I did a comparison of city street network orientations in major US cities, and now I've got a better sense of why I find Boston so difficult to navigate. Visualization uses Python, OSMnx, and @OpenStreetMap data.
geoffboeing.com/2018/07/compar…
geoffboeing.com/2018/07/compar…
And woe to those trying to navigate the city of Charlotte.
Each of the cities is represented by a polar histogram. Each bar's direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings.
For example, Manhattan's famous angled, primarily orthogonal street grid:
Detroit is interesting because it has two separate orthogonal grids, one a slight rotation of the other:
And then there's Boston. Although it has a grid in some neighborhoods, they tend to not align with each another, resulting in a mish-mash of competing orientations. Plus these grids are not ubiquitous and Boston's other streets wind in many directions.
Kevin Lynch defined "legible" cities as those whose patterns lend themselves to coherent, organized, recognizable, and comprehensible images that help us mentally organize city space, find our way, and develop a sense of place.
But what Boston lacks in legible circulation patterns, it makes up for in other Lynchian elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks) that help make it a highly imageable city for locals and visitors. From Lynch:
All the code to reproduce this visualization is available online here: github.com/gboeing/osmnx-…
By popular request, here's a quick follow-up comparison of street network orientations in cities around the world: geoffboeing.com/2018/07/city-s…
