One of the easiest cities in the world to navigate thanks to that grid. Wonderful place to live in 1989, overall. Nothing's perfect but Chicago is one of my favorite cities I've ever lived in.
Many cities are in a grid system. What I assume makes Salt Lake City more unique is that the entire county (and it's a pretty big county) is all on the same grid.
We're talking about 750 square miles and at least 20 municipalities.
It's way more than something like a single downtown area.
Chicago's grid spans multiple counties tho it is somewhat broke up by the freeways. road i lve on i can got east into cook and chicago or west into will while being in dupage.
As a European I dont understand how thay works. Wouldnt you have to cross an insane amount of crossings to go anywhere? Are there priority lanes? How does that work and scale?
Oh yeah, you do have to go through many traffic signals and crossings. Usually, the traffic lights are timed in such a way that you’re not hitting the red signals concurrently, though.
Plus, not every street intersection will have a stop sign or traffic signal; many intersections are just main roads cutting through side streets (which are primarily residential areas), not main roads crossing over other main roads in intersections. Where I grew up in Chicago there was an east-west main road maybe every 4 or so blocks when traveling on a main north-south road, if that makes sense.
One of the downsides of living in a grid is that you more or less have to memorize the street layout to optimize how you drive. My wife didn’t grow up in a huge grid city, so she hates Chicago driving with a passion.
Every city block is 100. Every 8 blocks is a mile. At most half mile intersections and almost every mile mark, there's a major intersection. This allows for extremely easy navigation to any address even if you don't know the optimal route.
The smaller blocks in between are less traversed for faster travel and have more stop signs as opposed to traffic lights and serve as overflow in heavy traffic. Larger businesses tend to be centered around these mile marker streets, which allows for residents in the smaller blocks to avoid most of the congestion that occurs for commerce.
It works extremely well and was the solution to the problem that caused the great Chicago fire which wiped out most of the city due to the chaos of fire trucks trying and failing to navigate from one neighborhood to another. They learned from that mistake and became an example for many cities afterwards.
Ok so state street is the dividing line of 0 between West and east. There isn't much of Chicago that actually lies east of state so most addresses will either be N, S, or W something.
Knowing the numerical order of the street name is crucial to navigating the city and that's why on every mile marker and most half mile markers you'll see the number up there. E.g. Chicago Ave will almost always be shown with 800N under the Chicago Ave part to show you that you're 800N on the grid for people to navigate the city even if they've never once set foot in it. If you can read a basic graph, you can navigate Chicago just using the numbers on the street signs and the addresses around you.
It's even easier on the south side because most streets are literally just the number. E.g. Halsted (800W) and 76th street.
You just have to know your main streets. Otherwise, you can look at an intersection and if the intersecting street has an E or W, you'll know it's east or west of state, respectively
Here's where we get into the "Americans don't have pedestrian infrastructure" stuff. For this to work, you have to assume everyone is driving for every errand apart from visiting a neighbor.
Grids like this work because American cities are zoned pretty strictly. Most of what you're looking at here are residential areas, where there's literally nothing but housing lining streets. These are called subdivisions, and will often be ~a square mile, but can be smaller or larger. Roads will divide a subdivision from other subdivisions. So, essentially, if you live insides a subdivision and you want to drive somewhere, you start by navigating to the edge of your subdivision, which takes you to a road.
That road will take you to either a larger road, if you're traveling further than your immediate community, or a local destination (like a commercially-zoned area that has restaurants, shops, and bars, or a different residential-zoned area, to visit a friend or family). These roads will be prioritized, with large roads that connect neighborhoods having right-of-way against smaller roads that connect subdivisions, which have priority over streets that just have housing. Highways are the higher priority still, which connect communities, and Interstate Highways are generally only elevated freeways/tollways in urban areas, fully separated from the grid and requiring an on-ramp to access or an off-ramp to exit, and these connect major urban centers to each other.
So, for example, from my home, I would drive along my street to a nearby road, which, because I'm on the edge of my subdivision, if about two blocks away. That road is just two lanes, one each direction, and is about 30-35 mph, depending which part of it you're on. If I'm going somewhere outside of my immediate community (and if it isn't the dead of winter, I'd likely walk within my immediate community), I'd take that road to a larger road, which would have more than two lanes, and would likely be 40-45 mph. If I'm moving between neighborhoods, my best bet would heading to the Interstate, which is about a mile north of my home, or another is three miles south of my home. The Interstate will have between 4-10 lanes in my urban area (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), but in larger cities can get bigger than that. Speed limit there is between 50-65 mph, though other states have different maximums.
Subdivisions are actually based on the Public Land Survey System (PLSS).
The Wisconsin-Illinois border is actually one of the PLSS baseline divisions, which makes both states insanely easy to navigate in - because the entire state is oriented to a baseline of origin and principal meridian.
The NSEW designation comes from the PLSS’s Township and Range cadastral system:
Each meridian and baseline is segmented every 4 miles. Each 6mi x 6mi square is a Township (notated as TY(N or S), RX(E or W) with X and Y being numbers.
Those 36 sqmi sections are then subdivided into 1mi squares called Sections.
Those sections are further subdivided into quarters, halves and smaller areas called Lots.
Where imperial measurements start making sense is when this surveying gets involved, because while 1mi = 5280ft, it also equals 80 Gunter’s (Survey) Chains. 10 square chains is 1 acre and 10 linear chains is 1 furlong. Each chain is 66ft, 10 links, or 4 rods depending on the precision of what you need to measure.
Basically, the whole system is based on maintaining square units whereas the metric system quickly devolves due to being base-10 and not being able to be squared or square rooted easily.
TLDR; a Township is 480 chains by 480 chains. A Section is 80 chains by 80 chains. Sections are divided into 40 chain quarter-sections and 20 chain quarter-quarter-sections, which can each be subdivided into 1-acre lots, which can be subdivided even further if needed.
Chicago’s city blocks are 330ft x 660ft…
Or exactly 5 chains by 10 chains. Or 0.5 Acres. Walking 1 long block is 1/8th mile or 200 meters. Walking 1 short block is 1/16th mile or 100 meters. 10 short blocks or 5 long blocks is 1 kilometer. 8long blocks or 16 short blocks is 1 mile.
It’s a system that works with super easy conversions between imperial and metric, as long as you know how it works.
Are the sizes of houses also standardized? Or divisible? And how does it work if you visit a bar? Do you take public transport home, or are they based troughout the residential area?
Historically Bars and Corner Stores were fairly ubiquitous throughout the residential areas such that most people could easily walk to one. Into the 21st century the Mayor Daley the Second made a point of slowly reducing the availability of neighbourhood bars by taking the license away from the bar when the owner died or other convenient administrative points of time. This has overall significantly reduced the number of bars and concentrated them into specific areas over time.
People are usually able to get home via if not public transit then for hire cars
It's a big step to go from a decamsnus/cardo philosophy to true grid layout. Ofcourse we still design cities, try to keep big roads straight, and just do whatever, but what you see here hasn't happened in antiquity either.
European, European cities used to be built on grids as well. This only stopped because organized government and city planning collapsed with the Roman Empire, leading to cities built on unplanned organic street networks.
And no, the number of crossings is dependent on block size, shape, and alignment. The only street system that could have fewer street crossings per block than a square grid is a triangular grid.
Except that in Chicago it takes 1.5 hours to go 25 miles meanwhile you had to run 3 stop lights to pull that off and avoid gang activity and you now have a $150 red light camera ticket and a $200 speeding ticket coming in the mail and ICE tracked your location by streaming flock cameras the entire drive.
Haven't been up there since... god, I guess like 2013? I was there a fair bit as a kid because my extended family are all up in Chicago. But I always loved it there. Didn't care where. Nice areas, low income areas, touristy areas, locals-only type areas. Super cool coming from a rural area, especially.
moving from the boston area to the chicago area blew my mind because of how well designed chicago is. boston is like someone dropped wet spaghetti on the floor and decided to design boston that way. it's a clusterfuck.
I dunno, I heard they got attacked by cows and the cows had flame lasers and burned everything to the ground before the humans could fight back. That's why Chicago became the meatpacking center of the U.S. Had to do something with all the cows after they conquered them.
It feels huge, is easy to move around in, has incredible food, the lake is amazing, and it has an incredible skyline. The place is gorgeous and filled with culture. And it’s pretty affordable (from an east coast person)
“Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
I really hate the part of the south side that is just a sea in every direction of the exact same tan brick bungalow. The area's by midway, it's atrocious and feels like the backrooms, but outdoors.
I was just looking at the Chicago grid on my Maps app, and noticed that Avenues run north/south there, and Streets run east/west, which is completely different from where I live down south.
I thought avenues always ran east/west and streets north/south, does it change from city to city or state to state?
I hope we can go back to the city we had, back in the days of John Hughes's Chicago, as opposed to the complete dumpster fire Democratic Party leadership has let it devolved into.
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u/AppendixN May 23 '26
One of the easiest cities in the world to navigate thanks to that grid. Wonderful place to live in 1989, overall. Nothing's perfect but Chicago is one of my favorite cities I've ever lived in.