By popular request, this is a quick follow-up to this post comparing the orientation of streets in 25 US cities using Python and OSMnx. Here are 25 more cities around the world:
And for reference, here’s the original that looked only at American cities:
For more info, check out the original post or this post about OSMnx.
I’d love to see Tokyo.
Even better, I’d love to see Tokyo as well as Kyoto, because the history of the planning for those two cities is so different!
I second this, I came on here specifically looking for Tokyo because I know from experience its streets are crazy.
I think that Tokyo would be similar to Seoul, as both have streets going in just about every direction.
Jakarta and Honolulu would be neat to see too.
Check out La plata argentina. Its got a crazy grid to the city proper.
I came to make the same proposal. I am platense too
Do you have the notebook you used for these cities online somewhere?
Yes. See link at end of post.
may it be that for Rome you have considered the whole province or Rome and not just the city?
Would also be interested in seeing Istanbul
I’ve created the chart for Turkey:
https://i.hizliresim.com/VDPJ6y.png
I’m surprised about İstanbul. I would have expected it to center more on the 45s due to the Bosporus and the marmara sea not running north-south.
Me too! It’s got so many grids that are in so many different directions, I wonder what the average of them all ends up being.
Cape Town and Johannesburg, please!
Most of Melbourne’s grid was laid out according to magnetic north, not true north, hence the ~8 degree rotation.
Love to see differences between unplanned and planned cities, ordered by date of fundations (for example cities from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community)
It would be interesting to compare the city street orientation to traffic accident rate. I have witnessed several accidents where the driver claimed to be vision-impaired by sunlight.
A street orientation like in Barcelona would solve that problem.
Seasonal variation in sunrise / sunset azimuth would mean you’d still get Barcelona winter sunrise heading southeast in the morning and sunset heading southwest in the evening
Is there a way of automating this histogram generator to allow people to pick the cities they care about?
Yes. See link to the code at the end of the post.
Where precisely is the link, At the end of WHAT post?
Sorry, the original post. Here’s the link itself: https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx-examples/blob/master/notebooks/17-street-network-orientations.ipynb
Many cities with medieval origins have essentially a polar coordinate system with a central square (often at a church) and some roads in the “spoke” direction and others in the “circumference” direction. An analysis of cities based on Cartesian coordinates will not do the regular order of these cities justice.
This is certainly the case for Paris, which is perfectly “legible” when understood as wheels and spokes divided into inner and outer slices (arrondissement).
It would be interesting to have direction of major geographical feature on the plots.
Clearly New York and Barcelona are based on the sea shore.
While Budapest and Warsaw on the main river.
How did you get Glasgow to work? When I substitute it into your notebook it returns a point geometry at the gdf_from_places call and then fails in graph_from_place.
I believe the query string was ‘Glasgow, Scotland, UK’
Hmmm. That still returns a point for me. I also tried
‘Glasgow, UK’
‘Glasgow, Scotland’
‘Glasgow’
Each returned ‘Glasgow, Glasgow City, Scotland, G, UK’ as the place_name in the table & POINT (-4.2435817 55.856656) as geometry after gdf_from_places call.
Ah, then it looks like the query is ‘Glasgow City, Scotland, UK’.
Cairo is only vaguely aligned along the cardinal directions because of the Nile.
Would love to see Chandigarh
Toronto is the best city ever.
The São Paulo, in Brazil, city is not fit in the graphic
I suggest for a fun American city try New Orleans. The lack of cardinality here is no notorious that no one uses the cardinal directions. The curvature of the river forces a lot of changes in the grid orientation of the city.
Try Varanasi in India. Difficult to imagine any planning
I’d love to see these charts ordered by the founding date of that city
Thanks for sharing your interesting work! Can we assume that some cities are originally designed for cars (driving from one place to another easily) and some cities are not? For example, Atlanta versus Rome or Denver versus Paris?
Vienna, Austria would be interesting since it is relatively regular but expands from a central point, especially from the older parts of the city.
As you get to what some may call suburbs (not like those in the USA, but rather far more residential than non-residential) things change a bit, partially due to geography and more modern ideals.