The video editing has become a bit overwhelming as our days have become very densely packed. While that’s going on, here’s a video on the street system in the US:
England generally doesn’t organise cities into ‘blocks’ as they mostly evolved from smaller settlements. Consequently, the streets tend to radiate out from centres and snake around geographical features.
US cities are planned and the streets are organised around the grid system (partly thanks to Thomas Jefferson). The crucial element is that in one direction, the streets are numbered, rather than named, making it a map index. It makes it possible to use a street number and the name of the intersecting street (so far I’ve seen those called ‘avenue’) to pinpoint a location in a city.
I very much like this.
Be careful with generalizing. You may get lost in your travels.
Not all US cities are like that – and usually only the downtown portion is on the grid. Even then there is a lot of variations, my city’s downtown has the grid – numbers go one way and streets mostly named after presidents (e.g., Jefferson Street) go the other and then we have random ones like A, B, C (didn’t know they existed till I look at the map today), Grace, Court, Church etc.
and the rest of the city is a bit wacko, I’m on a “drive” – and jutting off my drive is a “circle” with the same name. we can have a street, road, avenue etc all with the same name. You can follow a road to where you think it ends but you actually have to make a right turn go 20 feet and then turn left in order to continue on the same “road”.
So check maps carefully for each new city. My city may not be the only wacko one.
(I think I’m caught up on your blog now :))
I like getting lost! It’s the best part of the travels 🙂
The places we have gone so far have had grid systems though I am told that older parts of the country in the East have more diverse road systems and I’m looking forward to visiting them. Of course geographical features like rivers and cliffs must complicate things and I haven’t quite got the hang of the north, south, east and west extensions to the street numbers, either.
Thank you for reading the blog. If you have any recommendations of cities to visit, that would be very helpful.
DC’s grid is complicated and wonderfully so!
We start with two meridian streets – Capitol St runs north-south in the center of the city, and Constitution Ave runs east-west through the government part of town. Every street is then named for which quadrant of the resulting grid it falls in. We number the north-south streets going outwards from Capitol St, so west of Capitol, you’ll have 20th St SW, which becomes 20th St NW when it crosses Constitution Ave. East of Capitol St, you’ll have 20th St SE which becomes 20th St NE when it crosses Constitution Ave. The east-west streets are letters outward from Constitution, so E St NW becomes E St NE when it crosses Capitol St, and E St SW becomes E St SE when it crosses Capitol.
Then, there are way more streets to the north of Constitution than there are letters in the alphabet. So after W St, they skip XYZ and we get Adams St, Belmont St, Clifton St, Douglas St etc., all two-syllable last names in alphabetical order. When we run out of those, it switches to Alison, Buchanan, Crittenden, Decatur, and so forth. After the 3-syllable name, it switches over to trees and plants: Aspen, Butternut, Cedar, Delilah. (This part of the city is also more divided into neighborhood pockets, so the streets don’t run the full width of the city and the same letter might be used more than once in different neighborhoods for non-connecting streets that are roughly the same latitude as each other – Chaplin, Clifton, and College are all at roughly the same distance north of Constitution but each runs only for a handful of blocks in different neighborhoods.)
Finally, there are a bunch of diagonal streets named after states – Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Hampshire, Georgia, Florida, Connecticut, and Wisconsin are some of the heaviest-traveled routes into the city and these diagonal streets tend to be wider with more traffic lights and fewer stop signs. They also are the streets most likely to make use of traffic circles, often with monuments in the center of the circles.
Although it’s a bit ridiculously complicated, I’ve always appreciated that once you learn this arcane system you can hear virtually any DC address and have a rough sense of where it should be on a map. The layout was designed by Pierre L’Enfant and makes use of “sacred geometry” and golden ratios concerning the angles the diagonal streets run at and the distances and angles between key locations.
Thank you for the detailed explanation. It speaks of an enlightened, revolutionary attitude that something as raucous as a city could be systematised and optimised.
Arcane? Complicated? Not at all: It’s genius!
When I realised the utility of the numbering I was then wondering how the other axis could also be ordered. Of course, alphabetical order is the obvious solution. And I like the diagonals, too.
I don’t think the cardinal directions are as clearly laid out in other cities. In older places that we have been travelling, they don’t match up as neatly. We also visited some newer developments that had been deliberately designed in an ungrid fashion.
You’ve got me reading about L’Enfant now and I like what I read. He even originally named Capitol Hill as “Jenkins Hill” which, of course, is a much better name.
Ahaha, I didn’t even know that about Capitol Hill! Brilliant.