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The Decline of the City Grid

economist.com

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Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#131

Post by denkmoon »

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…

When I was a kid in the 90s (in Australia, not the US), we lived in a cul-de-sac suburb, and every cul-de-sac had a footpath to nearby streets and parklands.

In the early 2000s, residents realised they could petition the local government to have the footpaths removed and the land would be allocated to the neighbouring properties. Within the space of a few years, the route I used to walk to my school bus stop was completely blocked off because all the footpaths were removed. I went from having 4-5 different routing options to none. Also made it so that instead of riding my bike to my friend's house through parks and away from the road, I had to be driven (because my parents didn't like me riding near a high traffic road which I can understand).

Me and Mum were the only people on the "against" side to show up at the council meetings.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#132

Post by msla »

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.…

> Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars

How do emergency vehicles get in and out?

If a doctor is called in to an emergency, walking or biking is too slow. How do they get to the case?

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#133

Post by dghlsakjg »

msla wrote: post #132
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.…

> Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars How do emergency vehicles get in and out? If a doctor is called in to an emergency, walking or biking is too slow. How do they get to the case?

I just went to Houten on google maps.

In that area I couldn't come up with a route between two points that took longer than 10 minutes by car. And that was by trying to find the two most inconvenient points in the town. I don't know if Houten has this feature but there are often movable bollards that allow emergency vehicles to take shortcuts.

From their centrally located public health center, I couldn't find a location that was more than 6 minutes by car or 10 minutes by bike.

A 6 minute response time is better than most people can hope for in many major cities in Europe.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#134

Post by dghlsakjg »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #98
markfenton wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a view held by some that they actually decrease safety by providing somewhere for undesirables to loiter, or a means of escape after committing crime, or simply attract more foot traffic to an area than a cul-de-sac therfore increasing the chance of opportunistic crime. I suspect this is a situation where the benefits of the shortcuts to society may be greater than the possible downsides to the nearby homeow…

We have a creek trail at the end of our cul-de-sac, and it definitely has been used by people who walk up and down neighborhoods to check for open cars. It's especially useful in the day of home security cameras - people that drive tend to get their license plate lifted. That said, I wouldn't trade it for that kinda "safety". I'd rather just lock my car or not leave valuables in it. Being able to take my kids for a w…

I don't have a trail at the end of my dead end (Through oddities of lot sizes, I don't live on a cul-de-sac so much as, we need to put a road here so one guy can access his property.)

People have still come and looked through my car despite the clear lack of escape route.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#135

Post by dghlsakjg »

nkrisc wrote: post #21
beej71 wrote: post #5

[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead] I like grids... but I'm not sure why. I live at the edge of the old grid section in my town. West of me, it turns into modern non-grid. Which I don't like. But do I not like it because of the lack of grid? Or because of the new modern wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction? I look at an old organically-grown city and it's fascinating to me; its ties to the distant pas…

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.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#136

Post by strken »

davidw wrote: post #112
strken wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a middle ground. If you look examples of walkable suburbs (Houten from one of the other replies, the north of Canberra in Australia) they don't just shove cul-de-sacs everywhere with no thought. Canberra in particular uses looping streets rather than dead ends, runs footpaths between houses at the midpoint of many loops so pedestrians and cyclists can move like they're in a grid, and doesn't have mult…

With a good grid, you could always close off some of the side streets to cars and let bikes and pedestrians through. With the big up front design... you better hope you got it right the first time because you are going to have more trouble changing it later. I think that's what I like about a grid. It doesn't have to be 100% right. You can change and shape and adapt it as needs be.

With a big up-front layout you can still leave big enough gaps to put a road in and create a grid if you need, too: it goes both ways. Keep government ownership of pedestrian and bike paths with some nice trees on either side, and if you really need to you can put a road there later.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#137

Post by epilys »

twobitshifter wrote: post #118
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.…

you know what else is a tree with dead ends? The thousands of suburban cul-de-sacs throughout the US. It makes me wonder if there’s an opportunity to rework them into something other than houses.

FYI, plural of cul-de-sac is culs-de-sac. It means bottom-of-the-bag in French, so the plural form would be bottoms-of-the-bag. Like the plural of sibling-in-law is not sibling-in-laws. Worthless fact of the day!

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#138

Post by bobthepanda »

ghaff wrote: post #99
gpvos wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Four-way stops are yet another American pessimization. You won't find them in any European country.

Not sure why. In low traffic situations in both directions, it seems it's probably safer to have everyone to have everyone stop rather than have traffic in one direction blast through.

At least in subdivisions in the US, you'll often see more three-way stops than four-way stops.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#139

Post by bobthepanda »

bernawil wrote: post #97
bobthepanda wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree. Grids are bad for cars because four way stops are really inefficient at processing them. You'll notice in American suburban planning that there are as few four-way stops as possible inside a subdivision. Non-grids extend the distance of a lot of trips and are thus hostile to slower non-motorized users. Driving an extra 500m is not a big deal for a car but is an additional several minutes for slower…

> four-way stops are really inefficient at processing them This is a non-issue. Where I'm from, grid neighbourhoods are the norm and stop signs are not a thing. First, the grid spreads out traffic inside it. Then, you're supposed to drive at around 35 km/h. Last, narrower/streets with more traffic tend to be one way. Most of the driving takes place at arteries, still part of the grid. Those have semaphores. Also, gri…

non-grids can have all of those things as well. American suburban streets are certainly wide enough for street-parking but a lot of them don't allow it for reasons.

America is also a country in which road engineers will spend hundreds of millions of dollars eliminating mere seconds at a single intersection. In that context, a four way stop is "inefficient" or dangerous and as many internal intersections as possible in non-grids are just three way T's.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#140

Post by andbberger »

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.

the silver line is some of the worst urban planning of all time. some of the stations (loudon gateway) are literally only accessible by car
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