The grid structure for the roads in the states always amazes me. Is it the same everywhere? Even rural areas and little towns? Didn't some places grow naturally form tiny settlements?
Most of the western part of the U.S., with the exception of Texas (which is essentially a different country in many respects), was originally surveyed using the Public Land Survey System, invented by Thomas Jefferson. It involves a handful of baselines and associated meridians (you find a regional Baseline Road in various places, such as Boulder, Colorado) and then a huge grid. Each township is 36 square miles, each section is 1 square mile, and the legal description of everybody's property is something like "the southeast 1/4 of the northwest 1/4 of the northwest 1/4 of section 17, township 5 north, range 17 west of the 5th principal meridian."
Each township has one section allocated for a school, so in rural areas there are scattered undeveloped square miles that are owned by the government.
Towns developed since the early 1800s tend to have a grid system, but that tendency is reduced in the Northeastern areas that were initially developed before the township method started. New England is notorious for having confusing roads and town layouts. Big cities were laid out in grids because of unimaginitive planners. Small mountain towns often follow natural topographic features like rivers or hillsides.
Canada uses a similar system.
A few observations. One is that, in Suburbia, all the freeways, freeway exits, service areas and town crossings look and feel very similar, almost interchangeable. This can be disconcerting. Someone called this "no-places".
Another is that this uniformity is actually by design and is part of the business model of restaurant chains such as McDonald's, or store chains and supermarkets. The idea is that if the shopping or eating experience is the same no matter where you are, it's supposed to be reassuring to the traveller, or the person who moves house frequently. It makes it easier by design to move about in search of work, or to travel. But it can be an impoverishing experience compared with what happens when one moves to a substantially different place. By contrast, every country in Europe, even different regions, have different look and feel of the construction, and different business chains with different brands and different procedures.
Finally, I once saw a lecture by lee Smolin where he attempted to develop this idea that in order to have individual points the view from each of them has to be sufficiently different (and so, that in a highly regular grid of points there is really only one point). We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
The other thing gone missing during the ars (and partly not reinstated) is fences. I am always astonished about that...
<this is a snarky post!!!>
My attempts were equally, if not more, hideous. A friend and I had taken a ride around downtown, since he'd never visited. Needed to get on Memorial to get back across the river to the Parkway. Somehow wound up on Ohio. "Do you know where we need to be?" he asked. "Yeah, about a hundred feet higher and going West."
Wound up spending an hour and a half going up to, and then through, Georgetown to the Key Bridge.
Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of Mr L'Enfant, and I haven't driven in the city since. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
yes, and utilitarian, pragmatic....
or best: techno! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
the best thing about them is how if you momentarily forget where you're going, (!), you can keep spinning till you find the right womb-door.
(disclaimer: i used to love getting on the circle line in london and going peoplewatching round and round for free!)
the worst...italians haven't got the hang of them yet, and sometimes stop and give right of way to incoming traffic....
still way better than stoplights, (boring and fume-y), or the california system of first come first served, (polite, but over ritualistic)..
i bet roundabouts save energy... they sure feel like they do.
as metaphors, they rock. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
the model broke down a bit as the population shifted from the uniformly flat and dry north china plain to the hillier, wetter river towns of south china, where geography messed with the theoretical square city aligned by compass.
still, the old parts of most chinese cities tend to be nice grids, even if the outer rings have metastasized rather insanely of late.
