On Driving - Part 2: The Roman Grid System
It's been a long time coming, this one has... as the saga continues, I'll provide a bit more background by touching on my thoughts about the foundation of the system of roads in Phoenix-the "Roman Grid System"-and my thoughts on why it's a blessing as well as a curse (mostly a curse, however).
To start with, the only reason I refer to what Wikipedia calls the grid plan is because of a humorous fellow named Nick Roser. Indeed, he may not have been the most intelligent bulb in the shed, but he had the most amusing names for the weirdest things. Any time we'd get going in Centanni's class last year about driving, he'd bring up two topics: the annoyances of women drivers (which I won't touch on here), and the shortcomings of what he always referred to as the "Roman grid system" of road planning. Indeed, his name was accurate... quoting from the Wikipedia article above:
The grid plan was a common tool of Roman city planning, based originally on its use in military camps known as castra. One of the most striking extant Roman grid patterns can be found in the ruins of Timgad in modern-day Algeria. The Roman grid is characterized by a nearly perfectly orthogonal layout of streets, all crossing each other at right angles, and by the presence of two main streets, set at right angles from each other and called the cardo and the decumanus.
Figure 1: My to-scale rendition of the Phoenix Metro Area
The grid system works well for the type of area (metropolis, if you want to get specific) that Phoenix is. Namely, it allows expansion in any direction-you just add another road parallel to the furthest road out there (chances are, at this point, said road already exists) and you instantly have more space to build. You can instantly direct people to any new development nearby, because they already know where this road is (or they know it's "somewhere *motions with his hands* out that way") and because it intersects all of the other roads we're familiar with, they can use squareulation (hey, triangles give us triangulation...) and common sense to get there. If road B is closed (see red x on Figure 1) you can go around by taking its parallel (road A, obviously) and you'll still be headed in the same general direction. In fact, you can also take roads C or D, 'cause those go the same way too (fancy that!). You can get pretty much anywhere any number of ways (I'm sure that number could be calculated, but contrary to popular belief I don't have the means nor the desire to do so). This has numerous advantages, the most notable of which being that if there's traffic on Z on the way home from ASU, you can take Y and get there just as fast ('cause there's less traffic on Y, due to its odd-numbered index in the alphabet).
Thus, the grid system is all well and good... until you start introducing things like, oh, public transport. In an ideal world, you'd have a bus that runs up and down every street, thus you'd have the A bus and the B bus, etc., and everyone would be able to get from any point O to any point P on the grid by taking a maximum of two busses. This is of course very inefficient (as is Bogosort, a sorting algorithm that is akin to "attempting to sort a deck of cards by repeatedly throwing the deck in the air, picking the cards up at random, and then testing whether the cards are in sorted order"-completely irrelevant, but funny nonetheless). So, you decide to run busses on weird routes throughout the city that are determined to be most heavily travelled (wow, that makes two words-bus(s)es and travel(l)ed-in one sentence that can be spelled two ways... unless you go by that weird book that Urban always referenced, in which case there is, supposedly, a right and wrong way). This works alright, except that Angry Chandlite, III, thinks he lives on one of the more traveled routes in Phoenix (when in fact he lives in the boonies, somewhere near Carley's house...), and therefore demands that his cronies vote for someone to legislate that buses should run only to places in the boonies and not along routes that are actually more popular (heh, popular Phoenix bus routes... how oxymoronic).
Therein lies the greatest shortcoming of the grid system of city planning, the inability to create useful systems of public transportation. By that, I don't mean that a subway system to get around Phoenix or what not wouldn't be helpful, but that it'd still be inefficient in the long run.
On second thought, that's not the greatest shortcoming of the grid system-the lack of roundabouts is. Roundabouts have to be the coolest thing about driving, period. I mean, aside from stock car racing, what else allows you to go round a circle as many times as you'd like (typically less than once, of course) simply because you want to? Not to mention the consistent flow of traffic and the ability to route traffic from more than two cross streets efficiently. Unlike traffic lights, roundabouts allow traffic to come from all directions and can handle intersections between multiple large and small roads (including dual carriageways) effortlessly. And, if you're smart and crafty enough, you can combine multiple roundabouts into a Magic Roundabout, in which traffic flows counterclockwise and clockwise, and is just generally awesome in itself.
So class, what have we learned today? Well, we've learned that the Roman Grid System is bad because you can't have roundabouts. Or good bus routes.
To start with, the only reason I refer to what Wikipedia calls the grid plan is because of a humorous fellow named Nick Roser. Indeed, he may not have been the most intelligent bulb in the shed, but he had the most amusing names for the weirdest things. Any time we'd get going in Centanni's class last year about driving, he'd bring up two topics: the annoyances of women drivers (which I won't touch on here), and the shortcomings of what he always referred to as the "Roman grid system" of road planning. Indeed, his name was accurate... quoting from the Wikipedia article above:
The grid plan was a common tool of Roman city planning, based originally on its use in military camps known as castra. One of the most striking extant Roman grid patterns can be found in the ruins of Timgad in modern-day Algeria. The Roman grid is characterized by a nearly perfectly orthogonal layout of streets, all crossing each other at right angles, and by the presence of two main streets, set at right angles from each other and called the cardo and the decumanus.
Figure 1: My to-scale rendition of the Phoenix Metro Area
The grid system works well for the type of area (metropolis, if you want to get specific) that Phoenix is. Namely, it allows expansion in any direction-you just add another road parallel to the furthest road out there (chances are, at this point, said road already exists) and you instantly have more space to build. You can instantly direct people to any new development nearby, because they already know where this road is (or they know it's "somewhere *motions with his hands* out that way") and because it intersects all of the other roads we're familiar with, they can use squareulation (hey, triangles give us triangulation...) and common sense to get there. If road B is closed (see red x on Figure 1) you can go around by taking its parallel (road A, obviously) and you'll still be headed in the same general direction. In fact, you can also take roads C or D, 'cause those go the same way too (fancy that!). You can get pretty much anywhere any number of ways (I'm sure that number could be calculated, but contrary to popular belief I don't have the means nor the desire to do so). This has numerous advantages, the most notable of which being that if there's traffic on Z on the way home from ASU, you can take Y and get there just as fast ('cause there's less traffic on Y, due to its odd-numbered index in the alphabet).
Thus, the grid system is all well and good... until you start introducing things like, oh, public transport. In an ideal world, you'd have a bus that runs up and down every street, thus you'd have the A bus and the B bus, etc., and everyone would be able to get from any point O to any point P on the grid by taking a maximum of two busses. This is of course very inefficient (as is Bogosort, a sorting algorithm that is akin to "attempting to sort a deck of cards by repeatedly throwing the deck in the air, picking the cards up at random, and then testing whether the cards are in sorted order"-completely irrelevant, but funny nonetheless). So, you decide to run busses on weird routes throughout the city that are determined to be most heavily travelled (wow, that makes two words-bus(s)es and travel(l)ed-in one sentence that can be spelled two ways... unless you go by that weird book that Urban always referenced, in which case there is, supposedly, a right and wrong way). This works alright, except that Angry Chandlite, III, thinks he lives on one of the more traveled routes in Phoenix (when in fact he lives in the boonies, somewhere near Carley's house...), and therefore demands that his cronies vote for someone to legislate that buses should run only to places in the boonies and not along routes that are actually more popular (heh, popular Phoenix bus routes... how oxymoronic).
Therein lies the greatest shortcoming of the grid system of city planning, the inability to create useful systems of public transportation. By that, I don't mean that a subway system to get around Phoenix or what not wouldn't be helpful, but that it'd still be inefficient in the long run.
On second thought, that's not the greatest shortcoming of the grid system-the lack of roundabouts is. Roundabouts have to be the coolest thing about driving, period. I mean, aside from stock car racing, what else allows you to go round a circle as many times as you'd like (typically less than once, of course) simply because you want to? Not to mention the consistent flow of traffic and the ability to route traffic from more than two cross streets efficiently. Unlike traffic lights, roundabouts allow traffic to come from all directions and can handle intersections between multiple large and small roads (including dual carriageways) effortlessly. And, if you're smart and crafty enough, you can combine multiple roundabouts into a Magic Roundabout, in which traffic flows counterclockwise and clockwise, and is just generally awesome in itself.
So class, what have we learned today? Well, we've learned that the Roman Grid System is bad because you can't have roundabouts. Or good bus routes.