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I have seen it argued that heavily-curved suburban streets are safer because drivers have to slow down to see around the bends, etc. Highly-curved suburban str

I have seen it argued that heavily-curved suburban streets are safer because drivers have to slow down to see around the bends, etc. Highly-curved suburban streets also tend to avoid 4-way intersections and prefer T intersections. In theory both of these should make the streets safer, but in practice the streets tend to be built to highway-like standards, making many people drive over 30 miles an hour anyway. I encounter that on a daily basis. I would instead prefer for designers to make the streets narrower and to provide prominent sidewalks and bike paths, since that sends a much clearer signal that drivers should slow down. Moreover, there is a second problem with these suburban street layouts. They tend to follow a hierarchical design. Each area is a separate "pod" that is disconnected from adjacent areas. To get to another area, you have to go through a limited number of "choke points" that feed you into a larger road or an even larger road or highway (traverse up the tree and then back down). This design choice inevitably leads to traffic at the choke points, since many drivers cannot possibly avoid these paths. A street grid avoids that since it operates in parallel; there are many equivalent routes. This is literally the same as running a program in serial versus parallel. So even drivers have good reasons to dislike typical suburban streets, since they do inevitably lead to traffic by design.

BlackFly 5y ago
Ah, so I was more getting at a style seen in the Netherlands. The residential neighbourhoods have short sections of roads with frequent choke points (sometimes featuring speed bumps, but sometimes just narrowing of the road to a single lane), together with frequent one way sections and blocked routes for cars but continuations for lighter vehicles. From the perspective of a vehicle, the neighbourhood is precisely a pod: disconnected from a neibouring region until they filter from the residential streets onto a more main road and then back into the neigbouring residential area. However, to pedestrians and bicycles, there is no real delineation. Mazelike to vehicles, multiply connected and convenient to pedestrians and bicycles. Edit: so pedestrians and bicycles will typically avoid the choke points since more direct routes are available to them. On the main roads where vehicles become congested (and faster) clear separation of the traffic types becomes increasingly necessary compared to lazy back streets where bicycles and vehicles can intermix (these people will typically be neighbours anyways).

BlackFly 5y ago

Ah, so I was more getting at a style seen in the Netherlands. The residential neighbourhoods have short sections of roads with frequent choke points (sometimes featuring speed bumps, but sometimes just narrowing of the road to a single lane), together with frequent one way sections and blocked routes for cars but continuations for lighter vehicles. From the perspective of a vehicle, the neighbourhood is precisely a pod: disconnected from a neibouring region until they filter from the residential streets onto a more main road and then back into the neigbouring residential area. However, to pedestrians and bicycles, there is no real delineation. Mazelike to vehicles, multiply connected and convenient to pedestrians and bicycles. Edit: so pedestrians and bicycles will typically avoid the choke points since more direct routes are available to them. On the main roads where vehicles become congested (and faster) clear separation of the traffic types becomes increasingly necessary compared to lazy back streets where bicycles and vehicles can intermix (these people will typically be neighbours anyways).