Analysis of street network orientation in cities

Continuing his analysis of street grid-iness in cities around the world, Geoff Boeing sorted cities by the amount of order in their street networks:

Across these study sites, US/Canadian cities have an average orientation-order nearly thirteen-times greater than that of European cities, alongside nearly double the average proportion of four-way intersections. Meanwhile, these European cities’ streets on average are 42% more circuitous than those of the US/Canadian cities. North American cities are far more grid-like than cities in the rest of the world and exhibit far less orientation entropy and street circuity.

Chicago is all grid. Charlotte not so much.

See the detailed study that Boeing published in Applied Network Science.

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Stacked bus routes on a map

Speaking of 3-D usage on maps, here’s a map of bus routes in Singapore stacked one on top of the other. I’m not sure it’s especially useful to find individual routes as intended, but the overall distribution of routes seems like it might be interesting to someone familiar with the area. Or, maybe it’s world’s greatest roller coaster.

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Interactive to see street orientation everywhere

After seeing polar charts of street orientation in major cities, Vladimir Agafonkin, an engineer at Mapbox, implemented an interactive version that lets you see directions for everywhere:

Extracting and processing the road data for every place of interest to generate a polar chart seemed like too much work. Could I do it on an interactive map? It turns out that this is a perfect use case for Mapbox vector maps — since the map data is there on the client, we can analyze and visualize it instantly for any place in the world.

Fun.

So someone’s going to take the next step to rank and rate griddyness around the world, right?

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Street network orientation in major cities

Using OpenStreetMap data, Geoff Boeing charted the orientation distributions of major cities:

Each of the cities above is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. 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.

So you can easily spot the gridded street networks, and then there’s Boston and Charlotte that are a bit nutty. Check out Boeing’s other chart for orientation of major non-US cities.

See also Stephen Von Worley’s color-coded maps and Seth Kadish’s charts from 2014 that showed the same thing but used Census data instead of OpenStreetMap.

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