Street Algorithms

I hear a lot of complaints about DC as being hard to navigate.  Personally, I think DC is one of those places that was planned out really well.  L'Enfant had a vision to lay the whole thing out in one fail swoop and did a pretty good job implementing the French étoile system.  The design of a grid system with diagonals works really well for traffic, but don't get me started on traffic circles and the odd intersections they create.  City design is one of those things that's best left to cold harsh logic rather than organic devlopment.  The lack of planning and zoning is the curse of suburban development and strip malls.  When you have everything pre-planned you can nestle hidden algorithms to help navigate the city. 

First off is numbering.  When you have the convenience of a Capitol as a large anchor point you can use it to measure distance from it's zero-point origin, which is how houses are numbered.  1300 13th street is 13 blocks away form the Capitol.  As always with the grid system, you can find the 1300 block of H street by going to the intersection of 13th and H.  The combination of letter streets with number streets avoids the NYC confusion of saying you're at 6th and 7th (which is the avenue, which is the street?).  Having separate quadrants has some issues.  Many people get lost and wind up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue southeast.  Then again, some places will just reuse a numbered street without an area designation.  There are places with multiple 3rd streets and when you drive there for the first time and miss the first one, you will get lost and it won't be pretty.

A handy mnemonic I used often to calibrate myself in NYC and figure out what streets are one-way is "East is evens, West is odds".  Even streets, like 40th, 8th and 2nd street all are one-way going East.  7th, 31st, and 13th all go West.    It doesn't exactly work for the West Village or 42nd street, but it's come in handy more often than not.  When you're in a city with no valid way to determine the location of the sun, I've found this does the trick of a compass in a flash.

 

—September 16th, 2009

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