The traditional suburban street design of winding roads and cul-de-sacs is just as responsible for U.S. car dependency as the distances created by sprawl, according to new Yale research.
https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/suburban-street-design-thats-been-driving-emissions-wwiiOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip148
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So more kilometres of street equals larger distances and these larger distances have created U.S. car dependency? And I thought that shorter ways create car dependency. /s
Wow, a logical master work from Yale university 🤣😂 Are they going for the Ig Nobel???
Easily believable. I used to live in a place in California that was maybe 200 feet away from a local shopping center / strip mall kind of thing; groceries, restaurants, laundromat, couple assorted stores. It would have been real convenient except going there directly would have required walking through a neighbors yard and jumping their fence; so instead the only path to get to this place (again, 200 feet away if I were a bird) was to get in the car and drive in the opposite direction to leave the neighborhood and then double back along the main road.
200 feet became about 3 miles, about half of which had no sidewalk for people on foot.
Most suburbs in Australia have a park &/or pathway between houses every few hundred meters. The only places I can think of with bottlenecks like that are hilly areas surrounded by creeks and gorges.
That sounds lovely. I wish our planners did it that way.
Here in my part of the US we do build with shops outside of neighborhoods. The problem is that these shops are rarely prime real estate so the stores that move in are rarely something you want to walk to
For example, outside my neighborhood now is
A convenience store, A dry cleaners, a sports bar, a military surplus store, an office for a business that builds floating docks, a tow truck company, some kind of repair shop for hydraulics, a Wendy's, a burger king, and a bait-and-tackle store
Except not all of that is on my side of the street. If you left my neighborhood and went north you would run into the stores. Then there is a road, some more stores, and then another neighborhood. But that road between the two lines of stores is a major road. 8 lanes where I am. (8 lanes all-together. 4 east, 4 west)
So yeah, I could walk to the sports bar because it is close, but also I have to cross 8 lanes of traffic. And the other neighborhood could walk to the convenience store, but they also have to cross 8 lanes of traffic
On paper it's ideal. In reality not so much
Sometimes you luck out and you'll get a mom-and-pop sandwich shop or a small grocery store or something, but most of the time it's dance studios or a place to buy used vacuum cleaners. Just random, lower-rent shit.
If you keep walking you can find more useful things. There's a Starbucks and a doughnut shop close by. If I wanted to ride my bike there is a grocery store.. but that just means crossing more main roads. Not 8 lanes, but still. Not 2 lanes with 25mph traffic either. It's like 45mph 4-lane roads
And of course this is more difficult if you have kids. I'm not sure I'd feel safe riding my bike to the store with my young child. So if we need to go to the store, or even the playground, we drive. It's not that it's so far we can't walk, it's that the walk is sketchy
If you want to walk and shop, we have places built specifically for that. You drive there, park, get out, and then the next like 4 or 8 blocks or whatever is designed just to be for walking and shopping.
It's not an easily fixable problem through. Unless you're going to tear down a bunch of houses this is just kind of how it is
Then again, with everything costing $1000, I'm not sure who's walking to buy anything. I do well for myself but I'm still not going to walk to a sports bar regularly and buy a $9 hamburger and spend $7 on drinks. So really, I don't even care anymore.
You can mitigate this by allowing commerical zoning at the perimeters of suburban areas. You could go further and strategically place commercial zoning at specifc corners within the suburban nighborhoods themselves.
Additionally many suburban neighborhoods are designed to prevent through traffic at the expense of blocking all traffic. However what can get around this are sidewalks and trails that cut through the neighborhood. In this way you could strategically link neighborhoods with nearby parks and trails so that one could create a meandering route to their destination while avoiding busy roads. We do this where I live in Colorado a bit.
Both old and new suburbs do this. The street car suburbs (which date to the 1880s) had a grid and so you could get through, but often the streets are not easy to drive on. The latest suburbs are built with the idea of "the park will be here and people want to walk their dog and kids there". However suburbs between the 1970s and 2000s (very approximate) often didn't realize that would be important and so tended to be disconnected.
In all cases natural barriers like streams will disconnect things though, and knowing those existed they tended to build cul-de-sacs against them.
Yeah anyone who's lived in one can tell you that. Blocks are easy to walk and you can put shops inside because they're convenient. This type of suburban neighborhoods just can't do the same. Even attempts to put shops and restaurants nearby wind up being good, but just no genuine substitute for the real thing of a walkable neighborhood.
I have a hard time believing this can't be solved by free busses and free light rail.
I think that all suburban street layouts are designed by a secret society of men whose sole unifying principle is a fierce all-consuming hatred of pizza delivery drivers.
They accept women into the club. It's a very inclusive club, hatred is the only requirement for entry.
A bus/train cannot reasonably serve a cul-de-sac. The time needed to get down it and back is robbed from everyone who wants to go elsewhere. There is almost no destinations at the end - even if it has one (as it is in the case of many large office complexs or hospitals), not enough people are going there to be worth the time stolen from everyone else.
If you want good transit you need to be on the way to someplace else. That applies to both your start and destination.
Depends on the length of the cul-de-sac to be honest. It's not unreasonable to have a bus stop at the entry, if it's less than 200ish meters away from the furthest home.
Maybe. You are on the right track, but every bus stop is time robbed from people who are not getting on/off at that stop. Stopping at the entry to every cul-de-sac is too much. So really your 200 meters is 400 meters - the bus should only stop every 400 meters. (the 400 meter is a simple number of discussion, but any book covering this will have several chapters covering all the different trade offs, exceptions and the like: go read the book before arguing the number)
Right, but even then, a significant portion of the cul-de-sacs homes can still be serviced. Just those close to the entry/exit.
There are also recommendations that bus stops should only be about 200 meters apart. That seems to match my experience when living in a small-ish town. Some parts were inevitable underserved, but that's hardly avoidable I think.
Like I said, there are a ton of trade offs in stop spacing. In a small town with few places to go 200 works, but I'm going to stand by 400 as a better distance for most people is the better compromise overall.
We still have legs. It's not that hard to walk 400m.
But it is harder and takes longer than walking 200 meters. Your trip time is the door to door time not the time it takes transit to get there. People generally consider 30 minutes the maximum reasonable commute. 5 minutes of walking, 5 minutes waiting for the bus, then 5 minutes on the other end, and we have already used half of our time before we even got on the bus! This doesn't allow time for a transfer. While some of my numbers are a little high, they are not unreasonable and they add up why people often say transit is useless even when exists. In turn thinking about what can be done to reduce those numbers is important - but often they increase something else by even more since there are so many compromises.
I'd rather take the extra 2 minute walk out of my neighborhood than live in a street with bus traffic.
There are things to be fixed. The grocery store is a 15 minute walk (one way) IF I trespass through a neighbor's yard and hop a large fence. So instead it's half an hour each way.
There is no public transit to speak of here, cul-de-sac or not.
I just think this anti cul-de-sac take is extreme.
The problem is the cul-de-sac, not mass transit. There’s a mistaken belief in America that the “dream” means having a single family house with a large yard. If we were to move more to mixed use land plots that include condos/apartments, as well as retail it would all become a moot point.
Why does everyone need a yard? Or for that matter, why are so many cul-de-sacs and neighborhoods built and not mixed use?
Linear density is what matters. Large yards that are deep but narrow are just fine if you want a large yard. Transit needs to pick up/drop off within a reasonable distance of the door without unduly delaying other passengers. A wide yard is a much larger problem, a narrow yard that just has with width of a bedroom and stairs+hall allows for plenty of density for great transit.
A hospital, 10 floor apartment complex, or big shopping malls are places high density, but if they are a long distance down a dead end (cul-de-sac) they are harder for transit to serve than straight street in a suburb despite the much lower density in the suburb.
This is important to remember. People asking for density for the sake of density too often end up with something that doesn't help the cause they want. People who understand what they really want can fight for that, while allowing for less ideal things that are still close enough.
I don't need a large yard, but there are a lot of nice things about having a large yard that I want. Ideally I want my front door to be on Times Square New York City, with a side door to a Caribbean sea beach, a backdoor to livestock pasture, and the other side a mountain - this is of course impossible, but if you don't recognize why each of the above would be desirable you need to learn more about the world. Since it is impossible I have to compromise, but the less I compromise the better.
I don't know why a yard would require a cul-de-sac.
It’s more than just the cul-de-sac. Look at Bose’s comment above about being blocked from the shopping center by everyone having their own fenced in yards. Even if it’s a straight street, adding yards just increases distance and spreads things out further requiring cars.
It doesn't. What a cul-de-sac gives you is assurance that there is no noisy/dangerous traffic by your house at all hours. A street that a bus can serve is also a street where lots of cars will be going by (or at least want to go by even if not allowed)
It’s only “traditional” since post-WW2 white flight
This was just as much about enriching oil oligarchs as Bush's forever war, etc.
They robbed us of walkable (bike-able) spaces, real suburbs and public transport for the masses.
I don’t believe this at all. It is 100% the distance between things. Where I live, if I get on a bicycle, it will take 30 minutes to reach the nearest grocery store. If I wanted to ride it to work, it would probably take me 6 hours each way.
By car its 5 minutes, and 30 minutes in the high way. Cars are the only way to get around, and public transport is practically non existent.
Cul-de-sacs increase distance in many cases. There often is a "as the bird flies" path that would be much faster, but there is a fence (private yard) in the way so you can't go that way. Cars don't care much about a 2 mile detour to get out of a neighborhood, but that is a long trip on a bike and not acceptable for walking.
If work is 30 minutes by car that should be about 4 hours by bike in the worst case (that is you live next to the 70mph freeway on ramp, and the office is at the end of the off-ramp, no city streets). In my case work is 15 minutes by car, 25 by ebike - but that is mostly a function of the type of roads between them, and I'm likely near the most extreme in that direction (for people who can do either)