6 ms·

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 th

by timjahn 13y ago

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.

potatolicious 13y ago
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 traffic (i.e., undesirables), and meandering streets that run every which way helps artificially draw out the walking distance between any two points, further hobbling any desire or ability for people who walk/take transit to visit (i.e., undesirables). Suburbs weren't always like this, we had walkable suburbs a long time ago, and in some places we have them again. But the most typical archetype of a suburban neighborhood is an exercise in extremely class-conscious design. Despite the revitalization of urban cores across the US, the mentality that drove the construction of these suburbs still remains. The thing that jumps into my mind is the furor over Seattle's extension of light rail into Bellevue - a high-income suburb. All of the opposition boiled down to "but the undesirables!". Until we shake the whole "urban = poor" thing, we'll continue to architect our suburbs in this way.
- timjahn 13y ago
  Amazing explanation (and makes complete sense). Thanks!
- genwin 13y ago
  The problem I have with light rail in Bellevue is that it isn't very useful unless you live within walking distance of a station. I consider it to be mostly a boondoggle.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    I disagree, though I see where you're coming from. The trick with mass transit - particularly permanent infrastructure like rail transit, is that you're not really building it for right now, you're building it to shape the future. My go-to example for this is Toronto, Canada. They built the subway in the 50s and put stations in extremely low-density neighborhoods. Nonsensical at the time naturally, but if you take a gander on Google Maps today, nearly all of these subway stations have evolved mini-cities around themselves, and the surrounding suburbs have realigned to maximize accessibility to the subway station. Rail transit is always betting on the future rather than today. The question is if Bellevue is willing to redevelop around the infrastructure - or if the disproportionate power held by Kemper Freeman et al will put a stop to it. The natural evolution of neighborhoods around transit infrastructure is not subject to the curation of taste and wealth than has been emblematic of the development of Bellevue until now.
    - genwin 13y ago
      > Rail transit is always betting on the future rather than today. Agree! But it's too late for Bellevue. Its low-end houses are already $500K. It'll take $billions (including plenty for lawsuits) and decades to get stations within walking distance of most people. Better to install next year a more flexible "subway" consisting of buses (Rapid Ride as it should've been). The plan is for Bel-Red Road to become an artsy light-rail corridor, with densely packed restaurants and condos. When that becomes reality my kids will have mostly only 2 choices: a tiny condo for $500K in today's dollars, or a junky 1950s house for $1 million+. And the city will be a lot more crowded than it is today. I don't think Bellevue will be livable at that point. That's not all the city planners' fault of course. My go-to example is Montreal's Metro system. I like how they use long buses so there's no loud squealing of metal wheels on rails.
- jeffasinger 13y ago
  Yes, this is why you'll see malls removing bike racks, and fighting against an extension of bus service to them in some areas.
  - VLM 13y ago
    The solution to this problem which has been implemented locally is you set up a bus service regardless of any complaining, to keep one group happy, then you cut the service times and arrange the routes into insanity such that no one can use it, to keep the other group happy. When I was a kid, living in the same city, I could afford the time to burn to spend 2 hours taking the bus to a friends house and 2 hours back (this is in a roughly 4 sq mile city). When its 8 degrees and snowing, or 105 and sunny outside this is not all that bad of an idea... when its 70 degrees you take a bike or walk. Also make sure NOT to coordinate your local city bus service with neighboring cities. You can transfer between systems, if you're willing to stand in the rain for up to 45 minutes at times and pay two fares of course. This is how you have a 100K person small city, major suburb of a 4M big city, and yet from my car when I look into passing bus I never see more than one or two teens, maybe an old person, that's about it. Out of 100K potential passengers. I could take mass transit to work. I charted it out once at about 2 hours each way. Of course I can drive door to door in a bit less than 30 mins... I would save about $2 a day and that works out to about $1.33/hr which is a microscopic fraction of my current pay rate and tolerance for labor to save money. So I drive. So that's the "correct" way to implement bus service keep everyone on both sides happy.
- agentultra 13y ago
  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.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  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-poverty-These-days-more-poor-live-in-suburbs-than-in-cities http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0911/Face-of-US-po...
  - jchrisa 13y ago
    By non-residents do you mean non-drivers?
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      Envision a tree, and consider who might be traveling the links near the leaves. It will be fewer people - and more predictably the same people - compared to a grid where anyone could reasonably take any path through the graph.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  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.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    > Anything other than a perfect grid in neighborhood design is due to classism? Wow, talk about putting words in his mouth. He's referring to the status quo for American suburbs where those meandering side streets don't connect the arterials except at just a few choke points and there is no walking connectivity either. Fix those things does not imply "perfect grid".
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      He isn't complaining only about poor connections to main streets, he references meandering side streets several times as well... Anyway, every bullet I listed applies just as well to reducing "entry/exit points" as it does to meandering side streets, so I would argue limited "entry/exit" also does not mean classism was behind the neighborhood layout.
    - mason240 13y ago
      >Wow, talk about putting words in his mouth. You're right, he should have said "racism" and tackled potatolicious's bullshit head on and not been so polite.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
- tptacek 13y ago
  It's not about "undesirables", though surely there are some places where residents view that as a knock-on benefit. It's about through traffic. Residential streets that have very little traffic are more livable than ones with regular traffic. This is a design pattern from Christopher Alexander's book, which is not exactly a font of suburban Americana.
jimmaswell 13y ago
Maybe people don't like walking? I know I don't.
- timjahn 13y ago
  Fair point, but you can design a neighborhood to be friendly to walking without being hostile to drivers (ie, putting in sidewalks and designing the layout in more of a grid fashion to put more destinations within walking distances).
VLM 13y ago
Supposedly the financial value of a house is driven solely by its neighborhood (class, race) and its square footage, so as long as "every agrees sidewalks are worthless" then everyone is stuck in a "sidewalks are worthless" world. You need to get a majority of people to see a sidewalk as adding $$$ to the house rather than subtracting. I've talked to many coworkers over the years who live in newer subdivisions without sidewalks. When mcmansions are so close together that you can stretch arms and touch two house at once, and no one has a backyard bigger than my garage, not having people walk in front of your house is seen as a privacy thing. Like, if you grew up in a "normal" house and then got stuck in a mcmansion subdivision and now your lawn is only roughly the size and dimensions of a driveway, you get kind of sensitive about what little you have. They see it as uncomfortable or creepy that I have sidewalks and are even more weirded out about the fact I actually use the sidewalks for after dinner walks like many of my neighbors, so I'm creepy for walking past houses and waving "hi" and stuff. Its kind of like non-nudists don't much understand nudists and vice versa. Which is getting a bit off topic but being a privacy and personal space type of thing is sorta on topic anyway. I think they're also weirded out by the bowl of spaghetti road designs, such that people seem to appear out of thin air 20 feet away and then disappear, unlike a more civilized street grid like where I live (about 60 years old, the house, not me (yet)) So hopefully that data provides some insight. (edited to add it might be a territorial thing, like a dog. People raised to think 30 feet from their house is "theirs" are going to have weird attitudes about personal space when placed in a house with a front yard thats less than 5 feet deep, compared to a dude who lives on a one acre plot of land)

by timjahn 13y ago

potatolicious 13y ago

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 traffic (i.e., undesirables), and meandering streets that run every which way helps artificially draw out the walking distance between any two points, further hobbling any desire or ability for people who walk/take transit to visit (i.e., undesirables). Suburbs weren't always like this, we had walkable suburbs a long time ago, and in some places we have them again. But the most typical archetype of a suburban neighborhood is an exercise in extremely class-conscious design. Despite the revitalization of urban cores across the US, the mentality that drove the construction of these suburbs still remains. The thing that jumps into my mind is the furor over Seattle's extension of light rail into Bellevue - a high-income suburb. All of the opposition boiled down to "but the undesirables!". Until we shake the whole "urban = poor" thing, we'll continue to architect our suburbs in this way.

timjahn 13y ago
Amazing explanation (and makes complete sense). Thanks!
genwin 13y ago
The problem I have with light rail in Bellevue is that it isn't very useful unless you live within walking distance of a station. I consider it to be mostly a boondoggle.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  I disagree, though I see where you're coming from. The trick with mass transit - particularly permanent infrastructure like rail transit, is that you're not really building it for right now, you're building it to shape the future. My go-to example for this is Toronto, Canada. They built the subway in the 50s and put stations in extremely low-density neighborhoods. Nonsensical at the time naturally, but if you take a gander on Google Maps today, nearly all of these subway stations have evolved mini-cities around themselves, and the surrounding suburbs have realigned to maximize accessibility to the subway station. Rail transit is always betting on the future rather than today. The question is if Bellevue is willing to redevelop around the infrastructure - or if the disproportionate power held by Kemper Freeman et al will put a stop to it. The natural evolution of neighborhoods around transit infrastructure is not subject to the curation of taste and wealth than has been emblematic of the development of Bellevue until now.
  - genwin 13y ago
    > Rail transit is always betting on the future rather than today. Agree! But it's too late for Bellevue. Its low-end houses are already $500K. It'll take $billions (including plenty for lawsuits) and decades to get stations within walking distance of most people. Better to install next year a more flexible "subway" consisting of buses (Rapid Ride as it should've been). The plan is for Bel-Red Road to become an artsy light-rail corridor, with densely packed restaurants and condos. When that becomes reality my kids will have mostly only 2 choices: a tiny condo for $500K in today's dollars, or a junky 1950s house for $1 million+. And the city will be a lot more crowded than it is today. I don't think Bellevue will be livable at that point. That's not all the city planners' fault of course. My go-to example is Montreal's Metro system. I like how they use long buses so there's no loud squealing of metal wheels on rails.
jeffasinger 13y ago
Yes, this is why you'll see malls removing bike racks, and fighting against an extension of bus service to them in some areas.
- VLM 13y ago
  The solution to this problem which has been implemented locally is you set up a bus service regardless of any complaining, to keep one group happy, then you cut the service times and arrange the routes into insanity such that no one can use it, to keep the other group happy. When I was a kid, living in the same city, I could afford the time to burn to spend 2 hours taking the bus to a friends house and 2 hours back (this is in a roughly 4 sq mile city). When its 8 degrees and snowing, or 105 and sunny outside this is not all that bad of an idea... when its 70 degrees you take a bike or walk. Also make sure NOT to coordinate your local city bus service with neighboring cities. You can transfer between systems, if you're willing to stand in the rain for up to 45 minutes at times and pay two fares of course. This is how you have a 100K person small city, major suburb of a 4M big city, and yet from my car when I look into passing bus I never see more than one or two teens, maybe an old person, that's about it. Out of 100K potential passengers. I could take mass transit to work. I charted it out once at about 2 hours each way. Of course I can drive door to door in a bit less than 30 mins... I would save about $2 a day and that works out to about $1.33/hr which is a microscopic fraction of my current pay rate and tolerance for labor to save money. So I drive. So that's the "correct" way to implement bus service keep everyone on both sides happy.
agentultra 13y ago
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.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
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-poverty-These-days-more-poor-live-in-suburbs-than-in-cities http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0911/Face-of-US-po...
- jchrisa 13y ago
  By non-residents do you mean non-drivers?
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Envision a tree, and consider who might be traveling the links near the leaves. It will be fewer people - and more predictably the same people - compared to a grid where anyone could reasonably take any path through the graph.
sliverstorm 13y ago
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.
- dasil003 13y ago
  > Anything other than a perfect grid in neighborhood design is due to classism? Wow, talk about putting words in his mouth. He's referring to the status quo for American suburbs where those meandering side streets don't connect the arterials except at just a few choke points and there is no walking connectivity either. Fix those things does not imply "perfect grid".
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    He isn't complaining only about poor connections to main streets, he references meandering side streets several times as well... Anyway, every bullet I listed applies just as well to reducing "entry/exit points" as it does to meandering side streets, so I would argue limited "entry/exit" also does not mean classism was behind the neighborhood layout.
  - mason240 13y ago
    >Wow, talk about putting words in his mouth. You're right, he should have said "racism" and tackled potatolicious's bullshit head on and not been so polite.
- potatolicious 13y ago
tptacek 13y ago
It's not about "undesirables", though surely there are some places where residents view that as a knock-on benefit. It's about through traffic. Residential streets that have very little traffic are more livable than ones with regular traffic. This is a design pattern from Christopher Alexander's book, which is not exactly a font of suburban Americana.

jimmaswell 13y ago

Maybe people don't like walking? I know I don't.

timjahn 13y ago
Fair point, but you can design a neighborhood to be friendly to walking without being hostile to drivers (ie, putting in sidewalks and designing the layout in more of a grid fashion to put more destinations within walking distances).

VLM 13y ago

Supposedly the financial value of a house is driven solely by its neighborhood (class, race) and its square footage, so as long as "every agrees sidewalks are worthless" then everyone is stuck in a "sidewalks are worthless" world. You need to get a majority of people to see a sidewalk as adding $$$ to the house rather than subtracting. I've talked to many coworkers over the years who live in newer subdivisions without sidewalks. When mcmansions are so close together that you can stretch arms and touch two house at once, and no one has a backyard bigger than my garage, not having people walk in front of your house is seen as a privacy thing. Like, if you grew up in a "normal" house and then got stuck in a mcmansion subdivision and now your lawn is only roughly the size and dimensions of a driveway, you get kind of sensitive about what little you have. They see it as uncomfortable or creepy that I have sidewalks and are even more weirded out about the fact I actually use the sidewalks for after dinner walks like many of my neighbors, so I'm creepy for walking past houses and waving "hi" and stuff. Its kind of like non-nudists don't much understand nudists and vice versa. Which is getting a bit off topic but being a privacy and personal space type of thing is sorta on topic anyway. I think they're also weirded out by the bowl of spaghetti road designs, such that people seem to appear out of thin air 20 feet away and then disappear, unlike a more civilized street grid like where I live (about 60 years old, the house, not me (yet)) So hopefully that data provides some insight. (edited to add it might be a territorial thing, like a dog. People raised to think 30 feet from their house is "theirs" are going to have weird attitudes about personal space when placed in a house with a front yard thats less than 5 feet deep, compared to a dude who lives on a one acre plot of land)