Why Cities With Grids Are Terribly Designed

Why Cities With Grids Are Terribly Designed

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References
Books and Papers
Reps, John William. "The making of urban America: a history of city planning in the United States." (1965).
Allocated, Land, and City Core. "Streets as public spaces and drivers of urban prosperity." Of urban prosperity 108 (2013).
Sun, J. & Lovegrove, G. (2009). Research Study on Evaluating the Level of Safety of the Fused Grid Road Pattern, External Research Project for CMHC, Ottawa, Ontario
Sobstyl, J. M., Emig, T., Qomi, M. A., Ulm, F. J., & Pellenq, R. M. (2018). Role of city texture in urban heat islands at nighttime. Physical review letters, 120(10), 108701.
Sun, J., & Lovegrove, G. (2008). Research Study on Evaluating the Level of Safety of the Fused Grid Road Pattern.
Lovegrove, G. R., & Sayed, T. (2006). Using macrolevel collision prediction models in road safety planning applications. Transportation research record, 1950(1), 73-82.
Ben-Joseph, E. (1995). Livability and safety of suburban street patterns: a comparative study (Vol. 641). University of California at Berkeley, Institute of Urban and Regional Development.
Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history: Its origins, its transformations, and its prospects (Vol. 67). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
O’Grady, T. (2014). Spatial institutions in urban economies: How city grids affect density and development. Harvard University.
Ellickson, R. C. (2012). The law and economics of street layouts: how a grid pattern benefits a downtown. Ala. L. Rev., 64, 463.
Barrington-Leigh, C., & Millard-Ball, A. (2017). More connected urban roads reduce US GHG emissions. Environmental Research Letters, 12(4), 044008.
Barrington-Leigh, C., & Millard-Ball, A. (2020). Global trends toward urban street-network sprawl. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(4), 1941-1950.

Popular Press

[highlyconfused]

Sounds to me that grids aren't the problem, but that it's the usual suspects that make American cities less livable

1: Terrible zoning
2: Terrible Public transit
3: Absolute dominance of cars as a means of transport

[geography_czek]

Grids aren't a problem, cars are.

[gardenshine.]

If you continue your analysis to the least gridded cities in US and Canada i guarantee you will see lower livability than NY, Chicago, etc. Its not a grid thing, its a car and lack of public transit thing.

[edwardtyl]

The only definitive points I actually see are:
1) bad for airflow and environment
2) aesthetically boring.
The rest it seems are just American issues (cars), and wouldn't affect grid designs in another country that tackles urban management better with more pedestrian focused policies.
Also, the 2 points above could probably be solved with minor angle imperfections and 45 degree street changes, while still retaining the other advantages of a grid design

[jeroenska.]

It is unfortunate you don't go deeper into Barccelona. It is most certainly a grid city, but tackled most of the problems you mentioned in Cerdá's original plan.

[CarlNiemi]

Grids are bad if we assume that every street in the grid has to be made for cars. Grids can be extremely efficient and pleasant for pedestrians and cyclists if car traffic is kept to an absolute minimum or eliminated where possible.

[maxvanced]

Chicago may be the most gridded city, but it's an injustice and a half to not look at how the city has facilitated parks, alleys, etc within this grid - making it perhaps the most livable city in America. It is quite literally impossible to get lost. Cities like Charlotte have no grid, yet they are exponentially more unlivable

[chillin_like_bob_dillan]

Grids aren’t the problem, it’s car-centric planning that’s the problem. You wouldn’t call vast urban sprawl with cul-de-sacs and curved streets livable, because they’re based around cars.

Grids were livable before cars because there was good public transport, and the city was based around people. Grids don’t make a city any worse than another one, it’s how good public transit is and how pedestrian-friendly it is.

[napoleonibonaparte]

What made the grids (especially American) worse:
- Cars and car-centric
- Bad Zoning (banning of mixed-use, etc.)
- American Suburbs
- No traffic calming
- No public transport or gutting of it

[hippopotamusbosch]

I’m not convinced. You’ve alluded to cars as a possible culprit. I’d add poor zoning regulations that contribute to suburban sprawl. All of which create a feedback loop of diminishing quality in urban life.

[TristanCleveland]

Urban planner here. I'm afraid this video is conceptually confused. All of those "most livable cities" have a grid in the sense that they have small blocks. A grid of small blocks is absolutely essential to support walkability and transit, whether they are straight or organic. Yes, if the grid is straight, with 90 degree turns, it can look a bit boring — the video's one legitimate point — but these grids can still support high levels of livability, as in Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, and many other cities.

As for the grids that do have problems, the video got the issue precisely backwards. If Chicago has a problem, it's not that it treats streets as identical. (It doesn't). The trouble is that it excessively prioritizes traffic on many streets instead of human comfort. One of the biggest barriers to creating livable cities today is that streets are classified as avenues, collectors, or locals. On avenues and collectors, it's extremely difficult to design people-friendly streets, because engineers say they are intended for moving cars.

As for safety, no, the grid is not the primary source of danger. High speed streets with long blocks are far more dangerous, as they encourage people to cross mid-block. That being said, I haven't looked at that one study.

The biggest barrier to livability that many cities face today is the lack of a grid — whether straight or organic. I'd like to solve that problem. This video didn't help.

[benshaughnessy]

The grid system in Chicago makes the city more walkable/ bikeable, as the grid has a system that makes it easy to find safe streets to use without a car.

[machtmann]

Idk as a pedestrian, it's really easy to understand grid designs. I don't get lost in Manhattan because the grid system plus the naming convention of streets make it really easy to navigate and also understand the metro. I just wish there weren't so many cars around.

[goldeagle]

Despite having a very strong grid design, Chicago is one of the more liveable cities in the US. This is due to historically excellent city planning and redevelopment after the Great Chicago Fire. It's by no means perfect, but if leagues farther along than most other cities in North America.

[dmangsmile]

I'd argue that Melbourne, Australia is an exception to this. Despite the predominant grid it ranked as world's most liveable city many years in a row. I feel like most points in this video are specifically relating to US cities

[empirestate]

The grid is actually one of the best innovations in city planning history. It's simple and efficient to use, and it can easily be adapted to accommodate large developments by simply merging blocks. You can reduce the number of intersections and stoplights on major thoroughfares by simply prohibiting left turns onto and from minor streets. Creating car-lite superblocks is also very easy. It seems like other bad aspects of city planning, like restrictive zoning & car-centric design, are much more at fault.

[TheShortStory]

In the beginning it sounded like you were trying to avoid drawing conclusions from spurious correlations, but then you say “grids are correlated with more asphalt or paved areas”… which, because of the US’s urban design, car-centric culture and predominance of gridded cities is just that: potentially a spurious correlation

[danepabilonia]

ALL cities need MORE public transportation. I hate it when they focus on roadways for cars when the government could literally just make a series of railways, trams etc. Less pollution and Congestion (But bad for introverts)

[kazhamo]

Correlation doesn't imply causation. The grid is not the problem, as many others have already pointed out.

[alanlight]

A couple points to make here:

First, many European cities were originally established by the Romans with a grid pattern, and over time moved away from a strict grid as there are advantages to some other patterns.

Second, when speaking about grids vs. cul-de-sacs, the issue is not so much about a grid with all right angles so much as it is about streets that allow traffic to move through smoothly rather than ending in dead ends. It's about whether all traffic is forced onto a handful of high volume through roads, or is allowed to spread out over multiple roads.