Mildly Infuriating

So much more room for delicious maple syrup.

Waffle.

Sweety.

Optional sweaty is the perfect amount of perspiration to have upon one's person.

Someone followed north and someone followed the coast line. This is in Jacksonville Beach, FL

Still a better system than Boston, having navigated both MANY times. To call Boston's streets a "system" is an insult to the very concept of order.

Speaking as someone who has been living in towns with rivers for most of my life:

This is the way.

My experience clearly says that you will loose orientation and get confused the moment you go to a district that is not alligned with the riverbank.

Looks like everyone started a new road perpendicular to the shore line, and the mess occurred when the roads got long enough to meet.

This is the part in Sim City where I restart.

At least with places like Denver and other western cities it's pretty straightforward how it happened - everything built along the river. Access to the river was key.

Being a boom/bust city means that a much later boom they adjusted.

Then even older cities (think Boston) grew before any opportunity at planning could happen.

I think that area was built when nothing else was there, without the developer thinking too hard about its orientation.

As time went on, new development started nearby, oriented to a different geographic element, like a shoreline, or a river, etc. eventually that development met the old development, and they were lined up differently, and the municipality stuck with the new grid system orientation and just built around the old one.

Came here to say the same. This design (or accident) forces north/south traffic to use the arterials on either side of the neighbourhood instead of going through the neighbourhood.

I was thinking maybe an old Spanish Land Grant or something maybe. But, that doesn't seem to be the case. That block is orientated north, while the surrounding blocks are oriented parallel with the coast, just east (right) of the crop. So then, I thought that maybe it was one weird plat of lot and the city grew around it. Nope. The thing is, you can look up all the plats (thanks to Florida's sunshine laws) back to the original bureau of land management surveys (thanks to the BLM & labins.org).There aren't even that many. This neighborhood has been like this from it's beginning as far as I can tell. Around 1911 the whole town, then called Pablo Beach, was platted. And right there in the middle is this weird block, seemingly by design and without explanation. It was replatted in 1922, keeping the twisted block intact. It's been residential neighborhood and largely unchanged since then (at least as far as the parcels and streets are concerned).

Jacksonville Beach, FL

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16%2F30.27980%2F-81.39504

In my experience, many cities old enough in the US. Almost every biggish city where I live has the center of town laying differently than the newer, surrounding areas. There was a time when they oriented things different than how they plan it out now so now the older downtown areas look cock-eyed on a map/satellite image.

Have you considered maybe it’s easier to navigate and plan a grid pattern? I wouldn’t mind uninspired street names like 1st, 2nd, 3rd St, crossways with N, O, P, Q Ave so you at least know which direction is which. Give me that chess board layout so I don’t need to pull up a map to navigate your city please. Car C1 takes Bar G5