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Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

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Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#21

Post by pgrote »

redthrowaway wrote: post #12

>Why do most people fail to walk even the 10,000 daily steps needed to stay healthy? Where does that figure come from? A lazy guestimate of 1m/stride puts that at 10km/day. That's 2 hours of walking a day. Who the hell spends 2 hours a day walking?

The same people who gave us the drink 8 glasses of water a day.

I did find two studies related to amount of walking to show health benefits:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-199723050-...

http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/11110

No mention of number of steps. I think people add it for a way to equate a certain amount of time walking.

Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#22

Post by agentultra »

potatolicious wrote: post #11
timjahn wrote: post #8

I'll never understand why we continue to design our suburbs for cars and driving with no attempt to encourage walking. Instead, we seem to discourage walking through a lack of sidewalks, concentration of destinations surrounded by parking lots a mile wide themselves, and burying houses in subdivisions that require almost a mile walk just to get out of.

A large part of it is crime and/or race. The modern subdivision - full of meandering streets and poor connectivity to nearby arterials - is deliberate. It creates the gated neighborhood effect without the need to put up any unsightly walls or gates, and in effect keeps its residents separated from the world outside. The world outside presumably filled with undesirables. The lack of connectivity discourages through tr…

They're designed like prisons.

They also ensure that there are two cars in every garage, guarantee a lifetime of high oil and gas consumption and are situated around big-box stores and malls. It's a very efficient, gilded jail.

Unfortunately dense urban development in my neck of the woods is essentially a forest of towers designed to be dorm-rooms for affluent twenty-somethings. Anything more than 2-bedrooms is absurdly expensive and rare. And the towers are rapidly turning into empty shells. I had to leave the city (and fortunately found a suitable, pleasant alternative) shortly after my wife and I had our first kid. I was terrified that we'd be forced out and into one of these communities.

Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#23

Post by runako »

lanaius wrote: post #6
clarebear wrote: post #2

Walkable neighborhoods are like environmentally friendly homes... people won't usually pay as much more than what they cost as they will for McMansions, so builder's don't want to build them. I live on a cul de sac and my kids play games on the street with the neighbor kids, but we are the only family on the block that walks to the local park just outside of our neighborhood. We do walk to that park, but drive to the…

Not that it directly relates to your comment, but Midtown Atlanta is filled with brand-new high-rise condominium buildings at an incredibly high price. They continue to build more of them even right now, so there is still healthy demand there.

Worth noting since this is on HN: pretty much nothing in Atlanta is an "incredibly high price" by the standards of America's coastal cities.

Things may be relatively higher in Midwtown than places much further away, but none of it will be "expensive" for folks reading this.

Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#24

Post by ChuckMcM »

potatolicious wrote: post #11
timjahn wrote: post #8

I'll never understand why we continue to design our suburbs for cars and driving with no attempt to encourage walking. Instead, we seem to discourage walking through a lack of sidewalks, concentration of destinations surrounded by parking lots a mile wide themselves, and burying houses in subdivisions that require almost a mile walk just to get out of.

A large part of it is crime and/or race. The modern subdivision - full of meandering streets and poor connectivity to nearby arterials - is deliberate. It creates the gated neighborhood effect without the need to put up any unsightly walls or gates, and in effect keeps its residents separated from the world outside. The world outside presumably filled with undesirables. The lack of connectivity discourages through tr…

I guess it is unfortunate that the suburbs are where the poor are these days [1]. I think your description is accurate although the motivations are not. Neighbourhoods were designed to be convenient to residents and inconvenient to non-residents. This does discourage crime as it makes non-residents more visible and that makes it more difficult to commit a crime and not be noticed.

[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0911/Face-of-US-po...

Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#25

Post by bcoates »

ynniv wrote: post #10

The article mentions that Atlantic Station sits on a large parking deck, but doesn't explore how its 7,200 parking spaces can make an otherwise small outdoor mall very busy at popular times. Cars remove you from your immediate surroundings, but they also enable you to temporarily be part of a community physically distant from where you live. The answer to why Atlantans drive so much is not that they are lazy, but tha…

The article wasn't complaining about density but about structure; a fences-and-backyards suburb arranged on a grid or some other well-connected layout is much more walkable than the same density suburb where all traffic must pass through a distant trunk to a major street.

This makes it possible to actually connect useful mass transit to the suburb, which as the article explained, people will use if it's there.

Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#26

Post by enjo »

genwin wrote: post #13

My more ideal city would have higher density housing but with small private yards, if only decks that seem like yards, something like this: http://www.dwell.com/house-tours/article/mountain-dwellings-... In the US we have high density housing (condo skyscrapers) and low density housing (suburbs) but not much in-between that's nice.

That's not true for any city I've been to in the U.S. I'm seriously trying to think of a single one that doesn't have sprawling bungalow neighborhoods near the center of the city. These are historically known as "streetcar suburbs", as most cities had actual fixed transit networks throughout the city itself.

Today these are close-in neighborhoods full of generally smaller homes with yards. They tend to have small yards, as they are generally built pretty close together.

I live in Denver which has an enormous number of those homes ringing Downtown. New Orleans has the garden district and surround. San Francisco fits that bill with the huge number of row-homes in the city(although the costs are nuts). Portland most certainly has a lot of that stock. Capitol Hill all the way to the Queen Anne in Seattle fits that bill. Dallas has the park cities. New York City has queens. Little Rock even has an excellent selection of inner-city bungalows (the neighborhoods are in poor repair, but they exist).

The issue we have in the U.S. is cultural. I think it's a widespread mental disease. We're willing to drive enormous distances, spending huge chunks of our lives in cars, so that we can own giant houses full of rooms we don't even use. It's nuts.

Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#27

Post by lucaspiller »

AznHisoka wrote: post #15
redthrowaway wrote: post #12

>Why do most people fail to walk even the 10,000 daily steps needed to stay healthy? Where does that figure come from? A lazy guestimate of 1m/stride puts that at 10km/day. That's 2 hours of walking a day. Who the hell spends 2 hours a day walking?

2 hours straight, no. but it adds up: 10 minutes to the train station 5 minutes transferring trains 10 minutes to work. 10 minutes to your desk 20 minutes to lunch and back. 10 minutes to train station 10 minutes home 10 minutes walking around home etc..

I used to live in a city centre without a car. My office was only a 20 minute walk (or about the same by bus due to traffic), so I did that usually. If I wanted to go shopping it was about 10 minutes to the nearest mall. I used Moves [0] to track how much I walked, and it was around 60km/week.

[0] - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/moves/id509204969

Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#28

Post by wmeredith »

runako wrote: post #23
lanaius wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it directly relates to your comment, but Midtown Atlanta is filled with brand-new high-rise condominium buildings at an incredibly high price. They continue to build more of them even right now, so there is still healthy demand there.

Worth noting since this is on HN: pretty much nothing in Atlanta is an "incredibly high price" by the standards of America's coastal cities. Things may be relatively higher in Midwtown than places much further away, but none of it will be "expensive" for folks reading this.

You presume too much. I live in a suburb just east of Kansas City and my money goes a long way here.

Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#29

Post by sliverstorm »

potatolicious wrote: post #11
timjahn wrote: post #8

I'll never understand why we continue to design our suburbs for cars and driving with no attempt to encourage walking. Instead, we seem to discourage walking through a lack of sidewalks, concentration of destinations surrounded by parking lots a mile wide themselves, and burying houses in subdivisions that require almost a mile walk just to get out of.

A large part of it is crime and/or race. The modern subdivision - full of meandering streets and poor connectivity to nearby arterials - is deliberate. It creates the gated neighborhood effect without the need to put up any unsightly walls or gates, and in effect keeps its residents separated from the world outside. The world outside presumably filled with undesirables. The lack of connectivity discourages through tr…

Anything other than a perfect grid in neighborhood design is due to classism? Sounds like bullshit to me. Mildly meandering side-streets:

- Block some of the noise from nearby major streets

- Obscure the view of traffic

- Give the neighborhood a less "uniform" feel (think of how you feel in a neighborhood with 20 identical houses in a row. Arrow-straight roads contribute to that feeling)

- Reduce through-traffic- not because "outsiders are undesirable" but because through-traffic is noisy

- Reduce speeds of through-traffic. Neighborhoods near thoroughfares often wind up battling with cars whizzing through at 45mph; gently tangled roads combats that.

You are right that it can make the neighborhoods a little less walkable (although reduced traffic can make them safer to walk). A nice solution I've seen is shared open spaces in the neighborhood; pedestrians and cyclists can then navigate freely, cutting through blocks as they like.

Re: Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

#30

Post by lucaspiller »

> Aesthetics matter. We walk farther when streets feel safe and interesting. People who live in central New York or London typically walk between a third to a half mile to go shopping. That’s a four- to 10-minute stroll.

I don't think aesthetics is really the main point. Older cities like New York and London aren't designed for cars. High rise buildings don't have parking for every home / desk so it isn't an option to have that many cars in the city.

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