The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. – San Francisco (2009)

Re:The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. – San Francisco (2009) by bjacokes on Friday January 25, 2013 @03:31AM (#5114584)

In defense of Chicago, its grid is amazing for being able to efficiently travel around the city. The street numbering makes it trivial for any local to find their way to an address like "X00 W Belmont" without a map, and obviously the lack of hills makes for easier biking and public transit. It skews more towards beautiful architecture than beautiful landscapes, and has its share of decrepit neighborhoods (as does SF), but I don't think many people would describe it as a "soul-sucking" place. Different strokes.

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Re:The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. – San Francisco (2009) by snogglethorpe on Friday January 25, 2013 @03:45AM (#5114612)

I didn't say Chicago was a soul-sucking place, but rather that certain areas in it are (apologies if that wasn't clear), and one of the main reasons they're that way is the incredible sense of monotony due in large part to the regularity of the grid (there are other reasons for monotony in those areas too, of course, e.g. the rather extreme lack of variation in housing stock, the complete lack of anything except houses, and the very flat geography).

It's a localized example of the effect urban structure can have, not a denigration of the entire city. So, please, don't take it as a dig against Chicago; I rather like Chicago in many ways, and much of my family lives there. I used the above example only because it's one of the more extreme cases I've encountered.

As for the "it's easy to find addresses!" argument in favor of large-scale grids, well, yes, but in my experience this is fairly unimportant for the actual residents of a city. Most people don't spend any significant amount of time travelling to completely random locations, and to the extent they do, every city evolves methods of way-finding that suit it. I think it's much more important for the residents that the city actually be a nice place to live, and part of that is being beautiful / interesting.

[For tourists, yeah, extremely simple way-finding can be a significant advantage, but I don't think cities should be designed for tourists over the needs of those who live there...]

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Re:The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. – San Francisco (2009) by dalke on Friday January 25, 2013 @08:55AM (#5115364)

It's a bit of a straw man there. The NYC street grid system was meant "to unite regularity and order with the public convenience and benefit and in particular to promote the health of the City ... [by allowing] a free and abundant circulation of air". ("Foul air" was thought to cause disease.)

Salt Lake City grid system was also not designed for tourists. It was designed for travelers, yes, and I believe it was part of the vision that SLC would be looked at as a model city, with a strong Cartesian/classical influence. According to Wikipedia, "In these western cities the streets were numbered even more carefully than in the east to suggest future prosperity and metropolitan status."

Also, a grid system made it easier to subdivide the land which was newly part of the US.

So to say that the grid system is influenced by tourists is a bit of an exaggeration.

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