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In Chicago or Beijing, any given street is likely to take you north, south, east, or west. But good luck following the compass in Rome or Boston, where streets grew up organically and seemingly twist and and turn at random.

Geoff Boeing calls this structure the “logic” of a city, and he would know: An urban planning scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Boeing developed a tool to let anyone visualize this urban logic in seconds.

It works by using an old geography technique: the “polar” or circular chart. Boeing’s tool calculates what percentage of a city’s roads run along each section of a compass, and plots it on a circular bar chart. The island of Manhattan, for example, runs from south-southwest to north-northeast, and most of its streets are parallel or perpendicular to the island in a regular grid. Boeing's program visualizes that as four long bars, with several shorter bars representing the borough’s minority of streets that don’t line up with the grid, as illustrated in the circular pattern below.

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Originally posted by Nina:
The website where this was posted (CityLab) is really cool as well.

I wonder how PDX would fare? Most of it is a grid downtown and on the east side, but there are significant barriers (mountains, hills, rivers) that get in the way in other places. I hadn't realized how much I relied on visual cues/landmarks for navigation until I moved and didn't have many. They were blocked by other hills and/or clouds, mist and fog.