• Catoblepas
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    5 months ago

    I might be a moron here, but I have no idea how to interpret this. Is each blue bar the proportion of streets that run in that direction? Do the ones that just have a single bar at N/E/S/W have perfectly aligned streets that only go in the cardinal directions?

    • Bezier@suppo.fi
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      32
      ·
      5 months ago

      Here’s a portion of detroit:

      The city is almost entirely grid, some of it at an angle. You can see these two grids visualized in the post.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        Seattle too has a section that’s perfectly n/s. It was built upon infill created by destroying larger hills, flattening the city and filling in the bays. The older city is canted off at a strange angle, you can see the streets change directions at denny way near downtown.

        Outside the downtown corridor everything is aligned NS iirc.

    • lemming@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      5 months ago

      Also, how is the direction assigned? Especially for streets that are not straight? For example taking a beginning and end and measuring their angle wouldn’t be very representative. And how does it work with long and short streets? Are longer more heavily represented, or do they count the same? I’d like it if it took a tangent to the street every 100 m or so, but somehow I doubt that’s what they did.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      5 months ago

      This might not be the best representation if you’re trying to depict “good” cities. Madrid is famous for having a very centrally planned and carefully considered grid, and yet the graph here looks like a mess.