Why Don't Cities Use Hexagon Blocks?

[@CityBeautiful]

Give me your feedback! It's annual viewer survey time: berkeley.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cGzBaUHVAZxfX3U

[@theincrediblehulk2865]

Hexagons are the bestagons

[@suicideistheanswer369]

Hexagons are the bestagons.

[@volodymyr.kushnir]

I waited 2 years for exactly this video, gj!

[@fredashay]

_"Hexagons are the bestagons!"_ -- CGP Grey

[@elizabethdavis1696]

I heard that keeping lawns mowed can reduce crime is that true? Are there choices in city planning that can reduce crime?

[@telotawa]

if you split hexagons into three rhombuses, you can have the interior edges be for pedestrian and bike roads, so half the roads will have cars and the other half won't, and they'll be separate road networks in the same shape just offset by a certain amount

[@deadcarbonboy]

Exactly this, city grids can be multilayered rather than only one tiling scheme. A larger hexagonal grid that serves car traffic, with a subgrid within each hexagon that services walking/biking and public transit. Best of both worlds.

[@jascrandom9855]

Mind Blown!!!

[@jonathanj8303]

I also thought of doing a city this way, with two hexagonal grids, offset so that each had its nodes in the centre of the others hexagons, but (like the other poster implies I think) I wanted to make the "main" hexagon's "interior" roads continuous by having them at higher level. That way they could be basically pedestrian only, and to some degree "private", or at least purely residential. Then the lower level could be "commercial" and (very light) industrial, with a mix of pedestrian, vehicular and access-as-needed roads. Each rhombus had a residential and commercial face, but they were both part of continuous networks with a huge number of interfaces.

[@mrvnoble]

​@@suicideistheanswer369found the Tim.

[@stevecarter8810]

This!

[@Chronomatrix]

Cities Skylines II is launching at the end of October, a great excuse to try out an hexagonal layout, I'm very curious to see how efficient it can be.

[@vitordelima]

There are other patterns with similar advantanges, such as some tileable irregular pentagons or regular pentagons with gaps. Or Voronoi diagrams.

[@ChristiaanHW]

i had the same idea during the video, but then i remembered that zoning in CS is done in (tiny) squares. so you will end up with a lot of lost space within a hexagon. maybe we could use the lost space for props (like trees) and parks, but a nice hexagon lined with buildings around the edge/road is impossible in CS

[@itsapersonn]

I tried it with a Cities Skylines I city, and it was actually pretty awesome. Traffic was really great and the whole city seemed pretty walkable. Only problem was I had some trouble fitting certain buildings into a single hexagon when I could easily fit them into square blocks.

[@Dea_Decay]

Its funny I was considering attempting a hexagon street layout when CSII comes out, at least for part of the city. I was thinking it might result in too many intersections in rapid succession interrupting the flow of traffic, but I think if the parallel sides were elongated it would result in ample space between intersections, while allowing for buildings who's lots are limited to small squares as was brought up to grow. Additionally creating pedestrian networks through the hexagon might making pedestrian paths seem more efficient (i.e. the straight line to the destination might be so jagged with the points of hexagons that taking the pedestrian path might be more direct). In addition to that having public transit like trams that cut through hexagons at times instead of following the street could make them seem more desirable. Its a bit funny to me to hear all the 'efficiencies' of hexagons listed when I was coming at it from "if I can make the roads less efficient maybe more people will choose public transit, and the more who do opt for public transit will give me a bigger return in investment in public transit'

[@xenaretos]

It worked pretty well for me in Skylines 1 (I am a "hexagon head" myself) but I think in the real world the main issue is fixed scale: they all have to be of the same size, otherwise connecting them to each other is a mess.

[@wernersen6947]

Hexagons would mean every Civ player could be a city planner Hexagons are the bestagons 🐝🐝

[@onlyfraenz]

Spread the word 🐝🐝🐝

[@Mcfunface]

And Settlers of Catan players lol 😅

[@togerboy5396]

Thankyou brother ✋😔 🐝🐝🐝

[@Calbjrd]

How about rivers?

[@kittikulsupupkul]

Bestagons 🐝🐝🐝🐝

[@pedroSilesia]

I really like Muller's proposal. The fact that each building/flats facing some greenery seems as an completely underrated concept.

[@stevehansen4112]

Capitalism says no, can't you see that there's land to be exploited with all that greenery? Seriously though, there are flowers growing on Antarctica. We need to stop letting money dictate how to run things before we're all cooked.

[@Earth098]

But you can do the same with grid patterns, right? For example in Stockholm there are many grid-blocks with courtyards in the middle.

[@lekhakaananta5864]

Just because something predominantly uses hexagons doesn't mean you have to suffer its downsides all the time without compromises. Like how grid layouts can have diagonal streets that cut through the perpendicular blocks, hexagon layouts can have main arterials that cut through certain hexagons to form a straight line. Then you end up with straight arterials and non-straight roads for everything lower on the hierarchy, which is exactly what you want. For example you could cut every other hexagon in half (corner to corner) so that they match the rest of the lane already on the hexagon road network to form a straight line.

[@ellagrant6190]

Exactly what I was thinking.

[@kenkarsonn]

Having recently stayed in the Eixemple district in Barcelona, I can say that the Avenida Diagonal is not only useful but aesthetically pleasing as well.

I have been semi-obsessed with the idea of hexagon city layout ever since CGP Grey's video Hexagons are the Bestagons. My background is in IT and political science, not city planning or architecture, but for some reason it has been on my mind a lot.

[@jonragnarsson]

Take Cerdà's squares (Barcelona) and make them hexagonal. Perfection?

[@Noremac023]

Classic modernist behaviour

[@RogueSecret]

In a Squar system you can see from one end of the city to the other end, with hexagon, you cant see much since its allways a new hex that will block the view.

[@Enchie]

You were meant to build cities. It's time to buy the new City Skyline game.

@@Enchie I have never played that game. I will check it out when I graduate. The MPA I am doing is pretty intense. Not playing much these days.

[@Western_1]

Holy crap what a wildly specific video that I am insanely into. I've spent hours in Sketchup years ago designing hexagonal cities, photoshop and studying plans like the original woodward plan for Detroit.

[@beatrix1120]

As oddly specific as it may seem, I did the same thing. Or at least, I started. My SketchUp subscription ran out and I was too stubborn to accept it wasn't free anymore

[@234fddesa]

post it somewhere, I wanna see it in action

[@LeeeroyJenkins]

Do it in cities skylines and see if it works.

[@bashisobsolete.pythonismyn6321]

yeah. i dropped a comment about this and looks like a popular request. since my teenage years, i dream of triangular junctions with roundabouts.

[@toastquest1681]

hey, me too. I ended up becoming attached to the idea of an isometric grid. they are sisters, it works well with hexagons.

[@TheRiskyBrothers]

So I think one reason the grid-iron pattern wins out over hexagons is that the 90 degree angles of the street pattern match the 90 degree angles common in construction. If you're building with wood or cement, the platform and pillar method is going to be what you use. Having box-shaped lots to match our box-shaped buildings means that you can get the largest floorplate possible for your property with a cheap and well-known construction technique.

[@jasonriddell]

and more "efficient" indoor to land space as few people want odd corners in there spaces that "square" furniture has to fit into

[@carriebartkowiak]

Enter here the flatiron building in New York City that's no one could figure out how to use efficiently, has been sitting empty for years, and only serves as a place to hang advertisements.

[@rileynicholson2322]

The rectalinear grid wins both ways. If you have buildings first, the create natural right angle corners. If you have streets first, the natural desire paths of humans will have 4 way intersections that may or may not be right angles, because people don't randomly take a longer path to their destination than necessary.

[@angeldude101]

Rectangular tilings in general are easier to subdivide into smaller tilings. Triangular tilings can also do this, but hexagonal tilings can't. Then again, some would argue that it's actually a positive since it's directly related to why a hexagonal city block would only have 3-way intersections.

[@geldoku]

You have to think more abstractly, seperate dwelling space from traffic space and long distance traffic from short distance traffic. Pedestrians don't need streets.

[@osasunaitor]

I suggest you search the Polish city of Gdańsk on a map, there is a disctric called Zaspa made entirely of giant hexagons. I used to live there, it was a really clever planning. The edges of each hexagon contained the residential buildings, and in the centre of each hexagon a public facility (educational, sports, public services) surrounded by parks and gardens. Little roads rode along the edges of the hexagons and the rest was covered by pedestrian paths through the greeneries. And then just outside the hexagonal grid were the big commercial venues and the public transport stops (trains stopped on one side and trams on the other). It was a very practical and pleasant neighbourhood to live, quiet and walkable but with every service close enough. Additionally the city administration had refurbished all the residential blocks (dating back to the communist era) and had organised a mural contest on them, where renowned artists had decorated the up to 13-stories tall buildings with giant murals from top to bottom, it was like walking through a giant open air musem. I've lived in several cities and countries of Europe, and Zaspa will always have a special place in my heart.

[@oliversissonphone6143]

Doesn't look like it from Google Maps. Am I missing something?

[@osasunaitor]

@@oliversissonphone6143 search for Zaspa Młyniec and then zoom out with the satellite view activated. You'll notice a hexagonal pattern in the building layout

[@vuesch]

@@oliversissonphone6143 The buildings are hexagonal, not the streets. Switch to satelite view and you see it.

[@Rothman93]

3 points: 1: continuous tiling like you mention is called "tesselation", a function that enables the measurement of area, using continuous tiles that don't leave gaps or overlap can be used to measure area, most commonly squares but you can count also hexagons/ acres/ football fields etc to get total area. 2: Downtown Amsterdam and Budapest have street layouts very close to hexagons. With radial arteries leaving the center and concentric belts connecting them, like a hexagonal spiderweb. 3: The cell phone network IS laid out in hexagons. Each "cell" is one hexagon and each cell has three cell towers at alternating corners. You've likely noticed that cell tower tops have triangles. Each side of these triangles faces towards the center of one of the three intersecting cells at the tower. "Traingulating your location" is done by taking the signal strength to the three nearest towers and getting the distance to each of the towers to locate your phone using the three different radii to the towers.

[@thomgizziz]

Neither city is close to hexagons, it is a radial layout that is common in many old cities and it always falls apart as the city gets bigger because it stops making sense. The cellphone network isn't hexagons they are circles but if you know anything about circles or bubbles and their relationship to hexagons then you wouldn't be saying what you are saying. You are bad at this.

[@EibaProductions]

In Italy there's a town called Palmanova, which is also based on a hexagon shape. It was actually built as a military base/stronghold for the Habsburg army. The center was the parade ground and the hexagon shape allowed the soldiers to reach the fortified walls from every direction equally fast.

[@jayasuryangoral-maanyan3901]

Bit like the Pentagon in the us

[@Ruinenoberbaurat_Weckenbarth]

Interestingly, Palmanova has the shape of a nonagon, while the central open space is hexagonal.

[@longiusaescius2537]

Interesting

[@Scbalq]

that's not even a hexagon

[@VileGecko]

There's a whole district called Obolon in Kyiv based on hexagonal grid. However the hexagons themselves are not blocks but whole microdistricts (something similar to superblocks but with worse PR).

[@kesonator6862]

Шукав цей коментар

[@PerkeleKeyboardist]

One addition here: navigating Obolon just sucks. By car, by foot, by mass transit, it just sucks.

[@Halcon_Sierreno]

Kyev?

[@Halcon_Sierreno]

@amigos4erin I saw it as "Kyev" everywhere. That's how I learned it. Think I'm going to use that spelling.

[@trollinape2697]

​@amigos4erinkiev, kyiv, its english so it doesnt matter much

[@MarcelVos]

You say there are only two post-industrial city layouts (grids and cul-de-sacs), but here in the Netherlands most new developments seem to be more organic than either of those two.

[@Nedlius]

did you know you can also say the plural as culs-de-sac?

[@MegaBanane9]

Because if it only exists outside of america, it's not real, duh ;)

[@pizzaivlife]

obligatory "cool to see you here" comment

[@hngldr]

Pleased to see you here! I'd say "pleasantly surprised" but the surprised part wouldn't be accurate lol

[@Stroporez]

What do you mean by "organic"? Nature seems to mostly use hexagons, fractals and Voronoi patterns.

[@TheBronzeDog]

I've been designing a fictional city on a hex grid for a worldbuilding project, simply because I like hexagons. Good to know other people worked with the idea in a real world context, since that means I can research their stuff for inspiration.

[@jonathanraithel5726]

Hexagon city plans would inevitably have some inefficiencies due to the rigidity of the geometry, which is less useful for daily living than planning. You would always be trying to fit a rooms and buildings with 120 or 60 degree angles that are more difficult to plan around than right angles, which are much more flexible to subdivide smaller spaces around. Coming from an architectural background, hexagons are more effective at a macro scale than a micro scale, and the residents and users of a space are always thinking at a micro scale. It’s why Fowler’s Victorian octagon houses never caught on, because you do save on materials and space using polygons, but people don’t like trying to sweep or fit square furniture into the tiny corners octagons and hexagons make.

[@futenodeku3441]

my last city in Cities Skylines was made almost entirely out of hexagon grid with cul-de-sac centers. I was very pleased with how low the traffic was. I also included subway stops at the end of every cul-de-sac, in one out of every 7 hexagons (subway hub surrounded by 6 subwayless hexagons) , which heavily discouraged traffic.

[@kattagarian]

any images of this?

[@longiusaescius2537]

Video on it?

[@iangoldfeld6473]

Just curious, did you use any mods? And was this in sandbox or regular?

[@vankhiemtran7086]

It sounds like a great idea, do you have any images for me to see, I'm too tired of traffic jams in this game.

[@aopt471]

Could you tell what sizes you successfully used with this system?

[@gulagkid799]

Actually the 1960s Hautepierre neighbourhood in Straousbourg, France was divided into multiple hexagonal blocs so they aren't completely absent aside from planned capitals (in this case they are mostly occupied by social housing but also some commercial areas and city services) It's also been retrofitted with a decent bike network and served by the A and D line trams

[@thias2t98]

I feel Hautepierre is a pain to get through, or go from one block to another, unless you really know the neighbourhood. It's easy to get lost and I say that having a decent sense of direction! Maybe that's why they stopped with the few hexagons that they built and didn't do more like they had previously planned. Or maybe that was just for budget reasons. Also, minor correction, it's the A & D lines! The E line doesn't go that way.

[@gulagkid799]

@@thias2t98 Not sure what the situation looks like on the ground but it doesn't look too bad considering the blocks are actually pretty different from each other, for example one has a gigantic shopping centre, another one is a large hospital, another one is mainly green space and a couple have some townhouses and small apartments too, though the ones that are just condo towers might be a bit tricky to navigate admittedly and my bad don't know how I managed to mess up and misread A as E, should be fixed now

[@thias2t98]

@@gulagkid799 Right, the big Auchan shopping centre and the hospital are quite famous and it's difficult to miss them but otherwise, as you said, it's mostly apartment towers and with "hexagonal" roads it's easy to forget which direction you're going. But again, I have never lived there and it is probably easier for people who do

[@PghFlash]

I visited one neighbourhood in San Martin, Mendoza, Argentina, that has this kind of hexagon blocks, with some roads going inside each one. It felt really confusing, and a lot of taxi drivers would not go in there (here in argentina most taxi drivers, specially in the smaller cities, tend to not use gps). I went there to participate in a tournament, and stayed only in the stadium, which is adyacent to the neighbourhood, and both of them are kinda separated from the main city, but some partners rented a house a couple of blocks in, so we visited them (walking, we didn´t have a car), and it was kinda weird, but is a really nice place. I guess the people living there are more used to it and can traverse it better. The hexagonal blocks are identified with colours, and i remember seeing one map painted in a wall near the entrance. In similar fashion to all argentinian tipical neighbourhoods, it was mix use, with low housing, convenience stores and all that kind of stuff Here are the coordinates, so you can check it out! -33.072139, -68.487749

[@asdalotl]

@@thias2t98 I have lived there! i agree that it can be easy to get turned around on your first time in the neighborhood, but if you're in and out of there more frequently it's not that hard to get adjusted to it. as a fun bonus, you get the A line doing fun squiggles on the city map as it progresses towards the sports parc terminus

[@loftycloud5404]

Nice to know I'm not the only one that played with this idea. I drew a whole city grid with hexagons. I considered block sizing, bike paths, pedestrian paths, major arteries, highways, mass transit, water/sewage. I considered special cases like hills and waterways and large facilities. Preformed maths for distances and area ratios. I kinda went all out. I love the idea. It has a lot of advantages I didn't even think about till after I started planning it. Even designed it so there was no stoplights at all!

[@DidacusRamos]

@loftycloud5404 that's fantastic. Is there anyway I could get a copy of your design. Love to see what you did.

[@loftycloud5404]

​@DidacusRamos Yes I could do that! I only got some various sketches and as of this moment I'm out of my hometown for a while. So I'll take some time when I get the time to try to draw out more 'professional' drawings rather then a hodgepodge of rough sketches that may or may not make sense only to me.

[@emp.natieli1188]

I'm interested, could we talk about this?

[@loftycloud5404]

@@emp.natieli1188 Yes, currently making small drawings here and there, but when I get back home I hope to put in more effort and time.

[@TraitorousHomeworlder]

Sounds like you put a lot of love into your design! I'm just as curious about it, so I'd appreciate it if you replied back when you have some drawings posted

[@ehta2413]

One area where hexagons would really shine is urban city centers, just by building hexagonal buildings with open park/recreational areas in the middle you could increase efficiency of the buildings massively. All you need to do to get it working is to move infrastructure either underground or on the rooftops.

[@sevegarza]

1:06 nobody would travers a square grid like that. They would do it in a way were they would only make one turn. Hexagon grids forces you to make a lot of turns.

[@joost00555]

The distance traveled would be further nonetheless

[@lucemiserlohn]

@@joost00555 There is a distance metric derived exactly from this behavior pattern, it's called "Manhattan distance", sometimes also called "Taxi distance". Drivers don't necessarily optimize for driving distance, but for driving straight lines wherever possible.

[@martinrosenberg6979]

The distance traveled on the square grid is the same either way, so he chose the route that was most easily comparable w/r/t distance

[@ElDubsNZ]

​@joost00555 Yes, bit with less turns, it'd be an easier, faster drive.

[@RROO-qy8je]

Yeah i understand that. But the less turns people have to take the faster they start driving which increases the likelihood of a crash. More turns means cars have to slow down more often wich decreases the likelihood of a crash. I get it you love driving cars and taking more turns seems like more of a chore. But i asume taking more turns wont kill you and is far better than having a higher risk of getting into a crash.

[@ГеоргийМаксимовский]

There's also a city in Russia that employed hexagons to fill in a block in its larger circle-based grid (I don't know, if that even makes sense, but here are the coordinates, go and have a look for yourselves: 54.924167396550196, 82.97917393389625). Fun fact about the city: in its coat of arms there are three circles, referring to its city plan. Only in reality only two were ever built. Right now they are discussing building a third circular block, but it will look nothing like the other two, the "circular" part of it being a green belt, rather than a row of long bent apartment buildings. Some say that it's a stupid idea overall and the city should just scrap the 40-year old plan, stop looking back at its coat of arms and move on.

[@smitias_8474]

Oh, when you said that only two out of three circles was build I recognized Krasnoobsk. They call housing complex in place where the third circle should be "Rings". Of course it only called "Rings" and breaks towns concept entirely. I think building a circle just would eat into profits margins of Novosibirsk's construction mafia a bit too much for their taste.

[@jewwell3446]

There is a neighborhood made as a grid of hexagons (honeycomb structure) in Strasbourg, France. It's called Hautepierre.

[@Slgjgnz]

1:05 There's a caveat here, the orthogonal grid actually requires only one turn (top right or bottom left) for the exact same efficiency. It's still longer than on the hexagonal grid, and (assuming only right turns are safe in right right-driving countries) more dangerous than on the hexagonal grid, but it's simpler.

[@dennislaffey]

Or you could travel the other direction (east then south, instead of south then east) to get that safer left turn.

[@Slgjgnz]

@@dennislaffey Indeed it's equivalent, you have 1 safe turn, and many crossings.

[@ColonelSandersLite]

Yep, and in real cities, there are generally certain roads that are diagonal to the grid layout where there's a widespread need. Besides simplicity, the square grids let traffic move faster. A *lot* faster. You know, since everyone isn't having to stop at a wye every few feet.

[@scyllajk2757]

But what if you just wanted to go vertical or horizontal, then hexagons would be slower. He just framed it in a way that would make hexagons look more efficient.

[@MrChoklad]

​@@ColonelSandersLiteI don't understand how you could say that grid system allows cars to move faster when there are some many intersections with semaphores that it is a pain to go anywhere. The problem with traffic is inherent in the presence of cars, I think exagons could be interesting but if we are still building cities for cars, no method is truly good.

[@johnniemiec3286]

The diagonal drive idea is interesting, except that on a grid style road system you don't make a bunch of turns. You drive down one road until you get to your turn, then make a single right or left. If the lights are timed well, it doesn't take long.

[@ferjo3192]

paper planners don't drive :P

[@twistedyogert]

The only advantage is that hexagonal streets might be safer since you don't have blind corners.

[@samuela-aegisdottir]

This video mixes two different situations: the situation of a dense city center and the situation of a suburb. The difference matters - in a city center the streets are sorrounded by buildings (which means you need several buildings to make a hexagonal shape) with the requirement for the streets to be full of life to support shops and restaurants in the buildings. In a suburb the streeets are sorrounded by gardens (which means you need several gardens to make a hexagonal shape) with the requirement for the gardens to be quiet.

[@kemsat-n6h]

The cul de sac + hexagon looks like it would work well. I think it would end up working similarly to the super blocks of Barcelona, with the inside of the hexagon functioning as the “front” of the properties, if residential, or as the delivery/service points for commercial properties. If you add a 2nd or more floors you can have both, with the off-ground floors being residences for extra density.

[@PghFlash]

I visited one neighbourhood in San Martin, Mendoza, Argentina, that has this kind of hexagon blocks, with some roads going inside each one. It felt really confusing, and a lot of taxi drivers would not go in there (here in argentina most taxi drivers, specially in the smaller cities, tend to not use gps). I went there to participate in a tournament, and stayed only in the stadium, which is adyacent to the neighbourhood, and both of them are kinda separated from the main city, but some partners rented a house a couple of blocks in, so we visited them (walking, we didn´t have a car), and it was kinda weird, but is a really nice place. I guess the people living there are more used to it and can traverse it better. The hexagonal blocks are identified with colours, and i remember seeing one map painted in a wall near the entrance. In similar fashion to all argentinian tipical neighbourhoods, it was mix use, with low housing, convenience stores and all that kind of stuff Here are the coordinates, so you can check it out! -33.072139, -68.487749

[@majorfallacy5926]

Neighborhood instead of block sized hexagons (or similar shapes) would make a lot of sense for cities like tokyo, where neighborhoods generally revolve around a transit station. With a 3-way station at the center of each hexagon, that would allow you to get to any other station in the city with at most a single transfer, while travelling as close to in a straight line as mathematically possible on a grid. The 120° road intersections are also not just safer but far more efficient, so roads can be narrower. The disadvantages are that the neighborhoods would feel rather separated and that overly regular cities feel ugly, plus grids are bad at dealing with terrain in general. But the catnip theory is totally true.

[@mykki.d]

I was wondering if the hexagons could work in a less car-centric way. I think this is it!

[@benwagner5089]

@@mykki.d You'd still have to deal with horse-drawn wagons for cargo transport still. Unless you design your city layout before people even arrive, it's hard to adapt around the existing architecture. You'd also have to ensure the population understood how to live in a society with non-90 degree corners in their environments, so non-square furniture, house shapes, etc.

[@ScooterinAB]

"plus grids are bad at dealing with terrain in general." That's why you never build a strict grid. Look at even new cities and you're going to see roads aligning with the terrain and other features, then continuing the grid there.

[@JayPfo]

You may not be a hexagon head but this 100% convinced me of their hyper effectiveness, the critiques presented also mean very little to me in the grand scheme of things. Also i love the idea of a shared backyard for community gardens, or community gathering areas instead of private lots but that might be a bit more idealistic than practical

[@majorfallacy5926]

shared spaces with foot paths in between blocks would definitely make suburbs feel less dead, but it'd obviously come at the cost of lot size, which neither developers nor buyers like

[@JayPfo]

@@majorfallacy5926 well I was talking more about a lower income subsidized apartment complex sort of situation but your right for single occupancy or even smaller apartments that would be something undesired

[@JohnFromAccounting]

Shared green space is a lot better than private back yards.

[@carriebartkowiak]

@@JohnFromAccounting Until you get a few families that just throw their trash over their balcony into the green space. Or the older lady that walks through everyone else's garden and picks their produce without permission, or takes plants and features that aren't hers. Or generally *any* situation where a shared common space meets the reality of multiple people having access to it with their own opinions on how it should be used.

[@InventorZahran]

@@carriebartkowiak The Tragedy of the Commons strikes again!

[@flaviomongiovi8105]

Here in Sicily there's the Town of Grammichele which was rebuilt in the seventeen hundreds after an earthquake, and it has an hexagonal center main square and the general plan of the city still follows that hexagon. Pretty cool from above

[@asmonull]

Hexagon makes most sense when applied as a dense grid - maximizes density while keeping infrastructure low. I'd expect it to maybe show up more in fast developing highly populated cities (China?), since it works well with apartment complexes or office complexes - you can dedicate entire hexagon for a complex, use central part for shared space (which is problematic to build anyway because of angles) and dedicate one face for both pedestrian entry and access to underground parking lot.

[@sohopedeco]

There is a small town named Paragominas in Brazil that was built initialy according to one of the losing projects for the city of Brasília. You can look at it on Google Maps and see two huge hexagons that were supposed to form a large grid.

[@pwhnckexstflajizdryvombqug9042]

I think the hardest part about them, besides the odd shaped blocks, is that it could just be confusing to navigate, just like how cities built around circles can be a bit of a pain.

[@Bronze_Age_Sea_Person]

They are less confusing than sprawling cul-de-sacs. The only thing is that, instead of following a line in a grid, you follow a "wavy line". If each block gets a number identification corresponding to a coordinate, it's as trivial as navigating a "wavy" cartesian grid where every line of hexagons is "sheared" back and forth.

[@PghFlash]

I visited one neighbourhood in San Martin, Mendoza, Argentina, that has this kind of hexagon blocks, with some roads going inside each one. It felt really confusing, and a lot of taxi drivers would not go in there (here in argentina most taxi drivers, specially in the smaller cities, tend to not use gps). I went there to participate in a tournament, and stayed only in the stadium, which is adyacent to the neighbourhood, and both of them are kinda separated from the main city, but some partners rented a house a couple of blocks in, so we visited them (walking, we didn´t have a car), and it was kinda weird, but is a really nice place. I guess the people living there are more used to it and can traverse it better. The hexagonal blocks are identified with colours, and i remember seeing one map painted in a wall near the entrance. In similar fashion to all argentinian tipical neighbourhoods, it was mix use, with low housing, convenience stores and all that kind of stuff Here are the coordinates, so you can check it out! -33.072139, -68.487749 Try it with street view and you will know if its confusing or not

[@nirad8026]

@@Bronze_Age_Sea_Person You're talking as if American-style suburbs are the only alternative to hexagons.

[@Demon2k3]

Put park spaces in the corners possibly and keep the housing blocks square

[@westganton]

Utilities might be difficult too since they’re often laid under roads, but it’s probably worth the extra cost if any

[@Hellooo134]

Hexagons are like combining the good parts of a circle and the good parts of a square. Love them.

[@Morkins324]

The hexagon pattern would also likely lead to some weird street naming conventions, as each road would merge/diverge at every intersection. It likely would have been confusing to navigate without GPS. For example, the 1:06 scenario, if you know that B is at the intersection of John Street and Doe Avenue, then you can travel straight from where you are until you arrive at one of those roads and then turn to travel straight along that road until you reach the appropriate intersection. It isn't necessarily the "shortest" or "most efficient" path, but you will arrive there. Theoretically, as long as you head in the correct direction, you can arrive at the destination with only one turn if the city is a complete uninterrupted grid. I wouldn't even really know where to start with trying to name the roads on a hexagonal grid, unless I'm just assigning each segment its own distinct road name. And reaching any destination in the city would require navigating far more intersections, creating additional opportunity to make a wrong turn.

[@DarthRagnarok343]

I would first determine the town's longest possible expansion direction (if none are significantly greater than the others just pick East/West or North/South). Then align the hex grid so that two of the hex's edges parallel that direction. Every edge road segments that are colinear get the same name. Next the colinear "diagonal" segments going in one direction are given numbers, and the colinear "diagonal" segments going in the other direction are given letters. And to make it easier to quickly cross a large town you can have elevated highways that break from the hex grid.

[@Omnilatent]

I mean, people in Europe and other "natural" cities somehow manage with individual names for long streets, too. Don't think it's that big of a deal, especially in our times.

[@Morkins324]

@@Omnilatent European cities have also have streets that are continuous and cross the city. If I need to cross the city, I can be given instructions to find a street that cuts across town, and then I can follow it. A true hex grid city would have a bunch of super short streets, with zero continuous cross city streets(unless you break up the hex grid). As a thought exercise, feel free to draw a 100x100 hex grid (or even 50x50 if you think 100x100 is too big), and then try to route between 2 random cross town locations. Then do the same with a random European city. Don't worry about the "shortest route", just the simplest route. Now, compare the complexity of the instructions, how many turns are involved, how much of that route is able to be completed by following a single road, etc... European cities are complex, but it isn't a fucking disaster to try to memorize routing instructions if you need to cross them.

[@ZestyLemonSauce]

If I were to come up with address conventions for a hexagon it would be city, block x-y number, compass direction of the side the building is on, building numbers clockwise.

[@venomousfrog5546]

Labeling intersections might work, with addresses being 'street between x and y' followed by building number. Directions would consist of a list of intersections to go through/towards. For street signs, each street could be labeled at its 2 'entrances' with the name of the intersection you are approaching.

[@DarrylCross]

As someone who is a proponent for building in Hexagons, I think one of the other challenges is that Hexagons only fit nicely together when you have hexagons of the same size. For infrastructure that would require more space than one standard hexagon (schools, water treatment plants, shopping malls, etc. require more space than a standard house). In theory a few of those hexagons can be merged together, but it will not have a straight and clean perimeter line like with a grid system; the perimeter will jut inward and outward. The other option is to have buffer zones of odd geometry between the different zones with larger and smaller hexagons, creating distinct commercial, industrial and low & high density residential districts. I suppose those odd spots might make good places for parks and the like.

[@JaviiaEvelyn]

Berlin doesn't have hexagonal grids, but Berlin has a way of building houses that seems like it would work really well for a hexagonal grid. Basically mixed use 4-5story buildings are built directly on the street, but then each building has a 'hinterhof', or courtyard, which is a green space separated from the street that all the residents of the building have access to. Sometimes theres another (fully residential) building at the back of the block after the hinterhof, and often apartments on one or both sides of the hof that you can only access by going through the hof. (I lived in a place that had building, hof+side building, building, another hof, then another building, but that was unusual). It's a great shared space with your neighbours, and many places take great pride in creating a lovely mini park that the residents look after and spend time together in. There are some places in Berlin that are more commercial or arty that open the hof to the public, and there's at least one shopping district that has joined the hofe of 8-9 buildings together to make a very large foot traffic mall. The hexagonal blocks seem like they would work really well as mixed use 4-5story buildings along the streets, with either a public park in the middle or a large shared backyard (either separated for each building or shared between everyone on that block)

[@DidacusRamos]

You're describing a lot of the plazas of Renaissance cities in Italy and Spain. They seem to have worked well for many centuries. I love the concept. Thanks for sharing your Berlin experience. Would love to tour that. For an American audience I was thinking to make some of the diagonal lines car streets. For trans city passage perhaps an X road with a roundabout intersection. I try to limit or calm car traffic, do without it as much as possible. Your mention of the use of mixed-use I feel is essential to making a neighborhood practical giving residents potential access to the goods and services they require. Thank you much for sharing. Appreciated.

[@triggthediscovery]

You could use an offset grid layout (like bricks, apparently called running bond) to build a city with a square-ish grid with no 4 way intersections. If you do that you get straight, lateral roads for free, and could trivially add a few vertical roads as well.

[@jakobthomsen1595]

Such a pattern looks very nice with randomized brick size. I posted a link to a visualization but youtube removed it :-(

[@bramvanduijn8086]

Why would you want multiple straight lateral roads all through your city? Wouldn't that just attract a massive amount of traffic which then creates a massive amount of noise and air pollution? When just as easily you can have that road curve around the inhabited parts of your city so the pollution doesn't both the residents nearly as much. Also, it taking longer to get from one end to the other would induce less car traffic and induce more use of alternative transport modes, which would reduce the total pollution while allowing higher density (because you need less parking and roads),

[@TheBayru]

​@@bramvanduijn8086Did you know pedestrians don't like detours either? In fact walking distance is one of the biggest detractors from walking vs car use. Driving is far less tiring. It's very apparrent in stylish development where a planner (whose only experience is walking for recreation) has put in 'a concept' with meandering roads only to get an f-u from pedestrians that will cut their own straight roads through the lawns and flower beds.

[@ScooterinAB]

That really solves nothing though because you'd only have straight roads along one axis. It just overcomplicates things.

[@longiusaescius2537]

Interesting

[@mindstalk]

I would note that rectilinear grids are at least 4600 years old, going back to the Indus Valley Civilization and some construction in Egypt. They've also been used by Hammurabi's Babylon, Greek colonies, Roman cities, Chinese and Korean cities, old Japanese cities imitating Chinese ones, European "new towns" or bastides from the 1100s, Aztec Teotichuacan... Savannah's 'Oglethorpe Plan' had an interesting twist on grid design, check the wikipedia page.

[@tlockerk]

Savannah's beautiful "squares" had to be re-established in sixties and seventies. When the homes down there were multi-family apartments for the poor many were paved over. Thank the six strong-willed women who forced Savannah to begin restoration and helped fund restoration of many homes as well.

[@MDP1702]

It makes sense since it is easier to implement than eg. hexagonal grids. That however says nothing about whether it is more efficient or not.

[@mindstalk]

@@MDP1702 You really have to specify what your measure of efficiency is.

[@gdclemo]

I remember there was a videogame series where they built their city using a hexagonal grid because it reduced the draw distance, i.e. with a square city grid you can see long distances down the roads, which slowed the game down.

[@Soul-Burn]

In the factory building game Factorio, many bigger bases use the "city block" design, usually with a square grid. However, some players use hexagon grids, because they reduce the intersections to 3-sided rather than 4-sided, making traffic better. That said, using a staggered grid also creates 3-sided intersections, and fits better with the game.

[@eran0004]

I feel like the biggest problem with hexagons is how to navigate. You have to turn at every single intersection which means that you must memorise a whole bunch of turns. In a grid layout you can just go straight for X number of blocks, then make a turn and then go straight again until you reach your destination. But perhaps there is some clever way to navigate a hexagonal pattern?

[@hebneh]

There's also the problem of not being able to see for a long distance in a straight line, which can be very important in finding your way around. Looking towards a noticeable landmark that's far away on a straight street is helpful; hexagonal blocks would eliminate this possibility.

[@shafeena7247]

Maybe we could name them simply as a system of diagonals. In this situation some diagonals would actually have to be wider or otherwise more prominent. So if (random names) Main Street runs down diagonally 4 blocks, it would intersect with let’s say 2 smaller streets and 2 larger ones - broadway and idk fifth 🤷🏾‍♂️. The signal times for the smaller streets would be longer to give precedence to Main Street, but the signals at Main and Broadway or Main and Fifth would be equal. This would give more incentive to travel these streets on daily commutes.

[@DidacusRamos]

I think people master more complicated designs than this. I navigated the freeway in Houston! The advantage of not being able to see a mile down a straight road is that street lights are less likely to be seen as drag strip start lines. If each hexagon is small 15 to 20 acres and is mixed-use then people/residents can have practical walking/biking distances to easily navigate. For longer trans city travel a diagonal road that is wider and without commercial/residential development can be used. Perhaps an X shape with a roundabout intersection.

[@bramvanduijn8086]

Your and @hebneh's points all assume that what you want out of a city is to maximize the abillity to drive through it, when what a city actually needs is for people to visit the city, i.e. for the visitor to stop travelling and get out of their vehicle or other mode of transport. Getting the visitor to stop travelling and start visiting might or might not require driving to get to their destination, but it most definitely doesn't require the visitor passing through more than half the city. Ideally, you want to absolute minimum time spent travelling inside the city, since that means you've put their destinations in a suboptimal place.

[@BalderOdinson]

@@bramvanduijn8086 What a city really wants is to efficiently import supplies and export products/waste.

[@Stroporez]

Yes, we need a movement. The hexagons seem to cross-tesselate with equilateral trangles. They seem to fit well with Central Place theory which you touched on very briefly in your park example. Currently I am very interested in integrating hexagons and fractals for scallable patterns of urban design.

[@mykki.d]

Yes! We need built-in community spaces

[@DigitalJedi]

On top of the triangular nature, you also get rhombic shapes for free as well. You could divide each hexagonal block into 3 rhombi, 6 triangles, or any combination such as a 1+4 or 2+2 for alleyways, access roads, or pedestrian/bike infrastructure.

[@nirad8026]

@@mykki.d Again, traditional city blocks also have community spaces in the middle. Hexagonal blocks are just more confusing, and actually demolish the idea of a "central place". There would be no organic centre-point, since it's not efficient to use the streets. Think of Barcelona's Eixample, for that matter : are the streets there filled with shops and people, or the interior spaces? Of course, it's the streets. Interiors are way less accessible. It would also disturb the life of people there, as now you'd have many people simply making a shorter path through this "park" in the middle. It would lose the communality if it became a transitory space.

[@DidacusRamos]

Looking at the combination of hexagons and triangles I see some long streets that have the propensity of becoming raceways for unpassable car traffic. That's what I like about these hexagons with mostly narrow streets that naturally act as traffic calming. I also suggest that the hexagons should be small--perhaps 15 acres each, with buildings flush to the streets and facing inward toward a pedestrian plaza. With mixed-use on bottom floors of multi-storey buildings make it a very good walkable neighborhood.

[@nirad8026]

@@DidacusRamos You are looking at urban planning from the perspective of youtube urbanists. A city is not just a grid of tight street, because these streets would get congested sooner or later due to population density. It would feel entrapping. It also doesn't allow "superblocks", and breaking the pattern once means game over for the entire project. Organic blocks are way better.

[@TukaihaHithlec]

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, even searching last week to find nothing on KZbin. Instead of blocks, the pattern would be the size of a 15-minute neighborhood, and the inside could still be grid or organic. Equilateral triangles could make up transit corridors to maintain straight lines, and the different angled streets would be labeled something like rise, noon, and set based on when the sun shines down them.

[@PghFlash]

I visited one neighbourhood in San Martin, Mendoza, Argentina, that has this kind of hexagon blocks, with some roads going inside each one. It felt really confusing, and a lot of taxi drivers would not go in there (here in argentina most taxi drivers, specially in the smaller cities, tend to not use gps). I went there to participate in a tournament, and stayed only in the stadium, which is adyacent to the neighbourhood, and both of them are kinda separated from the main city, but some partners rented a house a couple of blocks in, so we visited them (walking, we didn´t have a car), and it was kinda weird, but is a really nice place. I guess the people living there are more used to it and can traverse it better. The hexagonal blocks are identified with colours, and i remember seeing one map painted in a wall near the entrance. In similar fashion to all argentinian tipical neighbourhoods, it was mix use, with low housing, convenience stores and all that kind of stuff Here are the coordinates, so you can check it out! -33.072139, -68.487749

[@shdhd07]

As a civil engineer, and primarily one who works in residential land development, I can see so many benefits to this. In a residential area, speed and ease of travel across the entire neighborhood isn't necessarily important. I can understand wanting to easily and quickly cross the entire length of the central business district, but a residential area rarely offers any incentive to doing that. A driver will enter the neighborhood primarily to go home, and likely leave in the same direction. I also like that a 3-way intersection doesn't necessarily have to be controlled with a signal or a stop sign. You can easily do the same job with a yield sign or a small roundabout. The improved line-of-sight certainly makes this more feasible. In your description of the alternating green space hexagon, each green space could be multi-functioning as a playground, picnic area, and even stormwater management. Nobody really uses a park when it is raining, so it would be okay to flood the area for a couple hours. You don't even have to use every space for green space. Maybe every 12th open space could be the location of a small elementary school, or a combined police & fire department.

[@ruben4447]

I didnt really know and care much about Hexagon blocks. I thought they probably are as bad as normal Grid blocks. But after seeing this video and playing around with Hexagon i absolutely became in love with them. I constantly design urban plans with them and they are so much better than grids. Everything about them is perfect. The 3 way intersections especially are very needed in our cities. Hopefully city planners will finally become more open minded and look at this alternative because grids and suburbs clearly arent it.

[@MasterBotttle]

Facts🙂👍

[@thomasburke1128]

I like hexagons as a tool in the kit of planners. I think that they work best on a more big picture or meta level. As noted in the section comparing them to cul de sacs, simply dividing them up radially creates very awkward lots. I think this can be solved with more complex geometry in the division, but that’s only sensible on larger scales. Further more I would have to see a how rail based public transit could be efficiently integrated before I truly got behind the hexagon block.

[@LeonidJP92]

CGP Gray: HeXaGoN aRe ThE bEsTaGoNs

[@TheRealFiveName]

cause they are

[@realcrys]

I'm disappointed, i expected this comment to be on top but it was second

[@4ardW0rKINGbarn1CAL]

r/Beatmetoit

[@wolfranium2199]

Haha so true

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

Hexagons are the bestagons

[@dicerson9976]

The very very interesting thing about a "true" hexagonal city layout is that it isn't actually a hexagonal layout. It's actually an equilateral triangle layout, with multiple rows of mirror equilateral triangles. Which means you can create parallel roads instead of using a hexagonal road structure whenever you want a highway. Just cut some of the hexagons in half wherever you want the highway to be, reserve those zones for non-residential use so you dont get neighborhoods under highways, and use some of the space for on-ramps and the like. This equilateral triangle structure with parallel roads can also be used to extremely easily incorporate a truly hexagonal layout into any gridion layout. Just take the gridiron roads, extend only the parallel roads (or every other parallel road if you want to use very large hex blocks) and cut out the perpendicular ones, substituting the equilateral triangle road connections in between. Also do not downplay just HOW efficient Hexagonal 120 degree intersections are. You can very much rely solely on a timer based system with 3 phases that guarantees that any given car will only ever experience a single red light on any given trip, except in extremely heavy bumper to bumper conditions where large numbers of cars are spending a good deal of the phase halfway up the street. BUT such situations would be rare, because the nature of the Hexagonal structure creates a ton of predictable, easy to see straightline entries to the smaller streets within each block leading almost all the way up to the intersection that can let cars in a jam ease the flow of traffic by rerouting and skipping intersections. There would be SO many of these handy roads in fact that true traffic jams would be near impossible unless a large number of cars were all going to the same very very specific location (IE the same hex block, and even *then* large hex blocks have far more surface area for cars to enter through than grid iron squares- more points of entry and more overall area means a far easier time navigating and parking. The beauty of a three way interaction is also that its far simpler to understand, meaning its easier to teach, and more intuitive in general for new drivers. Single lane roads can turn either right or left, with right yielding on red, double lanes don't need dedicated turn lanes because left lanes always go left and right lanes always go right. 3-lane roads can allow the center lane to act as a single lane road, with that lane able to turn either right or left and the far right lane(s) always sticking to whichever lane they're already in. You never get cars stacked up on a left or right turn lane- because ALL lanes are left or right turn lanes, so you never get a scenario where 15 cars are turning left and blocking the people trying to go down the straight road (or vice versa) and causing missed lights and thus heavier traffic. You can also simply make intersections into roundabouts as well, if they're particularly low traffic or you just don't want traffic lights. But roundabouts are significantly more difficult for common people to understand- especially if they are anything but single-lane.

[@dicerson9976]

As one image in this video showed as well, the "odd lots" problem is solved very easily by just putting a circular and/or hexagonal lot in the center of every larger hexagonal block. Serving as a central point for the entire block. It could be a park, or a playground, or a reservoir, or a transformer. The entire block could be dedicated to one or more schools. Regardless of what you do with the center of the hex, the rest of the lots are very simply just straight lines parallel to the edges of the hexagon in each section creating long trapezoids with mostly square lots except for the ones adjacent to the collector roads leading to the center of the hex and the arterial roads that make up the edge of every block. You can do double or single sided local roads as you please with however many local roads interconnecting these long trapezoids as desired/needed. The entry points can be placed basically anywhere on the edge of each hex block just like with grid iron, but having them be a few hundred feet before and after every intersection is probably the best bet- you can then leave the "corners" of the intersections relatively open for even further improved visibility as you approach and to make space for the turn off that leads to the collector road inside the hex block.

[@tjtribble.]

1:04 If you want to go diagonal in gridiron you don’t turn at every intersection, making a bunch of little triangles, you just turn once and make a big triangle. It’s much faster than hexagons no matter where you’re going.

[@acenutella1196]

CGP Grey is gonna like this one

[@iana1641]

they are the bestagons.

[@lagcom]

I feel like the big show-stopper to a 100% hexagonal grid is that street names would be hard 😂

[@JonFairhurst]

Yes! Street naming and navigation (without a mobile app) would be confusing. I guess you could have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in one direction, A, B, and C in another, and Apple, Beech, Cherry in the third. A weird thing would be that the 100 block would be separated from the 200 block, etc. Imagine directions from the 100 to the 500 block… “Go right, then two lefts, two rights, two lefts and so on for a total of sixteen turns. What I like about it is the natural traffic calming.

[@hebneh]

That never crossed my mind, but you're right. Named streets would have to be zigzags, and how do you determine where a new street name would be imposed?

[@shohamsen8986]

At 1:05, you argue that Moving diagonally in a standard grid road layout is worse than hexagons. however, instead of moving the way you showed it, we could first move vertically down and then move right to go from point A to B. A property of grids is that it would cover the same distance as moving zigzag like you showed. Moreover, you can accelerate better in the way i described.

[@seanmobb]

If you want a real-life (albeit small scale) example of a hexagon suburb, check out Fish Hoek, Cape Town, South Africa. It was developed in the first half of the 20th century and is made up of a number of residential hexagonal rings, with schools, parks, and city services in the centre of each ring. Making everything nicely walkable. My grandparents moved there after WW2 and never owned a car (there's a rail line by the beach that goes into the city).

[@saladspinner3200]

I immediately noticed the American way of looking at the intersections in a city like this would be shaped. As a Belgian, before I started the video, my first thoughts were on how perfect these three way crossings would be for roundabouts with wide angle connections. Perfect for wide bicycle paths around them. But no, a stoplight was mentioned in the first 60 sections of this video 😁😁

[@CaesarIII]

Would be great to have a collab with biffa and his cities skylines channel to check out the usage of hexagons. 😊

[@kide81]

Eurocommunist here solving your weird backyard problem. Just build one common yard for all the houses around it. There are lots of them and they are really great.

[@ГеоргийМаксимовский]

Exactly! I was about to say the same thing. Don't know, what to do with a weirdly shaped lot? Make it a communal space! If it's really valuable land, some capitalist will surely find a way to fill it in and still make a profit...

[@zoicon5]

I used to live in a suburban development structured in just this way, except the central parcel had a clubhouse with a swimming pool. If it had just been a patch of grass back there it might still be so today, but the pool and clubhouse was more expensive to maintain than grass would have been and the homeowners couldn't agree on how (or whether) to pay for it, so it got sold off. The former clubhouse is now someone's private home.

[@Morkins324]

Here's the problem with that. People don't want that. They want their own yard with their own space. In the eyes of a developer that is building homes that they intend to sell to buyers, giving buyers their own yard space is an easier selling point than a "common yard" for all the houses around it. And people also want privacy, so they want a bigger backyard as opposed to a bigger frontyard. If giving someone a choice, they are probably going to choose the design that gives them their own private backyard, as opposed to the design that has a common yard shared by everyone. This leads to a market dynamic where developers that accommodate that preference have an easier time selling homes, which incentivizes building neighborhoods and developments that result in that layout. It might be a less efficient use of space, but a developer only cares about that for as long as it helps to maximize selling homes. As soon as it starts making it harder to sell the houses/lots, efficiency becomes meaningless.

[@kide81]

@@Morkins324 I understand people don't want to give up their private yards but downtowns don't really have those. I meant city blocks with apartment buildings. If there are several apartment buildings with a small crappy backyards in the same block, everyone wins when all fences are taken down, parking spaces removed and a nice garden is being built. Where I live people actually want that and my home city encourages doing just that.

[@Morkins324]

@@kide81 but the backyard problem wasn't about city centers and apartment buildings. It was about development decisions related to suburban neighborhoods... and in that context cul-de-sacs won out because it was easier to sell those homes/lots for the reasons I stated...

[@aidanclarke6106]

There is a district composed of hexagons in Strasbourg, France. I have always found very difficult to find my way with all the lanes merging then diverging

[@ProductionTesthas]

Hautepierre-France is using hexagonal blocks. Now i understand what motivated this choice.

[@TransportSimulatorNationTSN]

I'm definitely going to try this out and CS2 when it comes out the end of October.😊

[@939Aed]

1:06: Hexagons only "win" going diagonal vs. a grid assuming in the grid one does alternating turns every block. In reality, one can go all the way down and then all the way over, reducing the number of turns, and possibly reducing the number of stops and restarts.

[@angeldude101]

Unless of course _traffic_ happens and you have to stop and start at every intersection anyways. Hexagons would win in this case since while you'd need to turn back and forth, the 3-way intersections mean that you'll probably need to stop significantly less often during typical traffic.

[@ekvinto]

Hexagons truly are bestagons!

[@jakobthomsen1595]

This hexagonal city blocks video makes me happy :D Have you ever considered to use the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kisrhombille tiling as city-grid? It can be viewed as three interlocked grids, rotated by multiples of 60 degrees. It supports 12 main directions. Depending on which edges (= streets) are actually used, it is possible to get a triangular, hexagonal or rectangular (aspect ratio sqrt(3)) sub-grid. (If you think there are too many possibilities for streets, consider using some as linear parks or for bicycle ways/tram-lines...). This pattern could be useful for seamless transition between rectangular and triangular/hexagonal city grids.

[@TheFoxfiend]

I am reminded of another video I watched that suggested some ideas for building better neighborhoods. It involved the central space of a block being communally owned and maintained so as to give an outside space for kids that isn't on the roads and to encourage actually knowing your neighbors. It had some interesting ideas that I think would fit well with the hexagonal block idea, I'm going to have to try to find it later, perhaps reply to my comment with a link when I do, but I don't have the time right now.

[@dexterjsullen]

Obvously there will never be a straight road, imagine all the extra stop signs/ stop lights, more car accidents and longer commute times

[@matasjanulionis1392]

I was just thinking about this recently. My conclusion was that the inability to accommodate linear streets was just too awkward for our understanding of movement, perspective and cityscape/spacemaking in general. Incredible coincidence, nice video.

[@majorfallacy5926]

Interestingly, in a square grid you could theoretically drive from any point to any other point using only right turns - meaning that if your arterial roads have at least 4 lanes, the only possible conflict points would be merges, which are the least dangerous ones. *However* for public transit, triangular (and by extension hexagonal) grids with 3 way stations are superior for travel time. Plus right turns stop being safe when you take bike lanes into account. So like always, it's a conflict between cars and everyone else.

[@alex2143]

I mean, the whole of Europe exists and has pretty much no grid layout whatsoever. And we manage to get around fine as well. I think a lot of this understanding of movement is really just learned behavior, because you're accustomed to living in grid shaped cities.

[@Morkins324]

​@@alex2143 Much of Europe is not navigationally friendly to tourists/visitors when isolated from the existence of GPS. Locals might know how to navigate, but someone that has no familiarity with the city might have a much more difficult time. Also, almost every European city still has long continuous roads, even if those roads do not necessarily travel in a straight line. If I want to navigate to somewhere across the city, I can generally do so by following a continuous road in a direction until I get close to my destination, then navigate the much smaller radius near the destination to find wherever I am going. The Hexagonal grid doesn't provide any continuous roads to follow. Every road diverges/merges at every intersection. With the importance of tourism/business/travel, navigational simplicity is not something that you can just hand-wave away.

[@alex2143]

@@Morkins324 "Much of Europe is not navigationally friendly to tourists/visitors without GPS" Apart from the fact that pretty much everyone has gps now... What? What makes European cities less navigationally friendly? I'd argue as well that the cities exist for the locals. If visitors like them, that's a nice added bonus, but the locals are the ones living there.

[@Morkins324]

@@alex2143 If you want to get to a specific location, it is demonstrably easier to so in a grid. Find out the nearest intersection to wherever you want to go, drive to one of two intersecting roads, drive down that road to the intersection, you are there. It is so simple that anyone could figure it out. Regarding GPS, not everyone has GPS at all times and it is possible for service to fail. People still need to be able to navigate without a computer telling them what to do. Finally, travel and tourism are still relevant. People relocate. Businesspeople travel to other cities to do business with other companies. People don't just emerge into the world with perfect knowledge of how to navigate a city, and a city that is more complicated to navigate is going to be initially frustrating, even if people can learn how to manage eventually. And if a city is initially frustrating, there will inevitably be people that make the decision to go somewhere else that isn't as frustrating. Say you are developing a new neighborhood or district within a city. Everyone that is going to interact with it is going to start from a position of not knowing how to navigate it. They haven't learned anything yet to be able to resolve that issue. Now, in a world where they have the choice of two options, do you think people are going to choose the option that is more initially frustrating? Are they going to actively gravitate towards the worse short term experience because it might eventually be better in the long term? No, people are going to do the thing that is easier in the short term because they don't give a shit about the fact that it might be marginally better 2 years down the line once they know how to navigate it, they are trying to buy butter today. This means that developers have to balance short term simplicity with long term benefits. And short term simplicity is often more important because businesses cannot stay operating indefinitely until the long term benefits become apparent.

[@derschwartzadder]

My main issue with this idea is navigating. The rectangular grid is SO much easier to navigate, especially for those unfamiliar with an area. Hexagon create too much zig -zagging in the streets. Hexagons also align poorly with the compass rose.

[@somethinglikethat2176]

True but most people use GPS these days, so it might not be a big issue.

[@Matt-yg8ub]

@@somethinglikethat2176 nobody in the west is building new cities now, just maintaining existing ones. It’s only “developing” countries and totalitarian governments that have the ability to do this sort of thing.

[@yvrelna]

@@Matt-yg8ub Indonesia is building Nusantara, Saudi Arabia is building the abomination that is The Line, China being China built dozens of new cities from scratch. There are a lot of new cities being built around the world.

[@VaughanMcAlley]

Walking around the hexagon in Canberra was confusing, because I’ve internalized right angles (after walking around four corners you’ve only turned 240°).

[@Matt-yg8ub]

@@yvrelna which simply reenforces my point

[@carterwilde7812]

Comments did not disappoint. Hexagon are the bestagon

[@theesotericman330]

I did this in City Skylines once. It was the only map I have ever built for that didn't have traffic issues.

[@alanlight7740]

Interesting. I have thought before that hexagons would be a good choice in many respects, except of course for the difficulty with through roads having constant turns. I think there are two obvious solutions: (1) have major roads cut hexagons in half, to allow faster travel; or (2) put major roads underground so that they go straight in whatever direction as needs require. One advantage of hexagon blocks that I don't see other mentions: in cities with tall buildings the long straight stretches sometimes channel the wind in a way that can cause high windspeeds and discomfort to pedestrians. Hexagons would disrupt that wind and slow it down a bit.

[@kenkeep69]

Some blocks in Barcelona have an octagon or a truncated square pattern, where the intersections are the fill-in square between the octagon blocks. I was only there for a couple days so I did not have a lot of interactivity with the pattern, but the square intersections were interesting.

[@jdhenge]

This seems to make alot more sense than octagons. At least most buildings can still be built square, and it's basically still a grid with continuous roads

[@blix1055]

Thomas Adams was a "Cul-de-sac Connoiseur" !

[@j2174]

Keeping it French, since he’s Canadian.

[@thehexagonalconstruct857]

Hi! You can call me a Hex-head. My idea isn't around tiling hexagons as much as fractal hexagons. Been a few years since I done something for the channel, but I would love the idea to get picked up and I like to see cities constructed in this manner. Thank you for the great video!

[@majorfallacy5926]

That's not very scalable though (and even less able to grow organically)

[@Saberg]

I created a hexagon city in Cities: Skylines. It was really fun and worked quite well.

[@ГеоргийМаксимовский]

I've been thinking about this idea a lot the last couple of days, on paper too. What I've found is if you scrap the idea of every street connecting to two others at exactly 60 degrees, this sort of grid becomes much more flexible. It even allows for 90 degree angles, which would mean you could basically merge a hexagonal vehicular grid with "normal" rectangular parcels themselves lining up in a sort of "usual" rectangular grid, and still leave some space for communal grounds, little local shops, public building, parking, or just weirdly shaped lots. This layout is possible with two opposite angles in a hexagon being 90 degrees. Some would argue that it wouldn't be a hexagonal grid anymore, but it would be. The hexagons just wouldn't be equilateral anymore, yet it would still allow for three-way intersections all the way through connecting at safe angles. The loss of useful space, comparing to regular rectangular grids is not even that much -- 1/3 if you decide to do nothing with triangular-shaped parcels. But you could still carve out some rectangular lots out of them, so the loss of space should drop down to roughly 1/6, compared to rectangular grids. And even these lots, as I said, may not be entirely useless.

[@ГеоргийМаксимовский]

I also feel that the biggest problem with this sort of grid could be that a car or, worse, a tram or a train would have to constantly turn left and right just to go in one direction. But the beauty of hexagons is is also such that they could be cut in half, while still leaving two sensibly shaped parcels. So if, say, you decide to built a transport corridor along this grid, you just cut every second block in half in one direction and have a straight line. Another possible solution is to transform this grid into a rectangular grid along an edge of the development. It is actually extremely easy to do, because in a hexagon there are two parallel lines in each of the three directions. You can run a perpendicular line across both of these lines and make yourself two pentagons with two adjacent 90 degree angles, that would easily fit into a standard grid.

[@jgr7487]

Urban hiking would be the new hexcrawling. And, yes, hexagons are the bestagons.

[@Arkryal]

I had to design a city layout for a class I was in years ago. I used hexagonal layouts, and it was indeed the most efficient overall. In mine, I replaced the three-way intersections with roundabouts, eliminating intersections entirely. This reduces efficiency a bit, both in terms of land use and that you really need 4-lane roads. But the key difference in my layout was on the z-axis. I had under-passes on each side of the hexagon, providing foot/cycling paths between each cell that never intersected the roads, and provided a means for wildlife to transverse the grid without road crossings. That combined with the no-intersection design means cars can run at fairly high speeds without stopping at all. The drawback is that it would be expensive to construct with underpasses, even after you account for the reduced land area of roads. The underpasses however also double as storm-water retention areas, as they are dug well below grade. One of the cool things though... if you need to shut down a road for maintenance, there will always be a detour that is of the exact same distance between wherever you are and your destination. And the traffic rules are so simplistic, if you put autonomous vehicles on these roads, the safety and efficiency is insane. While I didn't include it in my design, I experimented with (and liked the idea of) a 7-cell "flower" design, where a central cell held all the housing, and it's 6 neighbors served various other purposes, including a pond/reservoir as a water source to supply the area and for fishing, recreation, wildlife, etc. A forested cell for wildlife habitat and greenspace. Two agricultural cells for localized food production, and one commercial and one industrial cell.

[@GooodZz]

Well, we have it here, look for Obolon district, Kyiv, Ukraine. I live here. Big Hexagons. They have both + and their own -

[@alichi101]

Top reason as to why no hexagons. Rectangle city design allows for different sizes. If you want to go with hexagons, you are stuck with one size unless you get really weird with it.

[@michaelmccabe3079]

The easiest way to manage the constant angling/turns of a hexagon to travel in a straight line is with subways and sky bridges.

[@noirekuroraigami2270]

Having main streets that can easily be traveled going longitudinal and lateral would be the best help

[@lavatr8322]

In India we don't even know what City planning is.

[@timothytumusiime2903]

In Uganda neither do we 8 years ago, we only had one city the capital Kampala Every other settlement of over 100,000 was just called a big town

[@sepoy5346]

Erm akshually if we look at our urban centres such as Delhi and Mumbai they have been extensively planned with low income housing, urban villages and model cities 🤓🤓, also we have planned cities such as Chandigarh, Navi Mumbai, Noida, Gurgaon, Bhubaneswar and smaller townships such as model town, Gomtinagar extension, Motibagh and RK Puram and multiple planned cities under constriction such as Yeida and Nava Raipur and Amravati

[@jonathanvilario5402]

Could Hexagon layouts be merged with Barcona superblocks?

[@alex2143]

You can make the hexagons really big and subdivide them into three rhombuses. That way the hexagon is the superblock, and the minor roads could be extensively traffic calmed or even bike/ped only. The great part is that those minor roads would again form a hexagonal network, so you'd have two overlapping hexagonal grids.

[@bottled_leviathan9376]

I had no idea there were other people obsessed with hexagons in architecture and city planning. This was an extremely fascinating watch. Please do more videos about hexagons

[@cameronf3343]

Several years ago I did create a drawing of a city plan with hexagonal grid because of beehive. I love this video coming from a pro like you instead of me just being bored at work one day and imagining designs, lol.

[@Ntyler01mil]

The original street plan for Detroit was based on an a hexagonal street plan, but divided into additional triangles. It was only attempted downtown, and then abandoned beyond that.

[@andreaspatsalides1914]

*Fun fact:* The least amount of road needed to connect 4 points (ei. Cities) is through a hexagon pattern like so: A__ __B \ ___/ C__/ \__D

[@andreaspatsalides1914]

Well, I tried my best...you get the idea

[@MSheepdog]

Sure, but the drive from A to B is now 25% longer and instead of 0 turns has 2 left and 2 right turns which would be much harder to communicate and far far slower.

[@InventorZahran]

The biggest problem I have with hexagons is navigability: without parallel, straight streets, getting around and giving directions becomes a lot harder. Sure, a hexagonal city might be theoretically more efficient, but that efficiency doesn't add much value if everyone must spend more time figuring out how to get where they want to go. Maybe hexagonal blocks would start to make sense to us if we got used to living with them? But since no one has built a whole town or city that way (yet), we just don't know...

[@upandawaygames]

Yes, that and the lot shapes.

[@hopsiepike]

Washington DC is based on a non-orthogonal street layout, and it is very confusing to drive, not being able to rely on north and south (1/3 if the streets go true east west). I also remember a research hospital built with hexagonal modules. Again, it was so confusing to navigate, they had to put down colored stripes to follow to to get to your destination.

[@upandawaygames]

@@hopsiepike Sounds like a great idea to show in a futuristic science fiction movie though! :)

[@InventorZahran]

@@hopsiepike A well-designed environment should be reasonably easy to navigate with minimal wayfinding aids. If such drastic measures as painted lines are required, something in the space's layout must be too confusing.

[@bramvanduijn8086]

@@InventorZahran That depends on your goal with the environment. If you want to maximize travel like with a road, then yes you want navigation to be easy. But if you want to maximize living, like with a home, then navigation is a lot less important. Very few people have an uninterrupted straight line between front door and back door, because that isn't really relevant for the use of their environment.

[@kelmouse29]

🐝🐝Hexagons are the bestagons

[@Dartagnan753]

I'm so glad I came across this video since I'll be traveling across America for work. This just gives me something else to appreciate the structured design of citys

[@killer21946]

Perhaps a point that went amiss. The angle of the hexagon intersections also means trucks dont have to turn as sharply around corners, reducing the risk of accidents and slow heavy vehicles clogging the roads. You can also incorporate green rows into the roads inbetween to help provide "paths" for birds to follow, whilst helping to reduce sound pollution. The back gardens is indeed a bit of an issue, but you could resolve it by having a communal garden in the middle with small hedges/fencing for rear-property privacy. this would also make maintainence/demolition work much easier as well. since once a block is condemned the traffic can flow around it both ways, whilst the road is closed for maintainence/demolition crews. An intriguing video, thankyou for uploading it.

[@Kevin-ol5gr]

The only real life issue I can see with it is somebody unfamiliar with the city trying to follow a specific street. Addresses might be a mess to figure out. Do you name a street that goes around one hex or does it zig zag through the town? I think it'd be great to try out in cities skylines though

[@peterborowiec3885]

This reminds me of Walter Christaller's Central Place Theory: it suggests that all else being equal, patterns of settlement will tend towards hexagons due to their efficiency. It's fairly influential several fields, despite Christaller having tested out his theory while in charge of planning in occupied Poland in the 1940s.

[@asphere8]

If you did do it with octagons, the intersection points could easily be made into parks with a roundabout around them with smaller pedestrian bridges for access. That sounds nice, actually!

[@nirad8026]

NPC urbanism. Yeah, just think of how popular are mini parks on roundabouts. Having pedestrian bridges would be an extreme, almost luxury expense. Even when you have normal roundabouts in a regular organic city, they are chaotic for pedestrians.

[@ElvargsBane]

I've thought a bit about hexagonal blocks a few years back and didn't find much less talking about it so this video was exciting to find. What I noted as a benefit which I didn't see covered and might be interesting to retouch, is how you could have a city grid devoid of traffic lights🚦with some specific rules in place. Also before I cover that I also want to mention how utility pipes and wiring are most efficient laid out in simply straight lines. Rectangular blocks do this well but Hexagonal can too. Anyway to cover the no traffic lights🚦 set-up: 4/6 of the roads that surround the hex block should be 1-way roads (2 lanes preferred) and the other 2/6 roads 2-way but with alternating hexes driving on the left and right. To put it a different way each hex (in aligned rows of hexes) would be surrounded by either clockwise or counter-clockwise roads. At the end of every 1-way road would be a valid left and right at the T-intersection and each 2-way would have just 1 road/lane available for them. This is much easier to visualize so if you sketch out a few hexes you can see the pattern. The resulting grid has a couple drawbacks: 1 being the odder shaped plots and the other being the windy routes you might take to get to a specific place. But no lights and just some merges to cross traffic is nice. You can also do the same pattern with rectangular blocks set out in a brick-like alternating grid. I feel that would fit nicer into existing spaces.

[@agathalorenzo4224]

For big city, Hexagon might be a bit hard to implement right now. Because it would be a nightmare for Mass Rapid Transportation (Train like) track to bend over on every street corner. And it would even harder for HSR (High speed Rail) that have more than 250km/h to pass through the city.

[@joshuaelliot4421]

As CGP Grey says - Hexagons are the bestagons

[@phenomenonautumn9367]

For car free streets, hexagonal blocks would be awesome. However for larger roads designed for vehicular use, it would be a total mess since cars often get stalled behind crooked intersections.

[@bramvanduijn8086]

Why would they stall more often? Anyway, I would just make the cars that don't need to enter a hexagon go around the hexagons at some distance. Maybe make a hexagon of hexagon blocks car free, and leave enough open space for straight roads in between the hexagons of hexagon blocks?

[@hansmaulwurf9051]

Anybody going to make a hexagonal city in city skylines? :-)

[@DGARedRaven]

I am feeling oddly inspired for totally no reason.

[@BatCaveOz]

I can confirm that hexagonal cities are very popular in Catan.