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…
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://maps.nls.uk/view/245956114#zoom=6.5&lat=3256&lon=625...
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).
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.
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.
Niel Gaiman's Neverwhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwhere_(novel)
Imagine finding this in the US...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane
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.
Indeed.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If you are into maps see an air pic of La Plata.
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2X59727/detailed-map-of-la-plata-c...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
The alphabetical streets in the Richmond and Sunset districts of San Francisco do a similar thing
We don't do this numbered street thing very much in Australia and manage to get around ok.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.