Why U.S. Roads are Spaced One Mile Apart

[@calvinsmith6681]

Fun fact: Michigan actually messed up its baseline. One surveyor started surveying east of the meridian and another west of it. It turns out one of them (I can't remember which one) was incorrect, but as land had already been surveyed using the incorrect point of beginning, it was preserved. So, Michigan has two points of beginning: one for the townships east of the meridian and another for townships west of the meridian. The two points of beginning are immortalized by massive stone pedestals at Meridian-Baseline State Park.

[@davidlyon4950]

Therefore, the east-west roads jog at Meridian Rd.

[@calvinsmith6681]

@@davidlyon4950 they also tend to jog at any township line. Other than at the corners of the townships it’s very common for the section corners on the township lines to have double corners because the surveyors who did the original township surveys didn’t meet perfectly at either end. Also, since this is a rectangular survey being done on a spherical surface, error is inevitable and so all of the surveyor’s error was stuck in the sections along the north and west township lines, meaning the sections can be either larger or smaller depending on the nature of the error

[@bobby_greene]

How far apart are they?

[@calvinsmith6681]

@@bobby_greene double corners are usually only about 30 ish feet apart or a hundred feet on the high end. The baselines are about half a mile apart from each other

[@LilJessye94]

Yup I’ve been up and down Meridian Road growing up in Saginaw and fishing in Gladwin and Midland Counties. No road crosses it without moving several feet north or south. Never noticed the reason why tho

[@tomtom2719]

Fresno native here: thank you for finally recognizing our leadership and exceptionalism

[@monotonewombat9912]

FRESNO MENTIONED

[@marcbayarea1980]

FresOno

[@thatcapuchin6597]

LMAO

[@jorgehaswag7294]

Then again, maybe they made the grids smaller cause no one wants to spend too long walking outside in the Fresno heat lol

[@AndrewOjeda]

I grew up north of Herndon so to hear “public transit” and “Fresno” in the same breath had me very confused 😂

[@DodderingOldMan]

I've spent a lot of time on Google Maps, and it absolutely blows my mind just how much of the middle of the US is covered with 1 mile grids. It's particularly interesting to me as an Australian; my nation is roughly the same size, but our interior is almost uninhabited. There sure as hell isn't a road every mile. Every 500 miles, maybe.

[@aaronzimny8201]

There' are only roads where there's farmland or towns. Look at the basin and range states like Nevada, Arizona, Utah, etc. sometimes there are no roads for hundreds of miles, much like the interior of Australia.

[@DodderingOldMan]

@@aaronzimny8201 For sure, I know it's not quite that homogenous. Still, there are *vast* swathes of the US that are broken up into those 1 mile squares, and there's nowhere in the US that comes even close to the remoteness (by which I mean distance to the nearest town, or even road) of vast swathes of Australia.

[@bcubed72]

Unlike you, our interior has water. A whole lot of it until one gets west of the westernmost point of the Gulf of Mexico. But even then, the Rockies catch a lot of rain and snow, meaning even our deserts have rivers in them, unlike your Outback.

[@PeloquinDavid]

Canadian here. Most of our country is just as uninhabited as most of Australia, but in the main agricultural areas (in the southern parts of most provinces - and especially on the northern Great Plains in the Prairie provinces), the situation is very much as described here - even the extent to which the earliest settlers adopted a river lot system that persists to this day (I grew up on one along the Red River in Manitoba that abutted the start of the "township system" just to its west that continued more or less without interruption all the way to the Rockies.)

[@TreeStump-and-CheeseKetchupIT]

@@PeloquinDavid I didn't know other provinces had that too! I live in Alberta which is township/range and I'm right on the meridian road. The neighbour said the gov used the meridian road to correct curvature as well so we end up with a few extra feet of property on this side of the road.

[@intravenousradio]

as a detroiter and urban design enthusiast, I never thought our city would be mentioned in a positive light in an urban planning video. Southeast Michigan's roads and streets are overwhelmingly dangerous for motorists, pedestrians and bike commuters alike.

[@calvinsmith6681]

Noticed a mistake at 4:28. Your section map is completely messed up. The sections are numbered boustrophedonically, not just left to right. They're arranged like this: 6 5 4 3 2 1 7 8 9 10 11 12 18 17 16 15 14 13 19 20 21 22 23 24 30 29 28 27 26 25 31 32 33 34 35 36 Seems random, but it's very intuitive when you get used to it. I work in land surveying and have done many drawings and legal descriptions of property so I see this every day.

[@braxtonbennett]

Came here to say this

[@tomtom2719]

@@braxtonbennett yeah boustrophedonically

[@molodoy_suetnoy]

Thanks, that's kinda important

[@kaempenfamily4485]

There is a map in the video that shows the correct alignment at 7:13.

[@calvinsmith6681]

@ big oof

[@AndrewL209]

Talking about Fresno in a positive light on a youtube video is something i havent seen in a long time

[@stevecooper7883]

Fresno: well at least it ain't Stockton

[@gorgthesalty]

@@stevecooper7883 Clovis, where men are men are sheep are sca-a-a-red!

[@marcbayarea1980]

@@stevecooper7883 Trust me. Stockton is better.

[@JonnyMom5]

Stockton: At least we're not Modesto Modesto: At least we're not merced Merced: At least we're not Fresno Fresno: At least we're not Bakersfield Bakersfield: you're not wrong lol

[@AndrewL209]

@ unfortunately i just woke up and now i have to drive home through every one of those cities today including a speaker pickup in bakersfield😂

[@Steve_42_]

*sounds of surveyors and title examiners nerding out intensifies*

[@iseabeck9488]

I get to brag about being an examiner for once!

[@bjdon99]

Old Green Bay followed the French siegneur system that you see in Quebec. Their key was long narrow lots where everyone had access to water

[@calvinsmith6681]

You also see it in Louisiana along the Mississippi River. I believe the term for those long narrow tracts is arpents.

[@Steve_42_]

This is also the case in Michigan along the Detroit River/St. Clair River from St Clair County south to the Ohio border at Monroe County. Numbered "private claims" instead of Section/Township/Range

[@calvinsmith6681]

@ yup former French and British claims from before the PLSS was enacted. There are also a few in central Michigan but they aren’t numbered like that. They’re Smith’s Reservation in Flint, the Peter Riley Reserve in Saginaw, and the John Riley Reserve and Bowkowden Reservation in Bay City

[@bjdon99]

That’s right. The Arpent was the French pre-metric version of the acre

[@ecurewitz]

Tatakes sense. Interesting

[@jonathan248]

As someone from southeast Michigan, I love the simplicity of our mile roads. Even when you don't recognize the name of a cross road, everyone intuitively knows which direction the mile roads are from their current location.

[@Dratchev241]

had lot of outsiders of Indiana figure out our county road system is easy to deal with (most counties in Indiana) as we have CR names like 500 North, 800 West. 300E is 3 miles east of meridian. etc. couple northern counties use county highway numbers. and down south where you can't have a grid network just have road names like miller road.

[@ToTheGAMES]

The movie 12.87KM wasn't a huge success however.

[@colormedubious4747]

🤣🤣🤣

[@Rainer67059]

as well as Celsius 488.33

[@colormedubious4747]

@ If you're referring to the Bradbury novel, I think you mean Celsius 232.78

[@howardb.6205]

"with us over here and them over there and barbed wire boarders going nowhere" - NOFX

[@docplot8280]

Love hearing a fellow Cornellian talk about my hometown! Greetings from Michigan (actually within walking distance of 8 Mile).

[@DodoNn]

This was one of the most useful and beautiful YT videos I have ever watched! This channel is just getting better and better.

[@RichardArpin]

Canada land is still divided up on the imperial mile - we still went metric. Hence people like my dad (who was a surveyor, as I am), still use distances interchangeably. Many of our construction projects are still designed in ft and inches, and some supplies are in imperial (lumber and fasteners), but others are in metric, such as cubic meter for concrete. The worst is site plans though, they are all in metric, and then the buildings themselves are planned in imperial, and so trying to compare a "site confirm" dimension from the one plan to the other is a pain.

[@davidbarts6144]

And nobody sells real estate in metric units. It is all square feet and acres.

[@ronblack7870]

about 10 yrs ago i needed some 6 mm thick nylon sheet . so i looked in canada . nope only 1/4 inch.

[@marklittle8805]

Canada has never truly embraced metric, but it wasn't until I worked doing survey work for a civil engineer did I realise feet and inches were nothing; the old British military surveyors used chains....like what the hell? Canada is a mishmash of systems on just about anything, we just say we are metric so we can be one of the cool kids

[@RichardArpin]

@@marklittle8805 In school you're still taught the corrections for the drooping of the chains when held at proper tension, among other things. I didn't specialize in surveying but project management, so I didn't learn about all the crazy geoids regarding how to model the curvature of the earth but surveying can be extremely geometry heavy (I use total stations to survey concrete and anchor bolt layout, my tolerances are tighter than most gps systems could achieve). Modern survey tape measures, at least the long ones that are metal are still called chains. I typically only used a short 150' or 50m chain back before I used edm. But I still factor temperature differences when holding my 8m tape (or setting my edm), here in Winnipeg we can get a variation of 140° from summer to winter, and that can significantly affect measurements as well. Lastly, the absolute worst part of legal surveying in Canada is how decimal ft are/were used - never use that tape measure anymore since I got into being a PM rather than legal surveyor. Does anyone know if they use decimal ft down in the USA?

[@tammo100]

Good conditions for some major planning errors.

[@Giaayokaats]

8:48 you see a similar situation on the Canadian prairies, especially in Manitoba, as in Green Bay. Most settlements that predate 1880 were organized as river/lake lot settlements. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, the Canadian government ordered that the prairies be surveyed according to the sectional system. This caused major tensions with the local population and was one of the major underlying causes of the 1885 Northwest Resistance. Interestingly, you can still see where the larger river lot settlements meet the sectional system with satellite imagery

[@Giaayokaats]

The cities of Winnipeg and Edmonton both have some unorthodox road layouts because of the two systems’ being used together, lol

[@Eragor-h5n]

I am a bit surprised you didn't mention Denver. That city has a large section that is at a diagonal due to it originally being planned alongside the banks of the Cherry Creek river. When the new baseline street grid came, it intersected with the older street grid, resulting in a lot of strange angles in the city. Interestingly, that older grid marks the densest part of Denver, with the entire area being built up.

[@TheDanEdwards]

Grew up in a region of vast 1-mile square grids, and while it does lead to more bridges it does also make navigation pretty straightforward. And, when they are now enumerated with street numbers, one can readily tell how far one needs to go, e.g. you're crossing 127th street and want to get to 151st street then you know you have 24 miles to get to 141st street.

[@calvinsmith6681]

@@TheDanEdwards it doesn’t always lead to more bridges. Most of the time if a section of river overlaps a section line the road will just go around it rather than make a lot of bridges. The roads-on-section-lines is the default but it’s not a hard and fast rule and plenty of roads were constructed without regard for the section lines

[@denzzlinga]

@@calvinsmith6681 you could also make the rivers straight and fit in the grid if you want to by digging a new bed :D Where i live there is one river that was once straightened in the 19th century for flood protection, and than moved to the side in the late 70s to built a 4 lane highway in a more or less straight line instead of needing two bridged and have too tight curves in the highway.

[@tallest4eva]

It's usually not 1mile between the individual numbered streets. For example 75th Street could be on the mile border, and 87th street would be the next mile. In the KC suburbs, 119th and 127th streets are a mile apart, not 8miles apart, and 135th is another mile south of that.

[@Dratchev241]

@@tallest4eva Indianapolis and Hamilton county to the north the mile marker road number is every 10. so 246th st to 256th st is 1 mile. 1st st starts in Marion county (indianapolis downtown) and ends at 296th st Hamilton/Tipton county line which that road has 2 names depending if you are on the north side county road 600 south/ south side 296th st.

[@calvinsmith6681]

@@Dratchev241 a number of counties in Michigan name their roads this way too, but not the majority. Wayne County, Oakland County and Macomb County all do their east west roads north of Detroit (mostly, Oakland slips a bit after 16 Mile Rd) using the mile road system. Kent County has east west roads north of Grand Rapids following the mile road system while south of Grand Rapids they follow a street system counting up from 28th St and the number increasing by eight every mile (they do it this way because what would be 0 is Fulton St, which is on the half mile and the roads to the north actually count up from Bridge St instead). Mecosta County takes it further and does numbered avenues for north south roads and mile roads for east west, except east west roads on the half mile which are typically named for presidents.

[@barryrobbins7694]

9:59 I remember bringing up this issue in another video. So many suburbs are based on a mile grid. It is not just a half mile walk to a main road due to the labyrinthian street layouts within the grid.

[@moth.monster]

I wish every housing development had little pedestrian cut-throughs on their cul-de-sacs. Some do, and they're amazing. Makes them twice as walkable with zero extra traffic.

[@Rob2]

Well, it is like that here in the Netherlands, which is a bike and pedestrian oriented country. While we don't have those square blocks, it is common for a housing area to be surrounded by a somewhat circular road for car traffic, with side roads that split into cul-de-sacs, and with bike paths and footpaths interconnecting them on the inside. So it is easy to walk or bike from one house to the other, and to the shopping center that is in one of the sections, but to go by car you have to go the long way around.

[@maikotter9945]

@@Rob2 ein Beitrag an Sonntag, dem 26. Januar 2025 Moin aus dem Lauenburgischen (an der Elbe) [53° 36´ Nördlicher Breite]! Wann werden die Europäischen Niederlande, aufgrund der Eindeichungen, unmittelbar an England grenzen? ;)

[@LucarioBoricua]

This concept is called the fused grid, it's really friendly for multimodal development and cheap to implement, but the downside is that it's a poison pill for NIMBYs that play the 'not letting crime enter the neighborhood' card--they consider easy pedestrian access will only let in criminals and riff-raff to harm their children and property values.

[@Weavileiscool]

When I flew to Alaska last summer, it was really easy to see all the grids in Washington before the layover in Seattle.

[@matthewmahler9212]

For those who care an American football field is roughly 1.3 acres, so basically if you cut the 10yard line off from either side you have basically an acre

[@WompWompWoooomp]

Working in the oil industry, understanding the township and range system is essential. While we now have GPS coordinates, even new wells are still marked using the township and range system. (As well as how many feet and in what direction from which quarter of which quarter of which quarter of the section. It can take a bit to wrap your mind around at first, lol)

[@heronimousbrapson863]

Canada surveyed land in much the same way as the US did, particularly in the west, yet still converted to the metric system.

[@Bankable2790]

Far less people and far less settled

[@bobsweeper3391]

We technically converted but in practice we still use imperial a lot. Even a zoomer like me who lives in rural Saskatchewan will still refer to farmland plots in acres and grid road distances in miles

[@justintime343]

Being from Upstate NY, I wasn’t aware of these grids (since they tend to be very sparse there) until 8 Mile the film was released while I was in college…even after that I hadn’t actually encountered them until several years later. I didn’t even realize it was a nationwide thing until this video but thinking about how things look from 30k feet, it’s like duh.

[@NelsenMotorsports]

You should do a video about how many South Georgia city grids are aligned with the train line rather than the mile grid lines.

[@stanthonyofpadua1]

In Indiana, rural addresses often take the form "2240 E 1700 N" ... based on these mile grid coordinates, with a x100 multiplier.

[@EthanNeal]

Same in Idaho, though it varies from county to county. In Fremont and Jefferson Counties, the grid starts in the southwestern corner, starting at 100 N and 100 E, and each mile is 100 more than the last. In Madison County, the zero point of the grid is just east of downtown Rexburg at 2nd E and Main, Rexburg uses its own 1/7 mile grid (yes, really) that's offset from the Madison County grid by 2/7 of a mile to the west, and Bonneville County does 1/10 mile by 1/16 mile beginning northeast of downtown Idaho Falls. Since I do package delivery in the area, I'm intimately familiar with the grid systems here, and you could drop me on just about any random road in those 4 counties, even on a foggy day so I can't see the mountains, and I can still find my way around.

[@danieldaniels7571]

That's most all addresses in Utah

[@fernbedek6302]

Reminds me how Toronto has a lot of the suburbs divided into ~2kmx2km arterial grids, while Hamilton just down the lake is closer to 1kmx1km, which obviously has advantages for a walkable neighbourhood.

[@NosebergEatzbugsVonShekelstein]

Toronto is on the mile grid just like the US.

[@ronblack7870]

@@NosebergEatzbugsVonShekelstein maybe they changed for new development. i left 1993 so don't know for sure

[@marklittle8805]

The concessions are 1.25 miles actually. Eglinton to Lawrence is that distance, and so on....the north shore of Lake Ontario from Cobourg to Brown's Line in Etobicoke is in on this, and with the bend in the lake, west of Browns Line is angled. So when they hit Hamilton, the grid is off the south shore but I am pretty sure they jury rigged it because of the Escarpment

[@jons3226]

I work in Green Bay and Lambeau Field really sticks out because it is orientated along the North-South axis but pretty much everything else in the city is angled.

[@williamjones7163]

There is a road running through Phoenix, Arizona called Baseline Road. And as history will have it, it is the Baseline for the State.

[@danieldaniels7571]

And it doesn't rhyme with Vaseline

[@BrianBurkeProd]

You see, this was kind of a culture shock for me when visiting the Midwest, because I’m from the East Coast. Here our roads are very much shaped by the geography.

[@EthanNeal]

One note on the over bridging problem, states that developed their grids later don't tend to have that issue. Eastern Idaho's mile grid is chopped up in all sorts of weird places because of the local topography, it is all old volcanoes, after all. If anything, the bridges here are for canals, not rivers

[@keithwilliams9213]

Great video. Floridian here. Some property boundaries in our state predate the RLSS/PLSS (adopted by the Land Ordinance of 1785/Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to survey lands ceded by the 1783 Treaty of Paris) by almost 3 centuries and 4 sovereignties. To get the "ownerships" right, you have to figure out which survey system was in place under which flag of sovereignty when the land was granted and also understand that legal system of property transfer as well as reciprocal property rights honored by successive regimes. Florida land granted under Spanish (1512-1562; 1565-1763; 1763-1821), French (1562-1565), British (1763-1783). US Territorial (1821-1845), US State (1845-1860), Confederate State (1860-1865), and again US State (1865-present) legal systems all had differing survey systems and transfer laws which all had to be harmonized to determine who took ultimate title. Metes and bounds (Spanish, British) vs. arpents (French) vs. RLSS/PLSS (USA). The RLSS/PLSS is by far the easiest to use when locating prior land descriptions on the ground, but not all surveys close into a neat and tidy polygon with easy to follow instructions..

[@ulfgabrielson4766]

In Europe, even the thought of drawing up borders and building roads in squares is absurd.

[@LucarioBoricua]

Perhaps it makes more sense on the largest expanses of flat terrain over in eastern Europe and Russia's European side. Definitely not in the areas with diverse geography in western, central, southern and northern Europe.

[@markquintonii]

​@@LucarioBoricua roads in the US are only perfect grids in flat areas. Roads next to rivers mountains and hills are going to follow the geography. The grid system makes it pretty easy to navigate in cities. Also the grid system mostly applies to local roads. Freeways and highways will often have weird junctures with county roads due to rural county roads following the grid system and freeways and highways taking the most logical path to connect towns and cities.

[@AnotherDuck]

Borders in Europe were largely drawn through wars. USA had a lot of land that wasn't already divided up (and ignored the locals), so making a more cohesive system makes more sense.

[@james1971james1971]

Well actually this grid system was invented in Greek colonies around the fifth century bc and improved by Romans, who massively used it all across Europe... but this happened 2000 years ago, when Europe was more or less as wild as the US during the colonization

[@Taladar2003]

@@james1971james1971 Romans used it on a much smaller scale though, mostly just for their military camps and in some cases a small area around it.

[@elizabethdavis1696]

Please consider doing a video on all the different types of missing middle housing and what they look like and what the benefits and disadvantages is of each of them

[@fuzzylon]

Thank you !! This answers many things that have puzzled me over the years.

[@PeloquinDavid]

The "rectangular" survey system can only be a rough approximation on the surface of the (slightly oblate) spheroid that is the earth. Because of that fact, you'll often see surveyors' corrections (and sudden road turns - especially on north-south roads) every now or then to account for the fact that the northern length of "rectangles" formed by successive lines of LATITUDE that shape "townships" (or sections) are slightly shorter than the southern length. (Otherwise, their east and west lines would systematically deviate more and more (as you move away from your north-south baseline) from the actual LONGITUDINAL lines). These differences get more significant at higher latitudes (as the lines of longitude converge more rapidly as they approach the poles). The upshot is that a lot of surveyed townships (and sections) are inevitably NOT 36 (or 1) sq. miles in area, respectively.

[@d4b]

Thank you!! I was hoping to see SOME comment point this out! At some level of precision, EVERY "rectangle" is closer to a slightly squashed/bulging trapezoid, and NO section can be precisely one square mile.

[@charlesyoung7436]

@@d4b Absolutely! Think of trying to tape a piece of graph paper on a globe. It won't fit without folding points. This is the most important thing left out of this otherwise informative video. One minor omission, though. The first grid system used in the Western Reserve area of Ohio has five mile, rather than six mile (square) townships.

[@BS-vx8dg]

@@charlesyoung7436 _One minor omission, though. The first grid system used in the Western Reserve area of Ohio has five mile, rather than six mile (square) townships_ This is true, but it is because the grid system he was speaking of was the one set up by the Land Ordinance of 1785 to survey the Northwest Territory. But at the time this surveying was started, the Western Reserve was not _part_ of the NWT; it was still an exclave of Connecticut, which had retained rights to the area even after supposedly ceding its western claims a few years earlier.

[@heronimousbrapson863]

Canada, particularly in the west, has the same situation, further complicated by the fact that the western Canadian surveys also added road allowances.

[@impster]

Interesting question. excited to watch it

[@EricaGamet]

And now I know where Baseline Rd. in Boulder Cty. Colorado got its name! In the Denver area, the blocks are 8 to a mile, I believe. I still maintain it's the easiest, most logical street grid/numbering system. I grew up there, been in Seattle for 8 years and STILL find the grid numbering confusing. In Denver, each street maintains its numbering (so as you travel up Wadsworth, for instance, you're always at 7600 west). Maybe a video on the different wayfinding built into street grids?

[@mikenelson6630]

There is one flaw in your description of the Township/Range/Section system. The sections ARE numbered starting in the NE corner as you state, but they alternate in direction. Your map shows section 6, and directly south of that you have section12, which is actually section 7 with section 12 south of section 1, then section 13 south of that. Therefore on your map, sections 7 to 12, 19 to 24, and 31 to 36 need to be reversed in direction.

[@lpburrows]

I’d never thought about the Jeffersonian grid as a barrier to metricization, but it makes a lot of sense now that you’ve said it.

[@StevenEveral]

A lot of state grids aren't perfectly aligned to east-west grids even if that was the intention. If you look at the state line between Kansas and Missouri, especially State Line Road that runs through Kansas City and its suburbs, you'll see that the Kansas grid is aligned to east-west. The Missouri grid is just a few degrees off from the Kansas grid system.

[@eaglescout1984]

As someone who lives on the East Coast (and grew up a few miles from Thomas Jefferson's home), I am very familiar with the metes and bounds system and main arterial roads that follow natural boundaries and contours. In fact, even though all the property I've ever owned was delineated in the 19th or 20th centuries, deeds still use the metes and bounds system and even when property lines are in a grid, none of them are aligned with cardinal directions.

[@ddm3125]

Love the build + voiceover videos.

[@jpatrickmoore5158]

West of downtown Portland, Oregon is the Willamette Stone. Ironically, it's located on private property, but the owners granted an easement to the State of Oregon, and there's a walkway and staircase that drops down from Skyline Drive to the state heritage site. The baseline is alternately aligned with Baseline Road, Burnside Road and Stark Street. The meridian has a short section of I-5, 65th Avenue and Meridian Road alone its length, and the border of Clackamas and Washington Counties for a short distance.

[@PhillProbst]

I'm a retired surveyor, licensed in MD & PA so I've never directly dealt with the public land survey system, although I am, of course, familiar with it. I notice that while you mentioned the inevitable conflicts with topography, you never addressed the irregularities that result from imposing a rectangular grid on a spherical surface.

[@Woodburner100]

That township is upside down compared to land surveys in the western part of Canada. Ours starts with section 1 at the southeast corner of the township and counts up going west until it hits section 6 and then moves up and goes back to the east, continuing the pattern until it gets to section 36. We’ve arranged land with Range lines (latitudinal) and township lines (longitudinal) and you can pinpoint a location very quickly and easily using that information.

[@papanga1197]

I always asked this question myself as here in the Philippines, right of way is a problem when subdividing. The US model looks so neat in my opinion. Thanks for this!

[@nathang4682]

Fantastic video...please more like this!!

[@StevenDCook-rl5dg]

My dad grew up on farm in Michigan that was slightly less than 80 acres because the road jogged to the west at the corner, but not enough to make the 80 acres complete. I was told it’s called a fractional 80.

[@atti_tube]

yep, if a section in real world measurements comes out to less than 640 acres (most often you'll find these along a township/range line, can be due to the need to correct the grid or could be from natural formations) it is oftentimes referred to as a "fractional" section. have encountered that a number of times

[@CatHerderCam]

I feel called out, actual knowing what an acre of land is mentally. But then I grew up talking about acres, and my original home was 2.3 acres.

[@WanJae42]

Yes, if you own property / pay property tax, you get acquainted with an acre rather quickly.

[@EggBram]

Thank you, that was a very interesting video explaining something I was totally unaware of previously. Basically continental planning ;-)

[@jdshultis]

I had an online disagreement with someone when I expressed surprise the California uses rolling roadblocks. He said that when a crash happened they didn't have time to set up a detour. That struck me as odd... and then I realized why we didn't understand each other. I live in eastern S. Dakota, where, if you need a detour off of a major road, you get off at the next exit, travel up to a mile in a direction perpendicular your original direction, and then turn back in your original direction of travel at the next road, because we have the mile-by-mile road grid here. He, OTOH, lived in an area where that didn't exist, and it never occurred to him that no detour planning was needed in some places because an alternative path is easily found, just as I had no realization prior to that discussion that some places do NOT have that option due to mountains or other things preventing the mile-by-mile grid from existing.

[@vincentlevarrick6557]

South Dakota on google maps was the first I realised how a grid system of highways looked like. I'm Australian, and I never knew something like that existed,

[@PauxloE]

If you look at a map of the border area between Pennsylvania and Ohio, this is obvious: In Ohio, all the roads are aligned to the square grid, in Pennsylvania they are generally not. I guess the roads there predated the mile grid survey system.

[@CATDRL2]

The baseline medirian for the Los Angelese area is simple called: Baseline Road.

[@moors710]

Doing land survey in Minnesota, I encountered many townships that ware not exactly square. The reason is the grid is north south east west. but the earth is spherical and does not evenly mesh. On the ground you will notice the road slightly kinks so the direction of the road maintains north south east west orientation. this makes some sections somewhat less then the 640 acres for a section. In one case I surveyed a section that was 614 acres because of adjustment for Earth's curvature. In the prairie provinces of Canada the match is done by the roads not aligning on certain sections.

[@atti_tube]

as a title examiner in the midwest, i am a huge fan of the public land survey system. i've almost never been happier to see a video lmao

[@sydneyc5308]

Missoula's slant streets always make me giggle when looking at it in maps

[@denelson83]

We had something similar here in Canada, called the Dominion Land Survey.

[@garyholt8315]

when alberta was surveyed south to the Montana border it didn't quite match to u. s. survey. the actual international border was 800 ft in Canada's favour. don't tell trump.

[@michaelstora70]

Arizona's baseline is called Baseline Road in urban areas. We also use the half-mile urban grid. I had no idea it was copied from Fresno.

[@jimrinard1969]

Love this. Thank you.

[@katieandkevinsears7724]

I'm in Ohio's Western Reserve. Our townships ate 5 miles square while the rest of the state is generally 6 mile square townships. Of course we also have some meets and bounds randomly mixed in along with random treaty lines that take odd angles.

[@twifosp]

Thanks for making me feel like a giant nerd. I enjoyed this video WAY more than I expected to.

[@picklecrd]

Surprised you didn't talk about downtown Fresno. Downtown or the old part of Fresno is rotated by about 45 degrees so that it was aligned with the train track.

[@josephhouk6703]

Explanation of why Arizona has issues in one sentence: the Gila/Salt River Meridian and Baseline is on top of an uninhabited peak, right next to Phoenix International Raceway.

[@chrisperry3525]

i'm in PA..not far from the 'point of beginning' where the west begain, as in measuring. my deed goes back to early 1800s, one property line dates to william penn's time when he started breakiing up the land. Anyway, my deed says 'from this tree at the corner'...yeah, that tree is long long gone!

[@roaul]

Ngl, I would def watch a full video of you talking about 8mile (the movie) lol Great video!

[@giantastic]

I guess it took me 39 years to realize the redundancy in the word "subdivision," but that overhead shot was really illustrative of the purpose of the word and why it came about

[@robby2161]

New England enters the room "not so fast" lol

[@timtwoface]

The one-mile intervals are ingrained into much of the Lower Mainland around Vancouver, BC. They were set before Canada flipped over to metric.

[@garyholt8315]

albertan here. the farmland around chilliwack seems to be laid out like the prairies.

[@kennixox262]

They are called section roads and in Las Vegas, DO NOT buy a home that is on a section road or a subdivision that opens onto a section road unless you like living on a seven lane race track.

[@Allyfee-q4v]

As someone from the suburbs of phoenix 1 mile distances were all I knew until I moved up north. Though somehow my mom still gets lost driving in it.

[@garyholt8315]

Phoenix retained most of the grid network.

[@harrysmith3606]

I love the logical nature of the survey system in the US. You mentioned it's useful for running a bus network, however the downside of a rigid grid layout is that it doesn't support centralization, meaning everything is equally spaced out and creates sprawl rather than dense cores of importance. This is useful for farmland where each parcel has roughly equal value, but not so useful for cities, where connecting points of interest (such as a residential area to a school or office park) becomes the priority. In those cases, a rigid grid system prevents you easily from connecting point A to point B with a direct connection. It's why a lot of US highways end up cutting diagonally through the grid because it's more in line with the routes people need to take.

[@admiralcapn]

Another issue with the system is that while on a local level continuous square grids work, on a continental scale the line of longitude are getting closer together. So the number of sections available east/west at the bottom of Kansas is far greater than the number of sections available at the top, falling between the same meridians. I honestly don't know exactly how this was accounted for, but you can still find "correction curves" in those roads as one grid system adjusted to meet another.

[@wsmith521]

Wait I never thought about that so basically you’re saying that because we decide which direction the road should go based on which direction is north from that point for example, all north-south roads would eventually all be way closer together than a mile together as they go north?

[@aaronjones8905]

It would be interesting to go through the missing Imperial Units that are between Yards and Miles. Rods and chains are still required in some older land agreements.

[@danadnauseam]

Oregon and Washington were settled before the surveyors got here. As a result, Congress authorized 160 acre donation land claims. These generally serve as the basis for descriptions when they exist and the Rectangular Survey covers areas that weren't claimed.

[@scottivlow9962]

Some Cities in Florida have Grid naming quadrant format. Like Washington DC. Winter Haven center point streets are First and Central with mostly using Alpha Letters for W-E and so Numbers for N-S. with each street being identified by the NW,SW,NE,&SE quadrants.

[@aaronphillips402]

Fresno mentioned and it’s extremely positive 😮. Today is a day for use to celebrate.

[@josephfisher426]

In populated areas that predated this deliberate subdivision, main roads are often also spaced *roughly* one mile apart. Further than half a mile is a long haul by foot (or a quarter mile as Fresno has concluded). So there would be civic pressure to make a road every so far, and landowners would also have incentive so that they would be able to sell lands that would otherwise be too inaccessible to be in demand.

[@PiotrPavel]

0:15 no crossing?

[@lmlm_]

There is at least one it just isn’t painted to indicate it’s a crosswalk, making it less safe.

[@haweater1555]

Another obvious challenge for the surveyors was creating a uniform grid of rectangular lots on the curved surface of a spherical Earth. Lines of longitude becoming closer the farther north you go. So every certain distance a row of small or odd shaped lots are made to correct for it.

[@garyholt8315]

in Canada we use correction line roads every 36 miles to fix this, ending up with t intersections

[@darklelouchg8505]

Video suggestion: A video building off of Hexagonal grid one you did prior, specifically extrapolating the pro/con of tthe hybrid Hex/Culdesac model. Second Suggestion: Related to this video, extrapolating the basic or hybrid hex grid and its applicability relating to public services as mentioned. (Eg the half mile bus route and how you could redesign/rebound those to better fit such a model).

[@garyonnen7634]

Thanks, I live in Fresno. Now I’m sure of the distance of my walks.

[@patford9943]

At 4:25, the sections in your township diagram are not correctly labeled. The sections are numbered boustrophedonically. Section 7 is under section 6.

[@allenwiddows7631]

Another example of a mile road-Base Line Road or Baseline Street, depending what city you’re in, which is a secondary thoroughfare along the San Bernardino Base Line in Southern California. It crosses through most of the cities in the Inland Empire. It changes to 16th St in Upland, then changes back to Baseline in Los Angeles County. It ends as a main road at the junction with Foothill Blvd in La Verne, but continues on and off as a discontinuous residential street through the San Gabriel Valley, still roughly following the San Bernardino Base Line before disappearing as 1st St in Azusa. US 81 in the Midwest is sometimes called Meridian Highway as it follows the line of the Sixth Principal Meridian of the Public Land Survey.

[@joshw3485]

Go Fresno! We so rarely get mentioned for good reasons :)

[@kalpeshwani8520]

Any video on how they level up so perfectly the whole country 📈📉.

[@mikefirth9654]

I live in Louisiana, just below where the national grid meets the lines that mostly ran from a plantation on the river, like the Red river or the Mississippi. If you look at Rapides peirsh where I live, you will see that the northwest border is a zigzag. And the zigzag exactly follows the section and quarter section lines. This is the result of an action in 1910 when the parish surveyor for Natchitoches parish and the Rapides Parish found that there were no markers for the existing diagonal straight line nominal border and proposed to the governing bodies for the parishes a plan where nobody's property was cut in half by a parish boundary following the section lines, which was approved, as state law provided in October by action between the two parish bodies. [the reason for that slightly odd wording is that one parish at the time was run by a council, and the other was run by a jury.]

[@iseabeck9488]

I'm a title examiner in WA State. Sometimes, I need to track records on a property all the way back to the Patent deed (USA to whomever), usually around 1900. It's also a unique way to get a glimpse of history with who-owned-what. Just today, I did a listing for a property whose family got the original patent deed, and have been there ever since. EDIT: Ok this is weird - 7:39 is literally where I grew up (see my username).

[@Ali-rb1mq]

Thos is very fascinating to me. I always wondered about these standardized measurements

[@timesse7253]

Sacramento fun fact: the grid system was laid out in 1849 by then Captain William Tecumseh Sherman. About ten years before the Civil War. He drafted the letter verifying the gold discoveries. Notice that the streets don't run true north. They run magnetic North. I have personally verified that the downtown streets run magnetic north (yes, I know that magnetic north moves but when I sighted the curbline with a cheap compass in the early 2000's for giggles).

[@davidbarts6144]

Vancouver has arterial streets (and bus routes) at half-mile intervals in much of the city.

[@robertthomas4329]

Thanks Beaver.

[@justinfurgason1084]

It continues into Canada in many areas too. Vancouver area and all the Prairies.

[@BlackfeatherTanfur]

Of SF's 2 grids, the one south of Market is obviously aligned with Market, with the numbered streets running from Market southward, and the other streets (e.g., Mission, Howard) parallel to Market. But what of the other grid which is north of Market? Streets there seems to be roughly N/S and E/W. Even the southern boundary of SF (bordering Daly City and Brisbane in San Mateo County) is E-W with a tiny bit of SF along the Pacific sticking out southward. Also much of the city along the bay south of the CalTrain station has yet another alignment. 3rd Street turns to go directly south and is a major artery there. And in fact, it intersects a lot of other numbered streets (via which you can reach the Mission district). Having lived in the DC area before moving to California, at first I was bewildered by "the intersection of 3rd Street and 16th Street" which is near UCSF's (not USF, which is in the west of the city) major campus.

[@Sir_Austin_T_Gee]

I like being from Missouri which has both a surgery grid system (northern 2/3) and a “meets and bounds” thing going on (southern 1/3) as well as little bit of French influence along the Mississippi.

[@Hogtownboy1]

In Ontario Canada they extacly 2km apart but because the system was french they made up a measurement system called chains and links. 100 chains is 2 km

[@barryrobbins7694]

Adventures in Surveying Oklahoma’s western border is exactly on the 103°W longitude. That border was supposed to extend south to form the border between Texas and New Mexico. Due to a surveying error, the border jogs west in Texas’ favor. Texas gained almost 1,000 square miles as a result. A prominent Texan, John Farwell, had political ties with President William Howard Taft (they both went to Yale). New Mexico was not yet a state and was forced to accept the error or it would not be made a state.

[@EthanNeal]

Another thing about the Texas-New Mexico border is that it's not a perfect north-south line. The northern end is at 103°3'5.2"W, right where you'd expect it, since most Western states have that 3'5.2" western extension, but the southern end of the line is about 5' west of 103°W. It's just barely noticeable, but it's there!

[@markalexander832]

Now I know who the town of Farwell, Texas (located on the New Mexico border) was named after. Thanks! Just to point out, though, Texas sold its claim to the eastern half of New Mexico as well as considerable other lands to the United States in 1850, so the border, however imperfectly surveyed, had already been established and accepted between the United States and Texas, so New Mexico had no valid objection as it gained US territorial status as a result. Otherwise, everything east of the Rio Grande would still be a part of Texas.

[@barryrobbins7694]

@ It should really be called “Farewell New Mexico”.

[@RPSchonherr]

Many roads started life running along property lines. Others that were part of planned developement also ran on property lines as property was broken up by acres. It's been a while but this is stuff you learn when you get a real estate license or maybe become a surveyor. pretty much all roads follow what is or used to be some property line.

[@NIX_lost]

Stopped in the middle of the video to watch 8 mile, 9/10 very good movie

[@vincentlevarrick6557]

Is this Grid Survey System the reason why in books and films, distances are quoted in "blocks"? Like, 3 blocks north, turn west for 6 blocks and it's on your left. I always wondered this because it seemed so consistent, and I guess it is. Am I right in also remembering something about this being the reason American house numbers are four-digits? That the first house on the road is numbered based on it's location in the grid, and then the houses are numbered sequentially from there.

[@2Cerealbox]

This algorithm is known in computer sciences as a quad-tree. It used for things like collision detection, mesh generation, and path-finding.