Optimizing the Street Grid (2013)

You can input a street width, block size and it will generate some simple statistics about the land usage and walkability of a particular grid. We can tell just by looking at it, that the streets and blocks of Portland (left) and Salt Lake City (right) are vastly different; 

   

One metric we can pull from the grid is how much land is dedicated to the streets versus the actual block. This can be observed when comparing Portland’s grid to that of Salt Lake City, despite Portland being ‘less efficient’ by allocating more land to streets (40.83%) than Salt Lake City (30.2%); 

   

Another metric we can gather from the street grid is how much of the street frontage is within walking distance (street frontage being defined as the perimeter of a block that faces the street.)

Source: www.strongtowns.org