I love their use of the word legible. A good street naming system makes the city “legible”.
I’m in a suburb of Charleston, SC and it’s so weird how I have no idea how far things are….1 mile? 3 miles? I miss riding my bike on that Portland grid and following the numbers all the way to zero and hitting the Willamette.
Hahaha OMG I lived in Bogota for three months, and boy, it took me a while to wire up my brain to deal with Carreras and Calles. In principle should be easy, just horizontal and vertical coordinates, north, south, east, west... if you live in a chess board is bread and butter for Margnus Carlsen, but cities are not build like that, so you do end up in streets that you mentally mapped in a way and would land you blocks from where you planned to be.
Yes, Google maps can do the job, but often times just walking around feels odd.
I find named streets with odds and evens on each end much, much easier to navigate.
Also I want to add that my country uses a system where new pieces of town going beyond the original city plan and house numbering use zero as a leading number for houses going the other way, which is kind of endearing. That way you can have 20 and 020, which leads you to know which way you should be looking for.
I find some joy in historical street naming. It's nice that you can take a 1746 map of London and pretty much still be able to get around.[1] Would certainly make life easier for time travellers.
While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more interesting.
I may be very European, and grew up in a relatively chaotic city, but I find quite confusing when I’m on a grid city.
Yes, it’s sort of convenient at a rational level, but everything appears the same, and there’s no way to differentiate one cross from the next. Streets doesn’t have their own “personality” and you have to learn them by name. I don’t know half of the street names of the city I grew in, but I know where I am by the way they intersect and twist around in interesting shapes…
In Northwest Portlnd, Oregon the East-west streets were originally letters. A st, B st, C st, etc. They were renamed after people but they kept the first letter, so now its Ankeny, Burnside, Couch, Davis, Everett, Flanders, Gleason, Hoyt, Irving, Johnson... They get to have it both ways, and they could be renamed if there was a desire to do so without impeding the general purpose. (One of my joking tests to see if someone is a True Portlander is if they can get up to Marshall, Northrup, Overton, etc.)
SF should just name it "Chavez", as a convenience. Lots of people are named Chavez. No rush. Shorten the signs as they are routinely replaced.
Going back to "Army" would be silly, especially since the U.S. Army never had a presence on that side of town. It was all Navy near the bay. The Army was up at the Presidio.
SF has this silly thing of giving streets secondary names. Who knows where "Herb Cain Way" or "Isadora Duncan Lane" is?
Numbered streets have their own problems. In San Francisco, 4th St. and 16th St intersect near the UCSF hospital complex.
Washington DC is even better — streets with a number run north-south, streets with letter run east-west, and each address has a suffix indicating which direction it is from the capitol.
I lived in Calgary for 4 years before we had smart phones w/ maps. The grid system was amazing, it was like being able to give easily processed human GPS coordinates. "Let's meet at 7th Ave and 9th Street." Done!
Some Latin American cities were designed as grids (100m x 100m squares), and numbering of blocks spans a hundred per block (first block is 0 to 100 house numbers).
So if you are at 200s in one street and are looking for a house at 1200s, you know you are a kilometer away.
This with numbered streets is awesome to navigate. Buenos Aires has the first, but named streets. La Plata in Argentina has both.
Chicago is like this, there are numbered streets on the south side, but all the streets on the north and west sides are named, however they're very good about putting the grid numbers on the named street signs, so it's easy to figure out where you are. 100 addresses per block, 8 blocks to a mile, so if I'm at Western and Belmont, that's 2400W 3200N, so 3 miles west and 4 miles north of downtown. All the Metro stations list the grid numbers on the signs at the exits too
I really liked the number/name system in SF when I was living there. It was very legible, even if you didn't know the named street, you could quickly dial in to the location by scanning along the numbered street.
Where I live now the streets are 'wavy' and have very long names, usually a person or an auspicious date - and often multiple instances quite nearby. Almost useless for navigation.
I also miss the grid system - traffic naturally gets calmed down, and you are never too far from a cross walk.
> But before we do that, we should think for a moment about what streetnames are for. They are for helping people navigate the city.
People name streets (and other things) for other reasons too, often for internal or local reference. This perspective reduces the meaning of naming to a single focus, like saying we name dogs only to allow our guests to refer to them as needed when visiting our homes. We name things for many reasons, and those reasons are more about endearment and culture building at the local level. I recommend Seeing Like a State by James Scott for more discussion, including about street names, exploring this perspective.
Having grown up in and lived most of my life in the Chicago area, the rationality of the grid system is rather nice. If you know your “hunnerts”¹ you can find anything. Every 8 hunnerts is a mile except for the first three miles south of Madison where the streets are numbered.² A handful of suburbs use numbered streets for north-south streets (Cicero and Elmwood Park—maybe others but those are the ones I know). In the city, there was a plan to have north-south streets named with the first letter indicating the distance in miles from the Indiana border, but it only really starts with “K-town”⁴ between Pulaski and Cicero Avenues and while most streets follow the pattern, it’s not universal.
Some distant suburbs (Du Page County and beyond) use a numbering scheme of xxWyyy where the xx is the number of miles west of State Street (the 0 in the cartesian grid of Chicago) and the yyy is the location within that mile. I don’t think they do anything similar for North-South coordinates though.
The diagonal streets in Chicago largely follow the routes of early non-grid roads of the city (many of which were plank roads run as toll-collecting businesses and followed paths used by the native American tribes living in the area before European settlement.
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1. Hunnerts (from hundreds) being Chicago-speak for the location on a grid. E.g., Chicago Avenue is 800 (eight hunnert) north and Western is 2400 (24 hunnert) west.
2. This is a consequence of history. All the missing numbers (Roosevelt at 12 hunnert south is the first mile, Cermak/22nd street at 22 hunnert south is the second and 31st street at 31 hunnert south the third) do exist,³ but the streets were named and numbered before the replatting established the modern hunnert system.
3. There might not be some of the hunnerts in that first mile—the numbered streets only start after Roosevelt.
4. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’s K-town where the K stands for Korea.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 34.0 ms ] threadI’m in a suburb of Charleston, SC and it’s so weird how I have no idea how far things are….1 mile? 3 miles? I miss riding my bike on that Portland grid and following the numbers all the way to zero and hitting the Willamette.
Yes, Google maps can do the job, but often times just walking around feels odd.
I find named streets with odds and evens on each end much, much easier to navigate.
Also I want to add that my country uses a system where new pieces of town going beyond the original city plan and house numbering use zero as a leading number for houses going the other way, which is kind of endearing. That way you can have 20 and 020, which leads you to know which way you should be looking for.
While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more interesting.
[1] https://maps.nls.uk/view/245956114#zoom=6.5&lat=3256&lon=625...
Yes, it’s sort of convenient at a rational level, but everything appears the same, and there’s no way to differentiate one cross from the next. Streets doesn’t have their own “personality” and you have to learn them by name. I don’t know half of the street names of the city I grew in, but I know where I am by the way they intersect and twist around in interesting shapes…
Or perhaps is just the way I’m used to
Going back to "Army" would be silly, especially since the U.S. Army never had a presence on that side of town. It was all Navy near the bay. The Army was up at the Presidio.
SF has this silly thing of giving streets secondary names. Who knows where "Herb Cain Way" or "Isadora Duncan Lane" is?
Numbered streets have their own problems. In San Francisco, 4th St. and 16th St intersect near the UCSF hospital complex.
So if you are at 200s in one street and are looking for a house at 1200s, you know you are a kilometer away.
This with numbered streets is awesome to navigate. Buenos Aires has the first, but named streets. La Plata in Argentina has both.
If you are into maps see an air pic of La Plata.
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2X59727/detailed-map-of-la-plata-c...
Where I live now the streets are 'wavy' and have very long names, usually a person or an auspicious date - and often multiple instances quite nearby. Almost useless for navigation.
I also miss the grid system - traffic naturally gets calmed down, and you are never too far from a cross walk.
People name streets (and other things) for other reasons too, often for internal or local reference. This perspective reduces the meaning of naming to a single focus, like saying we name dogs only to allow our guests to refer to them as needed when visiting our homes. We name things for many reasons, and those reasons are more about endearment and culture building at the local level. I recommend Seeing Like a State by James Scott for more discussion, including about street names, exploring this perspective.
Some distant suburbs (Du Page County and beyond) use a numbering scheme of xxWyyy where the xx is the number of miles west of State Street (the 0 in the cartesian grid of Chicago) and the yyy is the location within that mile. I don’t think they do anything similar for North-South coordinates though.
The diagonal streets in Chicago largely follow the routes of early non-grid roads of the city (many of which were plank roads run as toll-collecting businesses and followed paths used by the native American tribes living in the area before European settlement.
⸻
1. Hunnerts (from hundreds) being Chicago-speak for the location on a grid. E.g., Chicago Avenue is 800 (eight hunnert) north and Western is 2400 (24 hunnert) west.
2. This is a consequence of history. All the missing numbers (Roosevelt at 12 hunnert south is the first mile, Cermak/22nd street at 22 hunnert south is the second and 31st street at 31 hunnert south the third) do exist,³ but the streets were named and numbered before the replatting established the modern hunnert system.
3. There might not be some of the hunnerts in that first mile—the numbered streets only start after Roosevelt.
4. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’s K-town where the K stands for Korea.