Interactive Road Orientation Distributions – How Ordered is Your Town?

San Francisco Road Orientation DistributionsAn image created by Seth Kadish at Vizual Statistix caught my eye in my Twitter timeline yesterday showing road orientation distributions (i.e. what directions the roads go in) for a number of US cities.  Being British, the idea of roads forming a nice, thought-out pattern is completely alien to me and takes all the fun out of trying to get lost but the visualisations intrigued me none the less.  The calculations used by Seth had a few limitations as the length of each street didn’t influence the plot and a twisty street would only register in a single orientation rather than being split appropriately.  So time to step up to the plate to see if I can find a more interactive and representative way of doing the same thing.

Continue reading