The Orientation Of Streets In Major Cities, Visualized
What would happen if every one of a city's streets intersected at exactly one point? It would be a nightmare for rush-hour traffic, sure, but it's a great way to visualize the orientation of a city's streets. This type of visualization is known as a polar histogram, and urban planning professor Geoff Boeing put together 25 of them to give us a sense of how messed up (or not messed up) America's major cities are. (Longer bars indicate more streets running in that direction; shorter bars indicate fewer streets running in that direction.)
As you can see, a whole lot of American cities adhere pretty well to a north-south, east-west grid! Surprisingly, New York isn't one of them — despite its streets' reputation for reflecting the cardinal directions, Manhattan's grid is actually skewed to the east — thanks to Manhattan's eastward tilt.
And then there's Boston, which is… a real outlier. Boeing explains why Beantown's polar histogram looks like a broken pinwheel:
Although it features a grid in some neighborhoods like the Back Bay and South Boston, these grids tend to not be aligned with one another, resulting in a mish-mash of competing orientations. Furthermore, these grids are not ubiquitous and Boston's other streets wind in many directions. If you're going north and then take a right turn, you might know that you are immediately heading east, but it's hard to know where you're eventually really heading in the long run.
But it turns out the rest of the world is even less organized than we are!
If you're planning a trip to Paris, Rome or Seoul anytime soon, make sure you have a data plan that lets you access Google Maps while abroad, because you are definitely getting lost otherwise.
