City Street Network Orientation

Cool Infographics: Charts and graphs can communicate data; infographics turn data into information.

The City Street Network Orientation infographic represents 25 of the United States’ largest cities and the direction of their streets. The data is shown by using a polar histogram, which show the direction of the streets (based on their cardinal orientation) and their frequency (the length on the graph). The infographic was created by Geoff Boeing, Urban planning professor at Northeastern University.

Using OpenStreetMap data, Geoff Boeing charted the orientation distributions of major cities:

“Each of the cities above is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar’s directionrepresents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings.”

So you can easily spot the gridded street networks, and then there’s Boston and Charlotte that are a bit nutty. Check out Boeing’s other chart for orientation of major non-US cities.

See also Stephen Von Worley’s color-coded maps and Seth Kadish’s charts from 2014 that showed the same thing but used Census data instead of OpenStreetMap.

Found on Flowing Data