renamed if there was a desire to do so without impeding the general purpose. (One of my joking tests to see if someone is a True Portlander is if they can get up to Marshall, Northrup, Overton, etc.)
flats 19 hours ago [-]
I live in a section of Brooklyn (the "flat south section" per this fantastically detailed Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lettered_Brooklyn_aven...) in which the avenues (which run east to west, like Bogotá's calles) are lettered. Some of them, mostly early in the alphabet, were named or renamed in this same way (Albemarle, Beverly, Cortelyou, Ditmas, and so on). The streets running north/south are numbered.
(Interestingly, Avenue Q was renamed Quentin Road to avoid confusion with Avenue O.)
Either way, lettered or named in alphabetical order, I appreciate the lettered/numbered combination. It's a good mix of character and practicality, and it sounds good when you say it out loud ("It's at E 14th and K"). The doubly numbered intersections of Queens always drive me nuts.
A final sidenote: some real estate developers in the early 20th century decided to rename sections of E 11th through 16th from Prospect Park South down through West Midwood to fancy-sounding anglicized names like Stratford, Westminster, Argyle, Rugby, and Marlborough (the SWARM backronym here is useful) so they could make more money selling homes on those streets. It worked. Yet another example of nefarious street naming...
codelikeawolf 13 hours ago [-]
When we moved to Portland about 7 years ago, our first apartment was in the Pearl District on Couch (asking someone to pronounce it correctly is another good Portlander test). I'm a huge fan of the alphabetic street names. It made it really easy to get around a new city. I know the system eventually breaks down when you hit the 27th street, but I still think it's great. Anyways, I'm back in Chicago now and memorizing street locations.
scelerat 20 hours ago [-]
The alphabetical streets in the Richmond and Sunset districts of San Francisco do a similar thing
pelagicAustral 22 hours ago [-]
Hahaha OMG I lived in Bogota for three months, and boy, it took me a while to wire up my brain to deal with Carreras and Calles. In principle should be easy, just horizontal and vertical coordinates, north, south, east, west... if you live in a chess board is bread and butter for Margnus Carlsen, but cities are not build like that, so you do end up in streets that you mentally mapped in a way and would land you blocks from where you planned to be.
Yes, Google maps can do the job, but often times just walking around feels odd.
I find named streets with odds and evens on each end much, much easier to navigate.
Also I want to add that my country uses a system where new pieces of town going beyond the original city plan and house numbering use zero as a leading number for houses going the other way, which is kind of endearing. That way you can have 20 and 020, which leads you to know which way you should be looking for.
adamddev1 18 hours ago [-]
I lived in Calgary for 4 years before we had smart phones w/ maps. The grid system was amazing, it was like being able to give easily processed human GPS coordinates. "Let's meet at 7th Ave and 9th Street." Done!
rkomorn 18 hours ago [-]
I gotta admit I used to think I just had a great sense of direction.
Then I moved back to Europe and realized it was a lie. It was just that the grid systems of the places I lived in the US were much easier to navigate.
Animats 19 hours ago [-]
SF should just name it "Chavez", as a convenience. Lots of people are named Chavez. No rush. Shorten the signs as they are routinely replaced.
Going back to "Army" would be silly, especially since the U.S. Army never had a presence on that side of town. It was all Navy near the bay. The Army was up at the Presidio.
SF has this silly thing of giving streets secondary names. Who knows where "Herb Cain Way" or "Isadora Duncan Lane" is?
Numbered streets have their own problems. In San Francisco, 4th St. and 16th St intersect near the UCSF hospital complex.
kube-system 19 hours ago [-]
Washington DC is even better — streets with a number run north-south, streets with letter run east-west, and each address has a suffix indicating which direction it is from the capitol.
dhosek 6 hours ago [-]
Having grown up in and lived most of my life in the Chicago area, the rationality of the grid system is rather nice. If you know your “hunnerts”¹ you can find anything. Every 8 hunnerts is a mile except for the first three miles south of Madison where the streets are numbered.² A handful of suburbs use numbered streets for north-south streets (Cicero and Elmwood Park—maybe others but those are the ones I know). In the city, there was a plan to have north-south streets named with the first letter indicating the distance in miles from the Indiana border, but it only really starts with “K-town”⁴ between Pulaski and Cicero Avenues and while most streets follow the pattern, it’s not universal.
Some distant suburbs (Du Page County and beyond) use a numbering scheme of xxWyyy where the xx is the number of miles west of State Street (the 0 in the cartesian grid of Chicago) and the yyy is the location within that mile. I don’t think they do anything similar for North-South coordinates though.
The diagonal streets in Chicago largely follow the routes of early non-grid roads of the city (many of which were plank roads run as toll-collecting businesses and followed paths used by the native American tribes living in the area before European settlement.
⸻
1. Hunnerts (from hundreds) being Chicago-speak for the location on a grid. E.g., Chicago Avenue is 800 (eight hunnert) north and Western is 2400 (24 hunnert) west.
2. This is a consequence of history. All the missing numbers (Roosevelt at 12 hunnert south is the first mile, Cermak/22nd street at 22 hunnert south is the second and 31st street at 31 hunnert south the third) do exist,³ but the streets were named and numbered before the replatting established the modern hunnert system.
3. There might not be some of the hunnerts in that first mile—the numbered streets only start after Roosevelt.
4. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’s K-town where the K stands for Korea.
ripplefringe 23 hours ago [-]
I love their use of the word legible. A good street naming system makes the city “legible”.
I’m in a suburb of Charleston, SC and it’s so weird how I have no idea how far things are….1 mile? 3 miles? I miss riding my bike on that Portland grid and following the numbers all the way to zero and hitting the Willamette.
thundergolfer 16 hours ago [-]
It’s a geographic legibility, but you could also say that “C. Chavez ave” provides a historical legibility or an ability to see what the city values.
In Melbourne the North-South street go: King, William, Queen, Elizabeth, Swanston, Russell. It communicates the commonwealth history and founding history of the city. Cute, but decidedly less useful and memorable than number avenues.
Padriac 18 hours ago [-]
We don't do this numbered street thing very much in Australia and manage to get around ok.
thundergolfer 16 hours ago [-]
Yea ok, but move to a numbered city and you notice the boost. I’ve lived in Melbourne, Sydney, and NYC and found Manhattan’s numbering is great.
Lower Manhattan also still has a large non-numbered area so you can get the old charm when you want it.
lmpdev 16 hours ago [-]
Only place I’ve ever seen it is the main stretch along Palm Beach on the Gold Coast
1st through 27th Avenues - they’re over 100 years old now funnily enough
somewhereoutth 16 hours ago [-]
I really liked the number/name system in SF when I was living there. It was very legible, even if you didn't know the named street, you could quickly dial in to the location by scanning along the numbered street.
Where I live now the streets are 'wavy' and have very long names, usually a person or an auspicious date - and often multiple instances quite nearby. Almost useless for navigation.
I also miss the grid system - traffic naturally gets calmed down, and you are never too far from a cross walk.
Rendered at 01:15:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Yes, it’s sort of convenient at a rational level, but everything appears the same, and there’s no way to differentiate one cross from the next. Streets doesn’t have their own “personality” and you have to learn them by name. I don’t know half of the street names of the city I grew in, but I know where I am by the way they intersect and twist around in interesting shapes…
Or perhaps is just the way I’m used to
In the US, if you're on 89th Street and 5th Avenue, and you want to visit your friend on 10th and 1st Avenue, you'll know exactly which direction to drive. Need to go to another city? Take the highway following the direction the other city is. Americans are typically good at knowing where the sun rises, or are always getting lost.
In Europe, you know your friend lives by the main hospital, so you follow the signs indicating the hospital, and then (if you're lucky) signs to your friend's neighborhood. From there you need to know how to get to the street they live on. Need to get to another city? Follow the highway signs indicating that city, if it's close by, otherwise you'll need to know what cities are on the way to it.
When we lived in the US, I could easily find any address in most cities. My wife was always getting lost, sometimes going to the complete other side of town.
We've been in Europe for over a decade now. She has no problems getting around to most places she needs to. I'm always getting lost going someplace new.
Taxi drivers don't use road signs anymore for figuring out which direction to take.
I've lived in both types of cities, and actually even the most grid cities like Salt Lake City, have parts that are named as opposed to just numbered.
I prefer the numbered cities for finding way around.
Finally I don't think the everything appears the same is integral to it being a grid city, that is instead a side effect of American habits of rebuilding often so you end up with everything relatively new and in the same styles. That is to say the stylistic affect is orthogonal to the grid, although they are both found to coexist this is just a historical coincidence.
>I don’t know half of the street names of the city I grew in, but I know where I am by the way they intersect and twist around in interesting shapes…
I don't know where your city is, but I did notice many years before everyone had a phone I was in a class in Copenhagen and everyone in the class had lived in Copenhagen their whole life and then someone talked about an address and nobody knew where it was so someone had to go out to their car and get a book of maps.
Of course Copenhagen was also built to be potentially confusing to invaders, as I understand it, and I have often thought I was walking towards a particular destination to find I have either been walking away from it or perpendicular to it.
I also find that I prefer websites that are easy to navigate than ones that have character but are confusing. But I do prefer art that is apt to be confusing and intellectually stimulating to things that are simple and clear cut.
I think perhaps the problem is I just don't want going shopping in an unfamiliar part of town to feel like a surrealistic event.
Could it be that you learned the chaotic city better because you were more likely to go around on foot and experience little things, rather than just driving to a box store?
While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more interesting.
[1] https://maps.nls.uk/view/245956114#zoom=6.5&lat=3256&lon=625...
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/8431660 Happens to be near "wood lane". Make of that what you will.
I studied on "Silk Street" which is nearby. Nearby are also "Oat Street", "Bread Street", "Milk street", "Gutter lane", "Goldsmith street", "Poultry" and many more who have old names relating to their function.
I like those but IME most people have no clue what old names mean, they are just sounds associated with a place most of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane
It turns out “grab her by the pussy” has surpringly robust precedent.
Doesn't one of CS Lewis's books have Merlin transported to modern London and he heads off down the Roman roads?
Grid layouts do have efficiency, but humans aren't built to be efficient - at least not all the time.
The problem is suburbs and modern "inefficient" roads are designed to be inefficient - not designed by and for life.
Persistence over time wouldn't make any difference to that case; Merlin is omniscient.
So if you are at 200s in one street and are looking for a house at 1200s, you know you are a kilometer away.
This with numbered streets is awesome to navigate. Buenos Aires has the first, but named streets. La Plata in Argentina has both.
If you are into maps see an air pic of La Plata.
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2X59727/detailed-map-of-la-plata-c...
People name streets (and other things) for other reasons too, often for internal or local reference. This perspective reduces the meaning of naming to a single focus, like saying we name dogs only to allow our guests to refer to them as needed when visiting our homes. We name things for many reasons, and those reasons are more about endearment and culture building at the local level. I recommend Seeing Like a State by James Scott for more discussion, including about street names, exploring this perspective.
(Interestingly, Avenue Q was renamed Quentin Road to avoid confusion with Avenue O.)
Either way, lettered or named in alphabetical order, I appreciate the lettered/numbered combination. It's a good mix of character and practicality, and it sounds good when you say it out loud ("It's at E 14th and K"). The doubly numbered intersections of Queens always drive me nuts.
A final sidenote: some real estate developers in the early 20th century decided to rename sections of E 11th through 16th from Prospect Park South down through West Midwood to fancy-sounding anglicized names like Stratford, Westminster, Argyle, Rugby, and Marlborough (the SWARM backronym here is useful) so they could make more money selling homes on those streets. It worked. Yet another example of nefarious street naming...
Yes, Google maps can do the job, but often times just walking around feels odd.
I find named streets with odds and evens on each end much, much easier to navigate.
Also I want to add that my country uses a system where new pieces of town going beyond the original city plan and house numbering use zero as a leading number for houses going the other way, which is kind of endearing. That way you can have 20 and 020, which leads you to know which way you should be looking for.
Then I moved back to Europe and realized it was a lie. It was just that the grid systems of the places I lived in the US were much easier to navigate.
Going back to "Army" would be silly, especially since the U.S. Army never had a presence on that side of town. It was all Navy near the bay. The Army was up at the Presidio.
SF has this silly thing of giving streets secondary names. Who knows where "Herb Cain Way" or "Isadora Duncan Lane" is?
Numbered streets have their own problems. In San Francisco, 4th St. and 16th St intersect near the UCSF hospital complex.
Some distant suburbs (Du Page County and beyond) use a numbering scheme of xxWyyy where the xx is the number of miles west of State Street (the 0 in the cartesian grid of Chicago) and the yyy is the location within that mile. I don’t think they do anything similar for North-South coordinates though.
The diagonal streets in Chicago largely follow the routes of early non-grid roads of the city (many of which were plank roads run as toll-collecting businesses and followed paths used by the native American tribes living in the area before European settlement.
⸻
1. Hunnerts (from hundreds) being Chicago-speak for the location on a grid. E.g., Chicago Avenue is 800 (eight hunnert) north and Western is 2400 (24 hunnert) west.
2. This is a consequence of history. All the missing numbers (Roosevelt at 12 hunnert south is the first mile, Cermak/22nd street at 22 hunnert south is the second and 31st street at 31 hunnert south the third) do exist,³ but the streets were named and numbered before the replatting established the modern hunnert system.
3. There might not be some of the hunnerts in that first mile—the numbered streets only start after Roosevelt.
4. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’s K-town where the K stands for Korea.
I’m in a suburb of Charleston, SC and it’s so weird how I have no idea how far things are….1 mile? 3 miles? I miss riding my bike on that Portland grid and following the numbers all the way to zero and hitting the Willamette.
In Melbourne the North-South street go: King, William, Queen, Elizabeth, Swanston, Russell. It communicates the commonwealth history and founding history of the city. Cute, but decidedly less useful and memorable than number avenues.
Lower Manhattan also still has a large non-numbered area so you can get the old charm when you want it.
1st through 27th Avenues - they’re over 100 years old now funnily enough
Where I live now the streets are 'wavy' and have very long names, usually a person or an auspicious date - and often multiple instances quite nearby. Almost useless for navigation.
I also miss the grid system - traffic naturally gets calmed down, and you are never too far from a cross walk.