The two cities that stand out for their directional noise are Boston and Charlotte. Its imposition can be seen ‘in action’ in the diagram for Detroit: originally oriented northeast-southwest on the riverfront, its later expansion was executed in line with the standard Jeffersonian grid, using Eight Mile Road as is baseline. The American grid system was codified by Thomas Jefferson and became the standard method to divide up America, especially its newer territories west of the Mississippi. In some cases, the combination is purely a matter of place – for example, the city annexing a neighboring town with a differently-oriented street pattern. Here, the histograms reflect that the streets are organized in more than one grid pattern. The grids get a bit noisier in cities like Sacramento, St Louis, Philadelphia, and Detroit. That’s the case for 17 of the cities depicted here: Atlanta, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Orlando, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, Tampa and Washington DC. The second one does the same for 25 cities around the world.Īs the first graph shows, many American cities have street grids that are almost perfectly aligned north-south and east-west. The first batch shows the ‘cardinality’ of 25 U.S. polar histograms) are the work of Geoff Boeing, a post-doctoral student of urban planning at UC Berkeley. Complex diagrams equal ‘messy’ street grids, making it harder to find your way. Simple diagrams reflect straightforward grids that make navigation easy. They show how closely street layouts in selected cities align to the four cardinal directions. How easy are cities to get around? These rose diagrams have the answer.