Lost in the grid

A quick note about how the English navigate compared with how Americans navigate. In the previous post, I spent some time complaining of the 2,000-year-old London street plan, with intersections where six streets collide with no predictable result, and London streets that wind in no particular direction and change names frequently.

On the first Friday I was in London, I began chatting in a Starbucks with a very friendly English woman who said she owned a small hotel in Milton Keynes. From her, I learned that Milton Keynes is a rather young city built by a development company northwest of London, (kind of like Reston, Va.) and that it was built on the "American model":

The city's layout was planned on a grid pattern of approximately 1 km interval, rather than the more conventional spider-web pattern seen elsewhere in older settlements. The major roads are drawn between communities, rather than through them: the major roads are known locally as grid roads and the spaces between them are known as grid squares. Consequently each grid square is a semi-autonomous community, making a unique collective of 100 urban spaces within the overall city milieu. ... Although the grid roads have conventional names such as Portway and Saxon Street, their original planning designations have stuck and locals are more comfortable with the shorthand "H5" and "V7" (where V is vertical or north/south and H is horizontal or east/west). The Vs are Streets and the Hs are Ways.

Sensible, eh? Sounds like the perfect way to design planning units and roadways so that people can't possibly get lost. Except, evidently, in England. My Starbucks buddy told me, "I don't know how many times guests would call from the road and tell me, 'We've been driving around for an hour and we can't find you. We're at this roundabout. Stay on the phone and tell me how to get there.'"

In short, it's all in what you're accustomed to. I grew up with grid roads, and I believe cities like Chicago and Tulsa, designed on the same pattern, are impossible to get lost in. But maybe if you grew up navigating from roundabout to roundabout, you feel lost in the grid.