What is your road network like?

[CapeCodder]

What is your road network like in your town/county? Barnstable is, as I've stated in another post stymied by Cape Cod Bay and Nantucket Sound. Many choices for getting around the town.

Does your road-net cover your city/town/county evenly, or are there parts that you cannot access?

[doorknob60]

Meridian: Arterials every mile in a neat grid. Free for all maze of disconnected subdivisions inside. The arterial grid spans most of Ada and Canyon Counties though, which is nice. I can drive from Boise to Nampa or Caldwell on a number of different roads, and they don't have any awkward breaks or name changes (in general, there are some exceptions, often caused by a lack of I-84 overpass).

[Brandon]

Joliet & vicinity is mostly a grid with a few roads going at angles to the 90 degree grid.  Even a good number of the subdivisions follow a rough grid, even if they do not exit the subdivision.

http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/maps/enhanced-street-grids/?lat=41.561775&lon=-88.052673&z=11

[kphoger]

Wichita, KS

Most arteries are on a grid, with a few but not many diagonals.
The grid goes wonky near the Arkansas river, but there are plenty of bridges.
The west side of the city is quite a bit west of I-235, the nearest freeway.
US-54/400 (main E-W corridor) is under constant improvement to eliminate stoplights.

[The Ghostbuster]

The Beltline loops along the south and west sides of the city. Interstates 39/90/94 come in from the north-northwest and runs along the far east side before departing in an east-southeast direction. The main artery from the west is University Avenue, East Washington Avenue from the northeast, Park Street from the south, Verona Road from the southwest, and Hwy 30 from the east. My city's downtown is on an isthmus. There are no inner-city freeways in Madison. Hwy 30 would be the closest to an inner-city freeway, and it ends a few miles northeast of downtown. Still, I have lived in my city since 1987 (I was 2 going on 3 at the time), and I know no city better than Madison, Wisconsin.

[TR69]

Louisville: The old, original city is pretty much a grid, though the curve of the Ohio River makes the grid veer off at slight angles in places.

The city is embraced by two loops, I-264 and I-265. I-264 is now an inner belt type of freeway, though when it was built it was only 2 lanes per carriageway. I-265 is now the outer loop, and is famously getting its two halves connected by a new Ohio River bridge.

Outside the central city the subdivisional areas are in the usual non-grid format. On the far eastern and southern reaches of the city hilly terrain makes for the curviest roads in the area..

[coatimundi]

The Monterey Peninsula has a number of grids, mostly not connected, and mostly oriented toward the water (either the ocean or the bay). Marina, Fort Ord, Seaside, Sand City, North Monterey, Old Monterey, New Monterey, Pacific Grove and Carmel are most of the core grids. Old Monterey and New Monterey are somewhat ironically connected only by one road, divided by the Presidio of Monterey, which itself has a unique internal street network. Additionally, there's only one road to Carmel from most areas to the north, with the exception of the tolled 17-Mile Drive.
The hills also leave many roads twisting, following canyons, and often not really leading anywhere. Many roads in the rural areas are either outright private or are now private.

If we had more population, then traffic would be a lot worse because of the lack of mobility and capacity. As it stands, there is traffic, but there are often ways around it, and it's really not that bad.

[cl94]

Albany area: the Dutch settlers were high when they designed the road network in the 1600s.

In all seriousness, the terrain makes any sort of a grid pattern hard to follow around here. Portions of Albany, Troy and Schenectady have grids, but there is no unifying pattern and roads that likely follow ancient Native American paths cut across everything. Most of Troy tries really hard to have a numbered street grid, but it's not easy to maintain if there's a 200' cliff running through part of the middle.

[bandit957]

Ours is pooey.

[Darkchylde]

In theory, Kansas City has an orderly grid.

In practice, the streets tend to meander. You can start on one numbered street and end up on another, while the one you were on before starts again just down the block. There's a lot of dead ends. Except for some of the arterials, it's hard to follow a numbered street very far.

The Johnson County, Kansas extension of the grid is a little more orderly than the Missouri side, with a few more arterials, and the north/south streets tend to stay more in a straight line.

[TR69]

Peoria, IL has a downtown grid, but it's at a 45 degree tilt thanks to the Illinois River. So, instead of the more typical "North Adams Street" or "West Washington Street", there's "Northeast Adams Street" and "Southwest Washington Street", etc.

[dgolub]

Manhattan: Very much a grid and easy to navigate north of Houston Street.  Rather chaotic with not much of any pattern at all south of Houston Street.  (That's the part dating back to when New York was New Amsterdam, and the street pattern there is considered to be historic and hence not subject to change.)  Generally very congested and hence easier to get around on foot or by subway than by car.

[Rothman]

Albany area: the Dutch settlers were high when they designed the road network in the 1600s.

In all seriousness, the terrain makes any sort of a grid pattern hard to follow around here. Portions of Albany, Troy and Schenectady have grids, but there is no unifying pattern and roads that likely follow ancient Native American paths cut across everything. Most of Troy tries really hard to have a numbered street grid, but it's not easy to maintain if there's a 200' cliff running through part of the middle.

Bethlehem, NY: Everything was a former cowpath except for Delaware Ave.  Having to go through Five Corners at rush hour can add ten minutes or more to your trip.  Also have this thing called the Delmar By-Pass for all those people wanting to get from the South End of Albany to...Feura Bush?  Westerlo?  Um...why?  Traffic lights not timed along it so the four-laning and wide median are wasted.  Intersection with 9W is classic 1950s engineering -- of course, no one would want to come up 9W north and head into Delmar, so we're not going to build that ramp.  Blech.

[epzik8]

I live in a place called Harford County, Maryland which is northeast of Baltimore.

The county as a whole does not use a grid-based network. There's I-95 running northeastward between the Little Gunpowder Falls (Baltimore County border) and the Susquehanna River (Cecil County border); it serves Joppa, Edgewood/Abingdon, Belcamp-Riverside, Aberdeen and Havre de Grace. Parallel to I-95 is U.S. Route 40, Pulaski Highway. U.S. 40 is the business route complementing I-95 between Baltimore and just south of Wilmington, Delaware. Then there's U.S. Route 1. It enters Harford County as Belair Road, passes through a community called Benson and then passes around Bel Air (Harford County's seat) as the Bel Air Bypass. Then it becomes the Hickory Bypass as it passes by the community of Hickory north of Bel Air. U.S. 1 then becomes Conowingo Road, heads northeast toward Dublin and Darlington, then crosses the Conowingo Dam over the Susquehanna River into Cecil County. U.S. 1 has a business route through downtown Bel Air as well as Hickory. U.S. Route 1 Business follows the former path of mainline U.S. 1 through Bel Air and Hickory before the bypasses were constructed.

Now for the Maryland state routes. Maryland Route 152 runs from the Edgewood Arsenal of the Aberdeen Proving Ground to the Ladew Topiary Gardens in between Fallston and Jarrettsville via Magnolia, Joppa (I-95 interchange) and Fallston proper. Maryland Route 24 might be the most major state route in the county. It stems from the Edgewood Arsenal, passes through Edgewood, interchanges with I-95 and MD-924, then passes to the west of Abingdon and Bel Air. In other words, the southern half of MD-24 connects I-95 to the county seat. After a short concurrency with U.S. 1, MD-24 turns back north through Forest Hill and Rocks State Park before emerging into the rural farmland of the northern portion of Harford County. It eventually lands in Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania.

Maryland Route 543 is another route that connects the north with the south. It starts at U.S. 40 in Belcamp/Riverside, interchanges with I-95, and then passes to the east of Bel Air, crosses U.S. 1 and U.S. 1 Business at Hickory, and ends at Maryland Route 165 in Pylesville. Next is Maryland Route 22, which connects Bel Air with the Aberdeen Proving Ground via the Harford Community College, Churchville and Aberdeen with an I-95 interchange. Maryland Route 155 starts at MD-22 in Churchville, interchanges with I-95 and heads into Havre de Grace where it ends at U.S. 40.

Then there's Maryland Route 7, which is sandwiched in between I-95 and U.S. 40 to about midway between Belcamp and Aberdeen; a discontinuous segment exists within Havre de Grace, and two more in Cecil County. Maryland Route 136 runs 30 miles northwest to south-central from Route 23 at Norrisville to Route 7 near Belcamp. Maryland Route 23 in turn runs from the PA line near Norrisville in the county's northwest corner to U.S. 1 just north of Bel Air. Maryland Route 924 is the former alignment of Route 24 through Bel Air and Abingdon. Maryland Route 161 runs through Darlington connecting U.S. 1 with MD-155.

[tradephoric]

Detroit's iconic hub-and-spoke design is a result of Augustus B. Woodward's vision for Detroit.  Woodward was tasked with designing a new layout after a fire burned the city to the ground in 1805.  His plan involved tree-lined avenues (some as wide as 200 feet) laid out in a hexagonal pattern.  In the middle of each hexagon were public plazas known as Grand Circuses and at the outer corners were rectangular public plazas.  Although his plan was abandoned in 1817, the principal Detroit avenues that extend out from Campus Martius Park are a direct result of Woodward's vision:



The other thing Detroit is known for is its broad boulevards.  In 1924 the Detroit Rapid Transit Commission proposed that the major avenues farther out from downtown be 204 feet wide.  This was enough space to fit 8-lanes of vehicular traffic along with 2-lines of interurban rail running down the medians.  This is why Detroit boulevards look like this (believe this was taken on Woodward Avenue near Long Lake in 1926).

[Windfarmer]

Cynthiana, KY: An irregular grid with alleys everywhere, while in the more commercial district, well... not very many roads there.

[jwolfer]

Jacksonville FL has an amalgam different grid patterns. Lots of ineruption from St. Johns River and tributaries, swamplands.  Railroads and freeways inerrupt grids also. 

I have images of downtown and wider view. Notice the seven bridges over St Johns





LGMS428

[DandyDan]

Omaha, and by extension Douglas and Sarpy Counties, which use the same numbering scheme, is pretty much a grid city.  Omaha has a few boulevards that don't conform to the grid.  Some of the residential areas have streets which parallel each other and all curve together.  Bellevue and Papillion and Council Bluffs, Iowa each have their own grids, but some of Bellevue tends to be freeform, especially as it gets closer to either the river or the UP tracks.  Council Bluffs has actual bluffs and canyons, so the roads do tend to follow the canyons as you rise out of the valley.

[sparker]

I pretty much described my current residential site, San Jose, CA, in reply #25 in the thread "Cities with Odd Street Networks".  But I didn't cover one rather amusing aspect of the "fan" format south of downtown:  the city has made every effort to keep the block numbers on east-west arterials constant in regard to north-south cross-streets:  Monterey Road/1st Street is the starting/"zero" point, Almaden Road/Expressway is the divider between the 1000 & 1100 block, while Meridian delineates the start of the 1600 block.  This isn't too bad directly west of the downtown area, where block lengths are "normal" (about 8-10 to the mile).  But it gets a bit ludicrous well south of there; using Blossom Hill Rd., which is an east-west arterial in the vicinity of the CA 85 freeway, as an example, it's a little under 4 miles from the Monterey Road overpass to Almaden Expressway; but the addresses along that street stretch out to fill the 11-block length -- the 1000 block itself is nearly a mile long!  Almost every available number from 1000 to 1100 is utilized; it's a commercial zone with the Oakridge Mall stretching along the street's north side for about half the block's length, so luckily the available 50 odd and 50 even numbers weren't exhausted (the mall is a single street address with the individual stores considered internal suites).  I've never seen a situation like it in CA!   

[hm insulators]

Phoenix, Arizona is laid out on a grid (with occasional interruptions caused by the terrain, such as Shaw Butte or Camelback Mountain). In addition, there are two diagonals: Grand Avenue, which is also US 60 heads toward the northwest toward Wickenburg (before I-10, this was the main highway between Phoenix and L.A.), and Cave Creek Road, which takes off to the northeast to the outlying communities of Cave Creek and Carefree.

Much of the Los Angeles metropolitan area is laid out as a grid, with interruptions caused by geography such as the Hollywood Hills.

[cl94]

I spent a few years in Buffalo and that city has a really messed-up system. In Buffalo itself, major streets radiate out from downtown with various mini-grid patterns throughout the city. Outside of the city limits, streets generally run along a north-south or east-west axis without a set spacing for major streets.

[bzakharin]

My "city" such as it is (Cherry Hill, NJ) has one divided highway (NJ 70) bisecting it diagonally from NW to SE. County routes (mostly 2-lane) run roughly parallel to it on both sides forming large "blocks" roughly a mile apart. I-295 runs perpendicular to that (along with the NJ Turnpike which has no exits in Cherry Hill) also roughly bisecting the township, with county routes, along with one divided highway (NJ 41) forming similar length blocks parallel to it to the Northwest. Southeast of 295 the roads are a lot less organized and are more at odd angles to each other. The "grid" this forms has no rhyme or reason to it. There is no logical road naming or route numbering for these major roads, nor is there universal house numbering or anything like that. Inside these blocks are mostly residential neighborhoods where you can easily get lost in curving roads and frequent dead ends.

If you take the county as a whole, things are not that much better. You basically have two parts, the urban/suburban area closer to Philadelphia, which takes up a quarter of space, and the rural/farm/forest area to the SE. The dividing line is the NJ Turnpike / I-295. In the urban area, aside from portions of Camden and Pennsauken, which have a proper grid, things are not very organized. You have a bunch of divided highways running parallel to the Delaware River, then there is roughly a point in Pennsauken from which six major spokes radiate in various directions (US 130 N/S, US 30 E/W, NJ 70 E, and NJ 38 E). There are other highways that do neither (NJ 73 NW/SE, NJ 168 N/S, NJ 90 E-W).

In the rural area you have just 4 highways running at various angles mostly NW to SE. I-676/I-76/NJ 42/Atlantic City Expressway is the only freeway, which runs roughly along the SW edge of the county lengthwise, the Black and White Horse Pikes to the south and north of it respectively, and NJ 73 which starts out on the NE border in the north, but ends up at the SW border in the South. There aren't any major highways perpendicular to these. What roads there are, are 2-lane, mostly county routes. US 206/NJ 54 just SE of the county border (in Atlantic County), is the first major cross road after the Turnpike, and even that is mostly a 2-lane road. All this leaves the Eastern corner (east of the White Horse Pike / US 30) without major roads. Indeed, much of it is forested and has no roads at all. Traveling through that area looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Camden+County,+NJ/@39.710863,-74.8020965,3a,75y,148.63h,83.42t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1saLm5bGFdBq-0Hw4vS_J_Mg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DaLm5bGFdBq-0Hw4vS_J_Mg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D17.561676%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c130af53c45aed:0xb9ca2fc83492feae!8m2!3d39.8592439!4d-75.0143824!5m1!1e1!6m1!1e1

[SD Mapman]

Spearfish is a combination of an offset grid (downtown) with a pure NSEW grid. The streets follow the terrain where necessary. Once out to the north, the county tries their best to fit roads into the SD statewide grid (but that doesn't work so well with the terrain). South of town are the Black Hills... so chaos.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/44.5010/-103.8599

[nexus73]

Coos County OR is about terrain and rivers dictating road placement with one glaring exception.  That would be a former stage coach route built in 1870.  Back then the most direct route was chosen regardless of terrain to connect the Umpqua Valley to Coos Bay (body of water, not the city).  Later on as the county filled in, it did so along rivers and the ocean as those were the highways of their time.  Once powered vehicles were common, roads were built to connect the small cities which were located along water so the roads wound up doing the same. 

In the meantime, nothing happened to speak of on the stagecoach road.  Even today it is only known for the hamlets and nice Coast Range scenes.  One local guy touted the alignment for a freeway for years but alas, the dream (a plausible one) never did turn real during the boom years of the timber industry.  That era is over so this plan will never be implemented.

Rick