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Dear Americans
Please have a look at Lucerne
You’re welcome
The beaked Warhammer?
Looks wonderful to walk around.
How about a grid system that changes direction at every single avenue?
Looks like everyone started a new road perpendicular to the shore line, and the mess occurred when the roads got long enough to meet.
Bingo. Allow me to introduce you to the colonial French seigneurial system.
No they’re were designed that way. The names remain the same no matter how many times they turn. The street i live on starts off going west, then south, then south west and back to west again on the other side of town.
Still a better system than Boston, having navigated both MANY times. To call Boston’s streets a “system” is an insult to the very concept of order.
Speaking as someone who has been living in towns with rivers for most of my life:
This is the way.
My experience clearly says that you will loose orientation and get confused the moment you go to a district that is not alligned with the riverbank.
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.
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
You don’t need curves to slow traffic, there a ton of ways to slow 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
Yeah, pedestrians aren’t really a consideration in this kind of town planning.
If they were, they would’ve put in sidewalks. Which they didn’t.
Can’t really have it both ways.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Sure but you’ll never encounter the magic of a crooked alley snaking its way through a maze of medieval building.
Istanbul blew my naive American mind when I visited
Tunis, Tunisia. The old town was something else.
Not medieval, but, Boston has some good alleys, nooks, and crannies.
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.
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
Not better:
What’s this?
A common American suburban development
A “modern” design, the current trend of shitty suburban layout that seems to be the alternative to the grid layout complained about.
so fucking much better!
But why? Name one reason it’s better besides your personal aesthetic preferences
Edit: I appreciate everyone’s measured responses. Thank you for answering my question, and not escalating my ill-advised knee-jerk comment. I stand corrected :)
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.
No constant traffic near your house (cleaner air, safer streets).
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.)
The kinda shit I do in cities skylines when I get bored
Or cities skylines 2 because the grid system is shit and breaks if you sneezed in the last decade.
Is it still shit?
I was hoping it was going to do a No Man’s Sky.
It’s getting much better. It’s not perfect yet. It’s not even as good as cities 1. But it’s much better than launch.
There’s still some hope with new company but it really feels like a cracked gamble. I’ll check back in September… again…
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.
There has to be some interesting history here.
A few other examples have been posted, but this is easily the wildest. It’s not even the same aspect ratio of grid, or at a normal angle to the rest, or over a very significant area. (And they’ve still managed to tie it in reasonably well)
I think that area was built when nothing else was there, without the developer thinking too hard about its orientation.
As time went on, new development started nearby, oriented to a different geographic element, like a shoreline, or a river, etc. eventually that development met the old development, and they were lined up differently, and the municipality stuck with the new grid system orientation and just built around the old one.
Yeah, someone deciding to clear out an area and develop it in a completely different way is possible, I guess, but seems a lot less likely. Maybe there’s a bit of both - something large like horse stables or a hospital was there, then it was replaced with a new self-contained development, and then they built out into the margin around it later on yet.
In any case, somebody had a big urban planning idea of some kind, but it hasn’t really continued to make sense as things changed. The angle could just be because one grid is aligned true north, and the other magnetic north.
To me what’s wild about it is that it’s completely filled with houses, and the houses seem to all respect the orientation of the nearest street.
You’d think that they’d say “Ok, well in this section we have these two roads coming at a narrow angle, let’s just make this a park”, or something to make the places where the two grids join a little less ugly.
Mandatory car dependency hurts, yes, everybody.
Unrelated but, Theres a section of Prince George Canada that all of a sudden does a big U. The story i was told is that back in the day there were two competing railway companies, and one of them bought enough influence that when the city was making roads to the other company, they instead made the roads bend back.
Damn, capitalism is fucked up
Would make sense to avoid people driving through the area. Grid patterns in general are kinda bad when it comes to traffic
Downtown Denver:
At least with places like Denver and other western cities it’s pretty straightforward how it happened - everything built along the river. Access to the river was key.
Being a boom/bust city means that a much later boom they adjusted.
Then even older cities (think Boston) grew before any opportunity at planning could happen.
Denver was two cities - Auraria (correction from Aurora thanks to @negativenull) and Denver. One was built to align with the river, the other with compass points and then they grew big enough to smush into each other and neither was willing to concede to the other.
Also Denver’s namesake, a Kansas politician, never even visited. It was a failed attempt to lure him here.
(minor correction: Auraria was the name:
https://www.uncovercolorado.com/auraria-colorado-history/ )OMG thank you - brain fart on my part!
This is the part in Sim City where I restart.
Aw, now I miss Sim City 2000
Sim City 4 is the best version of the Sim City games, and is 75% off on GOG right now, $5 / £4.
Cities Skylines 1 is the best modern city builder, 3D and a lot of fun plus well designed. But only really worth it when it’s on sale; lots of DLC and overpriced as a package when not on sale. Avoid Cities Skylines 2 - it’s just not fun and hasn’t been fixed - maybe they will one day fix but I doubt it 2.5 years in…
Pssst…just pirate it with all DLC.
The original developer has literally been pulled off of Cities Skylines 2. Maybe the little developer that Paradox put on it to crank out DLCs will do a good job and fix it, but I doubt it.
Imagine what Cities Skylines could have been without Paradox’s super monetization plan
Lol I was just thinking “this sounds like Stellaris” then you say it’s Paradox
Cities and Skylines isn’t too far off from that sim city 2000 vibe, if you need a fix
The GoG version of SimCity 2000 runs fine in wine. The originals, not so much.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=504
I’ll check that out! Thanks for the rec!
Just avoid cities skylines 2. It’s just a cash grab
IMO the painful thing about it is that it was clearly just too ambitious of a simulation and they made it unmanageable, so then they backpedaled and made it too easy by having a lot of the systems automatically balance themselves (electricity from neighboring cities, for instance)
My favorite is how 15th St just boings off of Colfax (15th ave)
I can’t see the pic in your comment, but I am gonna guess Broadway and Lincoln between 19th and 20th?
Interestingly enough, Denver has 3 main grids:
The range and township grid as the typical NS/EW grid, the Araria grid by DU which is largely built over, and the downtown grid, the last two of which are aligned to Cherry Creek and the Platte River, though I’m not certain which one to which waterway. If it wasn’t for one-ways, that area would be screwed up beyond belief. As it stands, it just looks a little odd and everyone needs to try to pick their lanes in advance. :D
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.
*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
The misuse of the word is intentional and part of the joke. An artifact from reddit.
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.
They probably did it so they could squeeze one more house in when building the track.
