I’ve lived almost all of my life in the Midwest, where the streets run North to South or East to West. My hometown actually had North, South, East and West Main streets. And it’s easy to just take that for granted, that all streets are the same.
But they’re not.
“These street networks organize all the human activity and circulation in the city,” said Boeing. “I think these visuals can help make otherwise dry or technical city planning concepts more salient and approachable for laypersons. You can easily see and comprehend your own city and how it relates to others’ patterns.”
It works by using an old geography technique: the “polar” or circular chart. Boeing’s tool calculates what percentage of a city’s roads run along each section of a compass, and plots it on a circular bar chart. The island of Manhattan, for example, runs from south-southwest to north-northeast, and most of its streets are parallel or perpendicular to the island in a regular grid. Boeing’s program visualizes that as four long bars, with several shorter bars representing the borough’s minority of streets that don’t line up with the grid, as illustrated in the circular pattern below.
— Visualizing the Hidden ‘Logic’ of Cities – CityLab – Pocket
So this is a pretty cool tool: Road Orientations Interactive Map. Flip around the map and find where you live, and you can see the pattern your town makes. Then flip to another part of the world and see how the pattern changes. Cities are neat.