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The Decline of the City Grid

economist.com

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Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#171

Post by humanistbot »

msla wrote: post #161
ericmay wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do emergency vehicles get in and out? They just do. And they do it more easily because they don’t have to fight car traffic to do it. > If a doctor is called in to an emergency, walking or biking is too slow. How do they get to the case? In America you’re looking at a 20+ minute drive for any physician so they are already at the hospital or it takes just as long if not longer to drive to the hospital in a typic…

> They just do. On roads where motor vehicles aren't allowed? On roads blockaded so motor vehicles can't access? That's what "stopped up for cars" means.

You can have roads where motor vehicles aren't allowed, but have exceptions for ambulances in emergencies. They turn the sirens and lights on and everyone pulls over to make way.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#172

Post by analog31 »

gpvos wrote: post #75

A thing about North-American cul-de-sac suburbs that I don't understand is why there are no footpaths to take shortcuts between the dead-end streets. That would make them much less hostile to pedestrians, would allow you to visit neighbours more easily, and it seems to me that you don't lose anything. Is it just an oversight or is there some reason for that? It should even increase social safety: always an escape rou…

My neighborhood was built in the 1960s, not with cul-de-sacs, but curvy streets and no direct routes through. Still, there's a network of shortcuts, paved like sidewalks, that radiate out from the school.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#173

Post by Kon-Peki »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #135
nkrisc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning . Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the build…

Utah, thanks largely to the LDS church, has pretty much the exact same grid naming system for every town in the state. It's a bit boring since all streets are numerical, but you could never get lost if you understood the system, even in pre-gps days.

Are you familiar with the history and why they did it? SLC is a grid of squares, which seems somewhat unusual for American grid-based cities.

But then, I went and zoomed in on Nauvoo, IL and it has the exact same squared grid, quite possibly even the same size squares. But if you look at the 3 cities on the Iowa side of the river - Burlington, Fort Madison and Keokuk - they also have pretty close to that same grid. Did the church pick it up there and take it with them? Because if I’m not mistaken, those cities predate the church presence.

As an aside, generally all of the Iowa cities along the Mississippi have astonishingly good grids and urbanity despite giving the feeling that they are part of America from long ago (the Illinois side too - go visit Quincy IL sometime). Burlington even has their own crooked-road-on-steep-hill, built 30 years before Lombard Street

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Alley_(Burlington,_Iow...

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#174

Post by nunez »

hammock wrote: post #165
burlesona wrote: post #66

The article says that governments began “encouraging” curvy streets and dead ends, but that’s understating things. The FDR administration effectively banned grids by requiring curvilinear streets for new developments to qualify for the new federally subsidized 30-year mortgages (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), aka what we think of now as a “normal mortgage.” It’s hard to compete with a heavy government subsidy, so other…

I’ve never heard this and am fascinated. Where can I read more?

https://www.planetizen.com/node/58690

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#175

Post by thinking4real »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #166
mattlondon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Stevenage in the UK. It ain't no paradise. It has what appears to be identical segregated cycleways and has done for 60+ years now ( https://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/wp-content/uploads/... ), yet cycle usage is less than 3% despite the town being literally designed around and built with cycleways from day 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenage

I live in a progressive/liberal town that has good roads and weather for cycling. Very few people seem interested, even young people without kids. I just don't understand why it is so unpopular and undesirable.

Let’s see… I can use a form of transit that takes longer. Likely for the majority of people, so much longer that it’s impractical for majority use cases (20 min car ride becomes 40+ min bike ride). I have to physically myself, so I’ll be prepared to be sweaty and live in that all day. If there’s inclement weather I have to wait it out for some unknown length of time or endure the elements (and again be disgusting for whatever I’m off to next). I’m in much greater danger than a car. People will try to steal my bike so I have to worry about that. If I have any amount of baggage with me, I guess good luck. I can’t listen to music vs a premium music experience…

I mean I could go on. Don’t get me wrong, Ive done a bike a primary transit for a year or so. But anyone who’s confused why the average American doesn’t want to is probably a little out of touch to say the least.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#176

Post by lstamour »

hammock wrote: post #165
burlesona wrote: post #66

The article says that governments began “encouraging” curvy streets and dead ends, but that’s understating things. The FDR administration effectively banned grids by requiring curvilinear streets for new developments to qualify for the new federally subsidized 30-year mortgages (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), aka what we think of now as a “normal mortgage.” It’s hard to compete with a heavy government subsidy, so other…

I’ve never heard this and am fascinated. Where can I read more?

http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/pa-suburbs/po... talks more about it under the heading “Trends in Subdivision Design”.

Part of its source material is from a 2002 publication: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/NRB46_S... (8mb PDF, see page 59 of the PDF, with printed page number of 49.)

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#177

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #101
twelvechairs wrote: post #8

The big recent exemplar of street layout for a new place is Houten in the netherlands [0] which is basically focussed on a train station and walkable town square at the centre with a ring road at the edge. Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars making the car network more of a tree with dead ends rather than a grid. And making road speeds slow at the centre and fast at the edges.…

Look at how human scale everything is, even the pedestrian underpass under the road. By contrast in the US, even public transit has to be built at massive, oppressive scales, with pedestrian walkways soaring multiple stories above the road: https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/354851.jpg . Awful.

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#178

Post by terribleperson »

madcaptenor wrote: post #169
terribleperson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where'd you get your mapo tofu? I like what I get from S.H. Spicy Garden, but I'm open to trying somewhere new.

Chong Qing Hot Pot, in the Chinatown food court.

Ah, I've been meaning to check out that food court but not gotten around to it. I'll definitely try that mapo tofu in January.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#179

Post by thaumasiotes »

ericmay wrote: post #164
msla wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They just do. On roads where motor vehicles aren't allowed? On roads blockaded so motor vehicles can't access? That's what "stopped up for cars" means.

It’s just not a problem. And even if it were a problem it pales in comparison to the deaths and societal cost to driving. You’re thinking about 99.99999% problems and sacrificing common problems (kids being run over etc.).

> You’re thinking about 99.99999% problems and sacrificing common problems (kids being run over etc.).

Kids being run over is not a common problem, by any standard. You'd struggle to argue that it even qualified as "rare". It's more along the lines of "unheard of".

The 2016 census reports the population of 0-19 year olds as 81,880,000. According to this article in US News ( https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2018-12-19/... ), "motor vehicle crashes" are the leading cause of death in that age group.

There were 4,074 such fatalities in 2016, making for an annual death rate of 0.005%. Every year, one in every 20,000 kids in America dies in a car crash. (Assuming 19-year-olds are "kids".) But "motor vehicle crashes" include cases where the child who died was a passenger in a vehicle that crashed, or where they were a passenger in a vehicle that was hit, or where they were driving a vehicle that crashed, or where they were driving a vehicle that was hit. NHTSA tells us that in 2016, there were just over 7,000 non-vehicle-occupant fatalities from motor vehicle crashes among all age groups combined. ( https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... ) This is about 19% of the total number of traffic fatalities for that year; if we apply that figure to our teen-and-under deaths, the number of kids getting run over in 2016 would be 770 out of almost 82 million kids.

In other words, the annual rate of this problem occurring is estimated at 0.000009; it is, in your terminology, a 99.9991% problem. That's still about 90 times as common as a 99.99999% problem, but I have a sneaking suspicion you were just making that number up. To a first, second, third, and fourth approximation, kids in the United States don't get run over.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#180

Post by mattlondon »

cameronh90 wrote: post #146
mattlondon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Stevenage in the UK. It ain't no paradise. It has what appears to be identical segregated cycleways and has done for 60+ years now ( https://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/wp-content/uploads/... ), yet cycle usage is less than 3% despite the town being literally designed around and built with cycleways from day 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenage

I was thinking it looked a bit like Milton Keynes. I guess they're similar enough.

Yeah I think they were both "planned towns" more akin to US cities where road layout and zoning appears to have been plotted out early.

Both Milton Keynes and Stevenage are notorious in the UK as a result - people (rightly) view them as soulless hellscapes

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