What Wrong With The Grid-System?

[Maxis92 11]

Ok, everytime I come o nthe site, I find people complaining about the person's city and their grid system.

However. I myself actually love the grid system because they allow for better city development in the long run when planning mass transit systems or building with greater density.

I know they're not attractive in sprawling suburbs, but what does that have to do with anything?

Not to mention, the grid system is usually the best way to relieve traffic in a huge city.

All the great or once great cities (Chicago, NYC, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, etc.) have or had excellent grid systems and you don't (or didn't) hear anything about huge traffic jams or infrastructure problems (LA, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. outside the beltway, etc.)

So please, tell me, what do you have against grids?

[david1314 44]

Not one of those points is valid. The grid system does not handle traffic well, doesn't relieve ANY traffic...it adds to it.

But the number one reason to hate it is because it's boring. You don't need a map of Phoenix, you just need to know your ABCs and how to count to 10. How boring.

[Nerd_Guy 4]

Well the majority of people on thiss site (that I know of) play for realism or good-looking cities more than functionality.  It is also much more fun to plan out roads and avenues and such than to sit there mindlessly zoning block after block in a sea of grids. 

[Maxis92 11]

Originally posted by: david1314 Not one of those points is valid. The grid system does not handle traffic well, doesn't relieve ANY traffic...it adds to it.

But the number one reason to hate it is because it's boring. You don't need a map of Phoenix, you just need to know your ABCs and how to count to 10. How boring.quote>

 

Oh really, then tell me why the less or non-gridded cities have the most traffic issues and the worst infrastructure?

A grid is not boring at all if designed right.

I'm not talking about just square boxes everywhere, but cookie cutter, maze-like and diagnol streets aren't ideal if you want a realisitc city.

[Callbat 8]

American grid cities = boring and wasteful (you need a car to move from any point a to any point b) therefore the local authority undermines the need for effective mass transit thus rendering said city into a pedestrian nightmare not to mention boring.

European cities (either medieaval design or Victorian area inner city or suburban sprawl and re-planning (Paris is an okay example) = Cars used, but things are generally reachable by foot and mass transit is emphasized, plus they are so much more beautiful and exciting than grid cities thus adding to the overall quality of life (or at least for me).

those are only a few points of many

[Khorasaurus1 1]

Where American cities are boring and wasteful it's not because of a grid system, it's because they grew in the age of the automobile and - no matter how their streets are laid out - they have the following:
-Wide roads with high speed limits
-Small sidewalks
-Single-use zoning (meaning things are farther away from each other and it requires driving)
-Excessive amounts of space used for parking, which makes it too easy to drive everywhere and discourages pedestrian activity (because no one wants to walk past or through a huge parking lot...it's boring and can even be dangerous)

I actually think a grid, if the streets themselves are designed properly, is better for walking because its easier for pedestrians to find their way around. Also, grids reduce traffic because if there's traffic on one street, drivers just hop over one block and can get to the same place, whereas in non-grid cities you only have one alternative to get somewhere.
Because non-grids can cause bottlenecks, transportation planners have to overcompensate for cars. Look, for instance, at the gigantic circle around the Arc de Triumphe in Paris or the massive Liberty Bridge/Blvd of Allies/I-579 interchange that cuts Mellon Arena and Duquesne University off from Downtown Pittsburgh. Both of those were necessitated by a non-grid street plan and are awful for pedestrians.

The one thing a grid does poorly is creat "focal points," which I think is why SimCity players don't like grids much. A place like the Arc de Triumphe, with so many streets leading to it, really creates a gathering place. New York is a grid, but where is the one major gathering place? Times Square, with its odd layout due to Broadway.

I think all in all, the best way to build a city is a grid system with a few diagonals overlaid on it so that people can take shortcuts and also to create focal points and gathering places where the diagonals intersect with major grid roads or create small triangles that can be used as pocket parks. Ironically, this is the road system that Detroit has, and it creates a lot of cool little spaces while maintaining a grid...but Detroit has so many other problems that this advantage doesn't help much.

[BarbulaM1 38]

The Grid was found to be the most efficient way of transporting people via vehicles (whether it be carriages like when they were first introduced, or cars in the present). And the "American Grid City" I must point out only exists in old urban cores, which tend to be the most pedestrian active areas of the country. The regular layout of a present American city is almost random curves of roads in sprawling suburbs, not grids, most of the US is not grided. The grid is not the reason for the dominance of cars, that is sprawl which as mentioned earlier is not a grid.

[HuskerDude 12]

Not to mention most of the American gridded urban cities were laid out before the advent of the automobile, or at least long before they became commonplace. San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Seattle, all cities with urban grids, and all pre-car cities.

Also, in-game, unless you're doing a Hausmann/Second Empire French style city, or a small Scandinavian one, there simply aren't enough custom lots to do medieval style urban centers. You're severely limited as far as what w2w buildings you can use, and in what configurations. I wish it was more practical to do, because it would be a lot of fun to try and to a London type "spilled spaghetti" city.

[tudorjason 31]

I like the grid system. My 2 largest cities that I've ever done are designed this way. And I think that large cities should have it; it just looks, I don't know, normal. And then, my suburbs are the sprawling mess that we often see today. That's how I do my cities.

[masochist 111]

I think that SC4 players' problem with the grid isn't in its function, but rather its aesthetic value.  To put it simply: a grid pattern just isn't as interesting as diagonal roads are.  They're too common, and it's usually agreed that to lay down an efficient grid pattern is much easier than laying out an effective anti-grid network (or even a straight-road network that's not laid out in 6x4 parcels), and that in itself can subconsciously take away the value of grids.

Not only that, but the game is designed to have straight roads dominate; therefore it takes a great deal of creativity (and in some cases a good amount of time in the Lot Editor) to seamlessly integrate the buildings and zones in the game with diagonal and curved roads.

That's my take on it, anyways.

[Yeah_Right 2]

I think the auto-street zoning thing is a culprit to the grid system we see so many times in sc4.

i dont think grids look that bad in skyscraper districts.

mainly cos u can even see the streets -.-

but yes, please dont use grids in the suburbs. imagine how you would feel.....

[thecross21 3]

I normally do the grids for the main city area and then the suburbs I eventually lean out to fancy road designs... like the inner core suburbs I do mainly grid but a few diagonal and all that.

[Odainsaker 2,136]

Well, many grids look do boring because many of us SimCity players simply tend to make boring grids, often uniform in all directions. Kyoto is a grid, but Kyoto is not boring. Grids can have direction, hierarchy, breaks, shifts, focal nodes, overlays, size changes, geography, boundaries, etc., all of which create opportunities and moments of interest. Similarly, our zone planning tends to be boring and blockish, focusing too much on zoning uniform blocks when we should be zoning for streetscapes.

The horrors of real-world modern traffic come not from grids or non-grids but instead from the segregated, compartmentalized, and disconnected use planning, ie sprawl. It is a Modernist mindset of separating everything into isolated units that can then be explicitly connected and controlled by engineering, but which is limited in ability to account for conditions outside its mindset. Mounting energy costs, demand exceeding capacity, budgetary neglect and maintenance shortfalls, social stigmas, demographic changes, environmental degradation, sick building syndrome...none of that was ever foreseen at the time.

[raja_indy14 8]

the problem with a uniform grid covering an entire map is that it looks exceedingly boring and its lazy (anyone can do it). the uniform 6x4 grids are especially bad - from what i've seen - since a lot of grids aren't even like this in real life. however, suburbs certainly can be grid-based and still realistic, even in European cities. my own city - a Canadian city, and hardly exemplary - has vast tracts of gridded suburbs, some of them over 100 years old, while only the most recent ones have the wending streets of a stereotypical 'suburbia'.

also, the grid pattern has been in use for millennia, the Greeks and Romans used a grid-based system in town planning - the legendary Alexandria was based on such a system - and in some instances the grid pattern survives into the modern city. Chinese cities were also laid out on a grid, and you can see this in Beijing today on Google Earth. it's often been considered the easiest and most efficient method of city-planning, even if it is monotonous, and has been widely used in city-planning long before the advent of the automobile. in North American cities, much of the grid is the result of the land being parcelled out on a regular squares which cities absorbed as they expanded into the countryside, especially in the west.

because of the limitations of SimCity, curved and diagonal roads are not only difficult to work with, they also end up looking wierd unless your willing to put a lot of time and effort into it (if you're doing it on a large scale). the most important thing is to add variations to the grid: have different areas of variably sized grids, place diagonal roads and fit the transport system in with the local terrain instead of simply applying a grid over all and sundry. make multiple roads leading out of the city on irregular paths so that as your city grows it absorbs these patterns. for instance my city is based almost entirely on various grids, except for major thoroughfares - Portage, Main, Pembina - which cut through it irregularly, and which were originally 'trails' which led to other nearby settlements.

[dedgren 830]

I guess I'm a pro-grid guy.

1. The best skylines, Chicago from the lake (#1) and New York from the Jersey side of the Hudson (#2), are in grid cities

2. Most of the (still largely) rural US between the Appalachians and the Rockies (north of, say, an east-west line drawn through Cairo, Illinois) is laid out on the mile-square (one mile = 1.6 kilometers) survey township grid system. That landscape says home to me.

The thing that makes "griddy" landscapes truly marvelous is the occasional (very occasional, imho) introduction of non-grid oriented elements. Streams, sweeping curves, "z-axis" stuff like hills and valleys, that sort of thing.

I've never gotten into the whole Zen thing, but hey- the game we love gives us a grid?  Work with it, not against it.  Hating it is the road to Grand Theft Auto.

I've done the grid thing for over two years now at 3RR [linkie].  I'm not bored yet.

David

[Callbat 8]

Bah, give me the London skyline over New York or Chicago any day (it's just a matter of personal opinion)

Plus our cities mess of streets have become iconic, Oxford, Fleet Street, The Mall, imagine bland names like "123124123412351st Street" or someting, why do you think everyone talks about Broadway and times square when they talk about New York streets? And not eighty-billionth and one gazillionth street.

Of course thats all down to opinion

[krbe 193]

The main problem with the SC4-grid isn't that it is a grid system—the problem is that you're limited to N-S and E-W. Grids aren't that uncommon in other cities, but they're small (nothing like New York), and it's many of them. They're not added as part of a larger plan, but rather when there is a need for it. Since they're added when they're needed, and nicely conform to the terrain, you can often find one major road alongside one grid, with roads crossing at angles forming a later grid on the other side.

Also, grids tends to have a couple of major roads leading through, with a lot of small streets inbetween, which makes it hard to just "hop" to another block due to restrictions on traffic, lights, etc.

Grids also have a long history: The Romans used them for their fortress cities, and they were revived during the renaissance. My city has such a grid in its core, but are restraind by water at three sides today and a hil at one side. New plans for larger blocks, including a diagonal throughway and "better" parks has been proposed once, but history will most likely do so that we'll never see these plans realised.

Besides, all those great cities are American. Take a look at cities like London, Berlin, Hyderabad, Tokyo too—most of these are ancient cities, perhaps with a Roman grid history but which now have a couple of thousands years of urban (non-)planning. At certain points in history, they've been merged with other villages surronding them, creating new centers, and possibly incorporporating new grids; with new major roads running to and through them. Also note that few cities in Europe have motorways running through it's core. If they have problems coping with the cars and not enough parking downtow, railways between the major suburbs and the core are much more likely to be built, together with congestion charges, et. al.

London grids between Regent's Park and the Thames—note the angles between the roads and even within the grids themselves

[SIMplMn9 0]

I would like to remind you that non grids also have a safety value. Especially in American cities, you notice how all new construction.. expecially on suburbs, the street are not grids? That is because they know what happens with you get a kid with a car on nice long stretch of stright road.

Breaking the grid helped in preventing street racing...

[HuskerDude 12]

Then why does street racing (outside of video games) always happen out in the burbs?

[panthersimcity4 162]

Not all grid cities are bad, San Francisco has a grid-like system and it's a beautiful city, same with Barcelona.

[TEG24601 32]

Another with an awesome grid system is Detroit, with Major Highways (4-6 lanes) each mile both north-south and east-west, the exception being the radial roads that start downtown and fan out from there, plus a nice, but inadequate freeway system.

TEG

[Patricius Maximus 236]

I use grids for high-density areas and CBD's, but not in mid to low density suburbs. A grid improves traffic flow in downtown areas, and it should be used there.

[un1 41]

I love grids in cities over 5,000 below it's all messed up. Cities over 100,000 have at least 2 freeways in a grid form.

[pagenotfound 53]

When I build a city, the downtown area typically has a grided network. But when im building a suburb or along a river or in a hilly area I either have a grid that distorts and bends around a geographical feature or a completly non grid plan.

[Maxis92 11]

Ok guys, I'm not talking about the suburbs. I'm talking about your typical city.

Any big city that's non-gridded looks just plain suburban and unattractive to me.

A city is meant to be a city and a suburb is meant to be a suburb IMO.

[Jazzmaster 716]

Originally posted by: pagenotfound When I build a city, the downtown area typically has a grided network. But when im building a suburb or along a river or in a hilly area I either have a grid that distorts and bends around a geographical feature or a completly non grid plan.quote>

That's exactly what I do!  Reason being, is that because of the way the game was designed, it's virtually impossible to see the road layout down in the grand urban jungle.  And with the square/rectangular lots that skyscrapers are on, it's much easier to plop them side by side in a grid then to mess around in curves/diaganols, only to have empty space left over (unless you want a plaza or something, then by all means!).  But where the road can be seen, it's nice to try and add curves and such, so that it looks unique and creative.  In the neighborhood where I live, there's nothing but curves and such all over, and it's really nice when I'm out walking, so that I'm not walking in a straight line (to those who think it's harder to find your way around, bear in mind that there's usually signs marked "no outlet" prior to dead ends...but that's for another thread).

[Haljackey 17,385]

I use a mixture of both. I like to have some curvy roads follow the landscape, with a grid in the most dense parts of town.

I don't like a pure grid, or anything close to a pure grid myself, but opinions will differ.  Heck, a good job with a grid system can be done in SC4. I've seen it!

Examples of what I do are below.  Not exactly "griddy", but a grid is still visible.

Click on the photos for full resolution!

Anyways, I think you get the picture.  A pure grid would be just bland.

Best,

-Haljackey

[Hahayoudied 3]

I am a pro grid person. Some time I don't have grids in some of my SC4 cities (due to geographical features; like hills, rivers, lakes, and etc). Grids are perfect for dense city area, such as skyscraper districts. However, when it comes to suburbs and low density area, then the grids would look bad.

[un1 41]

I don't do grids I do partial grids.; I'll post pictures of what I mean on the 27th.

[cemaphon 0]

I think it comes down to what you are trying to do with your city. Since I am usually building American cities with 19th century cores, I grid extensively - tight grids in the downtown areas, and loose arterial or highway grids in the suburbs and farmland. (Incidentally, this has nothing to down with automobile planning, but rather the natural result of the square-lot township system that was used throughout the western US.) But since I like maps with many water and terrain features, and since I tend to develop regions as a number of towns that coalesce, I usually don't end up with a totally uniform boring grid network. If you are trying to build London, or other medieval cities, grids are less suitable.