Best city layout - Grid, Hexagonal, Circular or Natural?

[Lance Winslow]

Indeed I have also studied maps all my live. From the time I was a child with HO Scale Railroad Models, until the time I got my pilots license and later used them for Marketing using ArcView and ArcData overlays. This is indeed a great subject and from a routing standpoint for service vehicles and traffic flows it is worthy of mention. As each time we increase productivity, the economies of scale lower costs and raise the standards of living and quality of life. Layout is just as important today as the Romans discovered back then, even more so with the insanity of the ever increasing densities.

[Snowguy716]

One style of development not mention much is the current "ribbon" style of development in which residential streets are laid out in a long/skinny pattern that curve and have small side streets and culd-de-sacs at certain points.

This style of development is very popular in newer exurban developments and has been popular in England for some time. Birmingham, England is a great example of this type of development:

Sutton Coldfield, England

[Rardy]

My prefered city layout would be the grid system (all four lane divided boulevards with loading lanes) but all intersections would be two lane roundabouts. Even though i cannot stand two lane roundabouts if put into place in the United States, it works very well on Sim City 4 and the rest of the world. No traffic signals are allowed in my city