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Indianapolis built the central mile square of streets aligned with magnetic north, but then the rest of downtown aligned with true north. It’s almost aligned, which causes problems at that border.
I’ve lived here for years and never realized that’s why everything in the center looked slightly off center. Thanks!
I lived downtown for a couple of years and drove north on Illinois street to get to work. This swerve as it crossed 16th street and the corresponding confusion to drivers just about killed me a few times.
Ugh that grid pattern. Imagine living somewhere so uninspired.
Have you considered maybe it’s easier to navigate and plan a grid pattern? I wouldn’t mind uninspired street names like 1st, 2nd, 3rd St, crossways with N, O, P, Q Ave so you at least know which direction is which. Give me that chess board layout so I don’t need to pull up a map to navigate your city please. Car C1 takes Bar G5
Yes! I can get up so much speed on those straight roads! Blow through a few stop signs and I can easily drive all the way through a house!
Easy navigation isn’t relevant in a neighborhood of nothing but houses and play space, roads with curves are incredibly important to slow the flow of traffic
There’s a flipside too though. Straight lines aren’t great for suburbs for the speed reason, but once you reach enough density and the roads get narrow enough, grids make planning easier, and navigating easier for pedestrians. Roundabouts are a nice way to slow traffic through straight roads
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Straight roads have little to do with driver speed. It’s how you design the roads. Wide lanes with buildings set back from the road? Higher speeds. That’s why some initiatives put curbs that jut out into the road (not into the lanes of travel) with trees and plants and such, and remove road striping. Combine pedestrians and road traffic on a road that looks more like a parking lot and you get drivers driving slowly. Sounds counter-intuitive, but it works.
Ok? So put straight roads in your cities and high density areas. Neighborhoods of just houses aren’t what you’re describing
There are residential neighborhoods in cities though, where straight roads with roundabouts and other traffic calming makes more sense than a curving a road, for the purposes of lowering driving speeds. Neither is better or worse inherently, we should just tailor solutions to the environment they’re needed in.
You don’t need curves to slow traffic, there a ton of ways to slow traffic
Over here in 2026 we have satnav in our cars and on our bikes. We also have a system of road types that actually makes sense and that keeps traffic out of housed areas as much as possible.
You have to understand that there are places in the USA where “city planning” is completely unheard of. They seem to let landowners develop however the fuck they want. They end up with grids of identical houses with little thought of connections to services such as shopping, healthcare, recreation, etc.
Sure but you’ll never encounter the magic of a crooked alley snaking its way through a maze of medieval building.
Not medieval, but, Boston has some good alleys, nooks, and crannies.
Istanbul blew my naive American mind when I visited
Tunis, Tunisia. The old town was something else.
Kenosha, WI
and then 14th SE doesnt connect with 14th NE
thanks portland
My city has a street that changes name 4 times as you go down it.
Are you in Austin? Because Austin has that.
Which part of Koenig/2222/Northland/Allandale/Bullick Hollow/290 do you live on?
Between Burnet and Lamar
Lexington, KY? They have several that do that.
Better than Atlanta that names every road Peachtree :)
Japan doesn’t even bother with street names, except the largest ones in big cities. If you want to find a house, they are also not necessarily numbered sequentially. Sometimes the houses in a neighborhood are numbered in the order they were built.
If you want to find a house, you go to the neighborhood map and look there. At least, that’s how it used to be. Now everything is GPS. I was using GPS in a car close to 30 years ago, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the first place in the world to have consumer GPS, simply because they needed it.
Have you considered maybe it’s easier to navigate and plan a grid pattern?
With every corner looking the same?
Only from above. When you’re on foot, grid systems feel plenty variable and lively
Better than living nowhere!
Not better:
What’s this?
A “modern” design, the current trend of shitty suburban layout that seems to be the alternative to the grid layout complained about.
A common American suburban development
so fucking much better!
But why? Name one reason it’s better besides your personal aesthetic preferences
No constant traffic near your house (cleaner air, safer streets).
Doesn’t require speed bumps to slow down the dregs of society.
The ability to walk or cycle somewhere without crossing 4-way intersections constantly.
Why? It IS about my aesthetic preferences :)
I like when everywhere in a place is different and memorable.
If you like samey grids I have no reason not to respect that, but I wholeheartedly disagree.
Agreed. Same car dependency grid but from different socioeconomic posh level.
(Actually the density is lower, so as a suburb it’s worse & traveling distances/city area larger.)
Lived on a grid the last 15 years and it objectively rules. The “objectively” part is the appreciating property values of the home I just sold, which outpaced those of cul-de-sac homes is my area over that same timeframe. Grid gang 4 lyfe
Are those the two options, grid or cul-de-sac
It’s a Moiré!
🎶 where the streets have no name…🎶
If anything a perfect grid would be mildly infuriating, it’s more interesting this way
Dear Americans
Please have a look at Lucerne
You’re welcome
The beaked Warhammer?
Looks wonderful to walk around.
Our house is on a slanty road and I’ve never lived on one before, my mind rejects it. The CORNERS of the house point in cardinal directions. It’s because we are near a river, some of the streets in my neighborhood follow its course, which right here runs southwest.
I just have to stop and think every time. Because I have only stayed on N-S or E-W roads my mind thinks our walls ought to be along those lines. I have to point at the corner and say NORTH out loud more often than you’d think.
You would not thrive in one of our small towns.
Eh, it’s not the fact that it’s not on a grid layout. It’s the fact that it is mostly on a grid layout.
Hünsborn looks lovely and organically developed in a hilly region.
That area in Florida is flat as fuck and was probably some codger who wouldn’t sell until well after everything else was built up.
May I ask a question about German addresses? Here, they go up and up as you move out from the center of town - we have a zero/zero, so to speak, at one corner, and if you live at 100 N, you are one block north of center. So if you are 100 blocks north of center you live at 10000. I lived at 1500 E on 15th St I’d be 15 blocks away in two directions from that central point.
Our German addresses are always like 6, never a big number. How?
I have marked all homes that belong to one street in one color. The address is Town, Road, House number. So, Hünsborn, Steimelstraße 32, for example.
But are none of the streets long enough to end up with a 1867, or whatever?
Had to Google, the highest number in Germany is apparently 1501 in a street in Cologn. But yes, you are right, streets are usually not long enough to reach such high numbers.
Most American cities use a distance or block system.
Most European cities use the odd/even system. Each plot increase by two on either side, so one side of the road has 1,3,5… and the other has 2,4,6…
If a plot is later subdivided or more housses are built on a plot, it’s new addresses will get post-fixed letters a,b,c,d…
Serious question: Why do you need to remind yourself where north is in your house? Is this important somehow?
Just a curious European here who thinks about cardinal directions about once a year…
I am not good with left and right, mostly orient myself in the world using north, south, east, west and it is oddly disorienting to be on the diagonal road, my mind keeps wanting to think of it as a north-south road. Until I can FEEL it I keep saying it. The corners of the house are the compass points. My work office right now also is set diagonally like that!
Mandatory car dependency hurts, yes, everybody.
Is this the most efficient way to store 17 houses?
Waffle.
So much more room for delicious maple syrup.
Here’s another one:
Missoula, MT
Inb4 Hank Green does a video about this.
It’s actually a good story, too. I’m on mobile and not really qualified to tell it, however.
It was a golf course. A sex golf course. For ghosts!
Two lawyers got in a pissing contest on developing the land they owned.
My great-grandfather apparently had a story about it. It involved lots of booze, a prostitute, and a horse. Then again most of his stories had the same theme so the truthfulness of the story is up for debate.
Missoula is a bit odd on a few things. I attended Hellgate elementary - yes that’s the name of the school.
It’s called being optimal sweaty.
That’s having a thin layer of liquid perspiration that’s constantly boiling off and evaporating
This is what I immediately thought of. I actually thought it was an AI construction, as a joke.
Sweety.
Optional sweaty is the perfect amount of perspiration to have upon one’s person.
The misuse of the word is intentional and part of the joke. An artifact from reddit.
*Optimal
Optional sweater is when you choose to perspire
*sweaty
Optional Sweater is when you have the exact correct sweater for the occasion
*sweaty
Opinionated sweater is when somebody offers to refund the sweater they gave you as a gift
Optimal. Optical sweaty is the choice of whether or not one would like to be perspiring.
Optional. Optical sweaty is when you are so sad that your eyes start to vacuum tears.
Optimus. Optical sweaty is when you are more than meets the eye.
Looks like it went askew between 1943 and 1949
Would make sense to avoid people driving through the area. Grid patterns in general are kinda bad when it comes to traffic
This was the intern using grid north instead of magnetic north, maybe?
One neighborhood in my town has streets at just the perfect angle for the winter sun to line up in the afternoon.
Maybe everything depends on whatever rule of thumb some 18th century surveyor heard was in style.
