Sorry I'm not following that. Elaborate please.
Roads veering around in downtown areas are usually more due to property lines than geographic necessity. Powerful individuals could and did fight attempts to run roads through their properties. For instance, in a city near me, the original interstate highway that runs through downtown has a sharp curving bridge, off of which many vehicles have flown over the decades until it was revamped a decade or two ago. Such accidents seemed to be a weekly feature on the local evening news, I recall one poor lady whose car was hanging by the rear tires on the guardrail, freaking out, stuck there for hours with news cameras rolling. That curve was there due to the influence of a prominent doctor.
Look at downtown Seattle on google maps. It’s like three sections of the city merge there with sections of streets going off in weird angles, not a nice 90 degree thing. Most major cities have something like this going on. The Denny’s, Yesler’s, etc. fought over how this would come together and this is what they were left with.
I used to sell commercial real estate in downtown Seattle and got a ton of history. Like the fact that Sam Israel, who owned most of downtown Seattle, lived in a shack by Soap Lake (eastern washington) and drove around in a beater Datsun pickup. I guess his hero was Howard Hughes, in more ways than one...