Social Engineering

I have long wondered if street patterns affect the way people vote.

The above street pattern is from France, with typical diagonal streets. Image from Google Earth. People in France tend to vote leftward, relative to the United States, where a rectangular grid street pattern predominates.

Each street pattern has it's advantages and disadvantages. A grid pattern is more efficient for the buildings. It requires less effort per unit of floor space to build structures where the streets form a grid pattern. With the above diagonal pattern many buildings have to have a less efficient triangular form.

The advantage of the diagonal pattern is that drivers and pedestrians have, on average, less distance to travel to get from one place to another. With the grid pattern it is necessary to "go around" the buildings whereas the diagonal pattern makes possible a shorter route across.

We can figure it mathematically. In the grid pattern the destination might require an equal distance in each perpendicular direction or it might be on the same street so that there is no perpendicular direction. We could thus say that, on average, in a grid street pattern will be two perpendicular directions, with the length of one direction being one half of the other.

Using a right triangle I figure that the walking or driving distance in a grid pattern averages 1.366 times as far as if direct travel were possible along a diagonal.

When it comes to economics the grid pattern conveys that business, represented by the buildings, comes first and the people are required to "go around" the buildings. This leads people to vote to the right.

The diagonal pattern, as shown above in contrast, conveys that business is required to "make way" for the people, and that leads people to vote to the left.