Cities can look and feel very different depending on how they were planned and built, and this is especially apparent when you explore them from above, on a map. Some cities strictly align to a grid, others seem like they grew without any structure, and in some cases, patterns only appear when you examine a city more closely, with each neighborhood having their own distinct style. Could we visualize these patterns?

Seth Kadish and recently Geoff Boeing showed one great way to do this. They divided 360° into a set of orientation ranges, counted how many road segments belong to each range, and produced a polar histogram that gives us a profound insight into the street pattern of each particular city:

When I saw this, I was hooked instantly— what an ingenious way to look at how a city is built! But I wanted to explore more. How would such a chart look for my city, Kyiv? Or for some of my favorite but lesser known places? How would different neighbors of the same city compare? Or, on a larger scale, how would a European road network compare to the one in the US?

Extracting and processing the road data for every place of interest to generate a polar chart seemed like too much work. Could I do it on an interactive map? It turns out that this is a perfect use case for Mapbox vector maps — since the map data is there on the client, we can analyze and visualize it instantly for any place in the world. Play with the map below to see it in action!