She Comes in Colors Everywhere
We've made it to Day 8 of our 10-day trip, the last full day we'd spend in the Phoenix Metroplex. We'd spend most of it at a baseball game, a day game this time that didn't leave time for any pregame outdoor wandering. So we just got up and drove another hundred blocks back across town. We passed these apartment buildings, which were painted in the colors of refrigerators from the 1970s.
We spent a lot of time pondering what it was that made the Phoenix Metroplex so easy to get around. The sprawl adds up to a metropolitan area population of 4.6 million people, making it the 11th largest metro area in the United States. (Phoenix itself is the nation's fifth largest city.) It's spread out over 3,103 square miles, which is huge, with an average density of 3,581 people per square mile. That also makes this the 11th mostly densely populated urban area in the country, and you'd think it would be the 11th hardest Metroplex to get across. You'd think it would take forever. But really, it's a piece of cake.
Why? There's more public transit than you'd think, but there's not enough of it to erase the traffic hell you'd think these Phoenecians should endure. Why wasn't this drive a pain?
I think ultimately, it owes to the fact that of all the grid cities, Phoenix is the griddiest. It is as close to a perfect, topographically pure grid as you'll ever find, and Phoenix doesn't muck it up with rivers or bridges or one-way streets or diagonal streets that would, in theory, create opportunities for short cuts but really just create a bunch of over-complicated six-point intersections. It's just a bunch of squares, with homogenized arterial thoroughfares at consistent distances that all look roughly the same and carry the same volumes. Everything's a right angle, and none of the angles are favored above the others, so everybody spreads out into a smear.
Some people might say that sounds boring, and maybe it is if you live here. But it's the kind of boring that moves. I kind of like it. It bothers me that I kind of like it, but I do.
She Comes in Colors Everywhere
We've made it to Day 8 of our 10-day trip, the last full day we'd spend in the Phoenix Metroplex. We'd spend most of it at a baseball game, a day game this time that didn't leave time for any pregame outdoor wandering. So we just got up and drove another hundred blocks back across town. We passed these apartment buildings, which were painted in the colors of refrigerators from the 1970s.
We spent a lot of time pondering what it was that made the Phoenix Metroplex so easy to get around. The sprawl adds up to a metropolitan area population of 4.6 million people, making it the 11th largest metro area in the United States. (Phoenix itself is the nation's fifth largest city.) It's spread out over 3,103 square miles, which is huge, with an average density of 3,581 people per square mile. That also makes this the 11th mostly densely populated urban area in the country, and you'd think it would be the 11th hardest Metroplex to get across. You'd think it would take forever. But really, it's a piece of cake.
Why? There's more public transit than you'd think, but there's not enough of it to erase the traffic hell you'd think these Phoenecians should endure. Why wasn't this drive a pain?
I think ultimately, it owes to the fact that of all the grid cities, Phoenix is the griddiest. It is as close to a perfect, topographically pure grid as you'll ever find, and Phoenix doesn't muck it up with rivers or bridges or one-way streets or diagonal streets that would, in theory, create opportunities for short cuts but really just create a bunch of over-complicated six-point intersections. It's just a bunch of squares, with homogenized arterial thoroughfares at consistent distances that all look roughly the same and carry the same volumes. Everything's a right angle, and none of the angles are favored above the others, so everybody spreads out into a smear.
Some people might say that sounds boring, and maybe it is if you live here. But it's the kind of boring that moves. I kind of like it. It bothers me that I kind of like it, but I do.