New York City is easy to navigate without a ~GPS~ map. It has a fairly logical layout, and I can generally figure out where I'm going. Philadelphia, on the other hand, was not easy to navigate at all.
NYC's streets are mostly numbered. If something is given a name, it's usually a bigger avenue. The narrower blocks are numbered and it's easy to tell if you've gone in the wrong direction because the numbers are going in the wrong direction. Since the block is short, you don't have to walk far before realizing this. Paths in one direction are avenues, the other direction are streets, so it's easy to get your bearings.
Philadelphia's streets are mostly named, and it's almost impossible to tell if you're walking in the right direction without walking a decent distance. East/West paths are sometimes avenues, but not always.
(1) You need to memorize the order of the streets (... Vine, Race, Arch, Market, Chestnut, Walnut, Locust, Spruce, Pine, ...), which is mildly annoying but you just have to do it once. A complication - there are multiple series of streets, for example that series continues ... Lombard, South, Bainbridge ... east of the Schuylkill but ... Osage, Larchwood, Cedar, ... west of it.
(DC's solution to this is good although boring - the streets are lettered.)
(2) you can usually look at the street addresses to tell which way you're going, since they increase heading away from Market Street (north/south) or Front Street (west).
> (1) You need to memorize the order of the streets (... Vine, Race, Arch, Market, Chestnut, Walnut, Locust, Spruce, Pine, ...), which is mildly annoying but you just have to do it once. A complication - there are multiple series of streets, for example that series continues ... Lombard, South, Bainbridge ... east of the Schuylkill but ... Osage, Larchwood, Cedar, ... west of it.
This sounds like the worst possible implementation, or at least one of the worst existing implementations, of a grid. The navigator just has to know all the randomly assigned street names and their relationships - in other words, maximum cognitive load. It could only be worse with special rules, like streets changing names from one block to the next, which also apparently happens.
(Not shitting on Philly - my city is just as bad or worse)
> (DC's solution to this is good although boring - the streets are lettered.)
Essentially the same as NYC's then. It's predictable, has minimal cognitive load. If you can see any two parallel streets you can determine direction.
Avenue of the Americas is also marked as 6 Ave, so you don't need to know the name. You can see the sign for 20th street in one direction and 22nd in the other, so now you have a better sense of direction. Since you know which way the street numbers increase, you also know which directions to go to head toward 5th or 7th avenue.
I'll be honest, I've spent a lot more time in NYC than I have in Philly.. but it did not take long for me to get my bearings without knowing much about the city other than the directions in which the street and avenue numbers increase / decrease.
Something I can recommend is taking a bicycle and intentionally getting lost in the city. Cycle random intersections in random directions and you'll quickly start to build a mental map. You can go from being entirely new to having a mental map of an entire district in only a few hours.
This trick is trying to compress the years of walking and cycling and getting lost that you'd do as a child or teen into a single evening and it's really helpful at building a mental map.
