? I'm not talking about the suburbs of Seattle, check out maps of rural areas of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, Nebraska, or even the plains in the east of Washington state, most of the rural roads are running primarily North/South or East/West. Not that it's a grid system as in Manhattan, but it is following a grid pattern, and the names of the routes on signs and in spoken language are like "380 West" "215 North", etc. In the interstate system and many state road systems, this is reinforced by numbering convention that East/West roads are numbered even, while North/South roads are numbered odd. None of that exists in Europe.