Just how absurd have American development patterns become over the past few decades?
Behold: Two houses with adjoining backyards in suburban Orlando. If you want to travel the streets from point A on Anna Catherine Drive to point B on Summer Rain Drive, which are only 50 feet apart, you’ll have to go a minimum of seven miles. The trip would take almost twenty minutes in a car, according to Google Maps.
Windy street patterns, full of cul-de-sacs and circles, have become such a ubiquitous feature of the suburbs that they mostly escape remark. But disconnected streets have many insidious consequences for the environment, public health, and social equity.
For one, the lack of a functional street grid funnels traffic onto wide arterial roads — which tend to be the most dangerous places for pedestrians. Furthermore, disconnected streets discourage trips by foot or bike. People who can drive have no incentive to walk or bike anywhere because the trips would be too long and dangerous, while people who can’t drive are effectively trapped in their own homes, or are highly dependent on caretakers.
The Congress for the New Urbanism’s Sustainable Street Network Principles guide outlines seven principles for walkable, safe streets. The number one principle is to “create a street network that supports communities and places.”
A major source of the problem, CNU points out, is that current transportation engineering and funding conventions favor building individual segments of roads, as opposed to a network of streets. In 2009, CNU even had legislation supporting street networks at the federal level inserted into the CLEAN-TEA transportation bill, which died along with the climate bill that year.
In the meantime, CNU has been offering trainings on their Street Network Principles to local communities and transportation professionals. Ultimately, CNU planner Heather Smith says, they are interested in getting the principles adopted into policy at all levels of government.
Little dumb that’s there’s no connector there but I much prefer the feel of neighborhoods made with curving streets and lots to perfectly square grid patterns.
There should definitely be federal laws governing housing layout. I think it’s in the constitution under Article 9 - Everything Else People Want To Have Their Way.
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There should be a term for how much shorter a trip would be if you didn’t have to follow roads, like if you were a crow flying from one house to another…
I suggest “As the pigeon flies”, but only after we spend a million dollars on a study making sure a pigeon’s flight is comparable to a crow. And PS, my brother in law just happens to have a company that can complete this study and I contributed $500 to your campaign last year.
A spin off take of what I get from this is that America has designed roads that make it difficult, inconvenient, and/or unsafe for people to walk, run or bicycle on them so ultimately the are forced to drive a car or forced to stay home and be extra lazy and therefore this is why America is fat!
has anyone ever played the simcity? im pretty sure it gave a warning something like “hey retard, your streets in your neighborhoods don’t connect. fix this or everyone is going to be pissed off”
If it were my yard I would build a driveway to make the connection and charge a toll of one cold beer.
Of course the govt probably would put a stop to it.
One guy says, “Hey, can I borrow a shovel?” Other guy says “Sure, come on over”. First guy gets in his car and 40. minutes later he starts digging his hole.
helping my wife with her appraisal business we run into this sort of thing all the time. while researching comparable properties you might be at one and be able to see the other but you end up driving a few miles to get to it…it is 10x worse when you get near a municipal border because the developers don’t want to develop over the boundaries. so you end up with separate developments from separate companies with no incentive to connect them
