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Old 03-23-2013, 03:35 AM
 
2,963 posts, read 6,234,734 times
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Take a look at the example below.

All of the avenues and streets throughout the city are completely discontinuous. The only exception is with downtown and midtown where everything is a perfect continuous grid (except k street and capitol mall). But once you venture into the streetcar suburbs it seems most of the numbered avenues and numbered streets are fubared as far as continuity.

Is this a unique "feature" of Sacramento or are most urban areas like this?

edit: Just look at the 2nd ave example. Ridiculous.
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Is it "normal" for city streets to be so discontinuous or is it a Sacramento thing?-sac.png  
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Old 03-23-2013, 03:43 AM
 
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And this is not just a feature of the inner city. Also in the suburbs.
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Is it "normal" for city streets to be so discontinuous or is it a Sacramento thing?-sac2.png  
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Old 03-23-2013, 03:46 AM
 
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Another example in a rural area.
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Is it "normal" for city streets to be so discontinuous or is it a Sacramento thing?-sac3.png  
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Old 03-23-2013, 06:34 AM
 
Location: Sacramento, Placerville
2,511 posts, read 6,263,750 times
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Most areas are like this. In the case of 2nd St there is a possibility large lots were subdivided by different owners and what you see as 2nd street today may have been property boundaries from back then. Discontinuous streets are the norm in residential areas anyway.

It looks like Morse Ave either ran into private property, or the displacement is due to an adjustment for the township and range grid. The adjustment is to compensate for sections getting narrower as you go north.

Kiefer Blvd used to connect. You can blame that one on the Air Force. That missing section used to be part of Mather AFB. If you look at the aerial image it is obvious it used to connect, but came too close to the southwest end of the runway. There are plans to connect it.

If you take a look at Herdon Ave in Fresno you can see the north-south streets all have a curve in them. This is due to that township and range thing I mentioned. The only reason they have those curves in them is because they were added as development went north of Herndon Ave. It was mainly a traffic management issue, and a lot of that land was being sat on by developers waiting for the next housing cycle to jump on the development. This is a big difference from the odd occurrence of the same displacement of streets in Sacramento County. Traffic management wasn't needed back then, and the individual subdivisions were often developed one by one leaving large square empty lots in between them.

Fresno, CA - Google Maps

Elkhorn Ave in Fresno County still has disconnected roads for the same reason:

Fresno, CA - Google Maps

And so does Excelsior

Fresno, CA - Google Maps

You could looks at a map of any large city and tear it apart. They all have their quirks and Sacramento doesn't come near being the worst in this regard. Try San Antonio. Most of the major streets change names four or five times as they go through one quadrant of the city and you can forget about having streets with the same name crossing the entire metro area. If you drive up 24th you will encounter a curve and suddenly you are on 26th, which at some point turns into Wilson. The whole place is built like that. Austin is worse. It is okay if you are driving north and south through Austin, but once you wander a bit north it is difficult to go east and west. The few roads that go any distance east and west are gridlocked because of this. The other major east and west roads suddenly turn into residential roads without warning, or curve some direction you don't want to go. Kind of like Sacramento County and getting across the rivers. The getting across the rivers is the only thing that really bothers me about traffic planning here. I think a good north-south expressway is needed, but a few more bridges would really improve in the reduction of air pollution here.
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Old 03-23-2013, 09:49 AM
 
8,679 posts, read 17,189,509 times
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Yeah, that sort of thing is pretty standard. In the case of 2nd Avenue, the area was basically just the old Stockton road (aka Stockton Boulevard) until the California State Fairgrounds were moved there in 1905-1909. The big fairground took up a big chunk of land and interrupted the previously gridded streets that were laid out for private subdivisions like Oak Park and Elmhurst. There were a few homes out there by then, but it was mostly still "out in the country."

The map near Mather AFB is a similar scenario--a large facility (an Air Force base) got dropped on an unincorporated and largely uninhabited area in a rural area. Kiefer Road may have already been around but was blocked by the need for safety/security space around the airfield.

Also, mid-20th century road design was done largely by private developers, who wanted to sell more land and build fewer roads. Regular grids mean a lot of asphalt and fewer houses to sell--discontiguous cul-de-sacs mean more land for houses and less money on asphalt that goes to the city. It was also marketed as a way to reduce traffic in residential areas--no through traffic. But yes, it makes driving physically inconvenient. Happens all over the place, not just here.
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Old 03-24-2013, 03:44 PM
 
Location: Vallejo
21,617 posts, read 24,753,085 times
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Normal. There's five South King Streets in Seattle, and that's in something like two miles.
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Old 03-25-2013, 10:54 AM
 
1,321 posts, read 2,637,762 times
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Majin, time to invest in a GPS, my friend. The "similar threads" list down below includes one on the same topic that you started two years ago.
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Old 03-25-2013, 12:54 PM
 
Location: Sacramento
323 posts, read 1,004,172 times
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I also think that the city renamed the streets after the fact to conform with the grid. East Sacramento, Land Park and Oak Park had their own street names and the city renamed them.

So you have streets like Castro between 2nd and 3rd Ave in Curtis Park but nothing in Oak Park. They don't totally match up. Same thing in San Francisco's Potreo hill vs. the Mission. The Mission has a bigger block size than Potrero Hill so you have streets like Maripossa in Potrero hill not the Mission. This goes all the way back to when Mission Dolores was a separate city from the rest of San Francisco.
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