Snap to Grid
One of the first things new visitors to Phoenix notice is how easy it is to get around here. If you give me an address, any address, in Phoenix, I can probably find it — even if I’ve never been anywhere near it. This is thanks to the original city planners’ genius idea of mapping out all the streets on a grid.
Above you see a map of Phoenix’s ground zero: Central Ave and Washington St (Click it to get a slightly larger, non-smushed version). This is 0,0 on Phoenix’s road grid. Knowing this, and a few other bits of information, you can get anywhere.
Let’s talk about streets and avenues first. Roads that are to the east and parallel to Central Ave are the Streets, and are numbered sequentially starting at 1st Street. Likewise, roads that are to the west and parallel to Central Ave are the Avenuea and are numbers sequentiall starting at 1st Avenue. You can see this on the map above (east is right and west is left).
Roads north and south of Washington St work on a similar design. So from the map above, Adams St. is 100 North. Monroe is 200 North. Jefferson is 100 South. And so on. The 100s are considered fairly small roads. The big guys are 1000, 2000, 3000, etc north and south. Example: Northern Avenue is 8000 North.
So now we have our points on the graph. Given any address, we can plot it on the graph, and then drive there. Example: 8626 N. 10th Avenue. We know that 10th Avenue is west of Central. And from the example above we know that Northern is 8000 North. So we know that 8626 N. 10th Avenue is 10 avenues west of Central, and between Northern and Dunlap, because Dunlap is 9000 North.
Once you’ve been here a little while, this becomes incredibly easy. Again, for example, I know that the major avenues are Central, Seventh, and 19th. And I know that Butler Ave is directly between Northern and Dunlap (making it 8500 North). So to get to 8626 N. 10th Avenue from the south, I would go north on 7th Avenue to Butler, turn left (west) on Butler to 10th Avenue, turn right (north) on 10th Avenue, and drive North to my destination.
Believe me, this is easy. And it’s made infinitely easier by the fact that all streets (with a few exceptions) run completely straight. So if you know where 8626 N. 10th Ave. is, you can infer that 16601 N. 10th Ave. is exactly north of that address (and roughly twice as far from Washington St as 8626 is). I should also add that usually when streets do curve (to go around a mountain or a big sports arena), they end up back on the straight line they left, eventually.
In the map above, which is a zoomed-out version of the top map, you’ll see that Jefferson St. curves south to hit the America West Arena and Bank One Ballpark, and then curves back up north to get back in line.
The city planners who made this design were genius’s. But to be fair, there are other cities in the US which are based on this design. The difference is that Phoenix, despite its exponential growth, has kept this design all the way out to the edges, while other cities have abandoned it. I shudder to think what it would be like trying to get around this city if it was built like D.C., for example. Like I said, it could be worse.
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