{"id":41044,"date":"2013-01-22T08:53:33","date_gmt":"2013-01-22T13:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=41044"},"modified":"2014-05-08T09:24:41","modified_gmt":"2014-05-08T13:24:41","slug":"is-a-grid-the-most-efficient-street-layout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2013\/01\/22\/is-a-grid-the-most-efficient-street-layout\/","title":{"rendered":"Is a grid the most efficient street layout?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Is a grid system the most economically efficient way to lay out a downtown? Last week, I attended a talk by Prof. Robert Ellickson of Yale Law in which he made this argument. The talk was based on his article “The Law and Economics of Street Layouts: How a Grid Pattern Benefits a Downtown<\/a>“. He was inspired to look into this subject by the exhibit “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011<\/a>” at the Museum of the City of New York last year.<\/p>\n

Ellickson contrasted two general models of street creation — bottom-up (created as people build and use the city), which tend to be unstructured (the main US example is Boston), or top-down (laid down by government), which tend to be more structured (most US cities, notably New York). Many cities have a combination of both.<\/p>\n

Ellickson based his argument on the higher land values of properties in a downtown grid street system. To be honest, his evidence was fairly thin, so the paper is more a hypothesis than a proof. Ellickson suggested that a grid system is more valuable for three reasons:<\/p>\n