Why did we stop building through-streets?

[Blackbird]

Not a huge history, infrastructure, or public policy buff so forgive me if any of this is wildly off base!

But something that’s bothered me about conversations around housing, traffic, and infrastructure and how the three inter-relate is the forgone conclusion that any new development whether it be SFH, townhouse, 5-over-1, etc. will be setup in a one-way-in/one-way-out kinda place.

The older towns within 128 all seemed to have grown by first having “major” roads with double-yellow lines and often numerical route designations connecting town centers. These roads would themselves have houses along them. Then there would be “minor” streets and roads extending off of the major roads that would connect to each other and probably to at least one more major road. A collection of minor roads would be a neighborhood, and the fact that the neighborhood sat between at least 2 major roads meant that someone leaving their house had options in terms of which direction they could travel.

But modern developments seem to be 100% dead ends. You turn up a street and at the end of it there may be a loop or cup-de-sac or apartment complex, but there are no connections to other roads besides the one you first turned off of.

Why is this? Why did we collectively stop building new roads (both “major” and “minor” ones) in favor of a bunch of dead end stubs? And I know some new “connectors” have been built in the last decade or two, but these usually don’t have houses and are just to get from a mall to a highway faster.

I feel like it’d be a lot easier to build new houses in the 128-to-495 belt if the towns there built more roads first for houses to go up along rather than identifying the marshland on the edge of town where they could squeeze a small one-way-in/one-way-out apartment complex using the existing infrastructure.

Any history/policy/planning buffs out there that can make sense of my rambling and explain how we got to our present situation?

 

[bakgwailo]

It's simple: it is more attractive to buyers and homeowners to be on a dead end or cul-de-sac, and is intentionally done to limit or really eliminate any through traffic on the street. It is also more economic for developers to build them, so adding that all up: it makes houses and land more desirable and have higher prices.

 

[Blackbird]

It's simple: it is more attractive to buyers and homeowners to be on a dead end or cul-de-sac, and is intentionally done to limit or really eliminate any through traffic on the street. It is also more economic for developers to build them, so adding that all up: it makes houses and land more desirable and have higher prices.

Is it more attractive? I wouldn’t want to live on a dead end, but maybe that’s just me. I like having a little network of roads to walk around and multiple exits onto different bigger roads.

And let’s step back from developers for a second and look at the towns. Even if dead-ends are preferable, you can fit more in if there are more roads to stem off from. But no new roads seem to be going up anywhere.

 

[TheRatmeister]

Another part of it is that if you connect two dead-end roads, they become a through-road and you'll get opposition from people who already live on the dead-ends. So if you're not planning a whole development at once on virgin land it's going to be a challenge to get that through a town meeting, for example.

But also, we're not building those huge new developments nearly as much anymore. With nature conservation a bigger priority than ever, and infrastructure capacity to Boston and other regional centers largely remaining static, there's less and less room to build, and we've generally reached the edge of how far most people are willing to commute. There's a good deal of land down in Plympton for example but people aren't exactly rushing to move there.

I'm also not really sure this is a bad thing in the context of New England though. Building off existing roads and generally not in depth into new areas limits sprawl somewhat, and encourages higher density for new developments.

 

[Charlie_mta]

In urban areas, such as the newly developing areas of Everett, I prefer a rectangular street grid instead of stub streets, because it encourages walkability and walkable access to multi-use development. However, in suburban residential areas, stub-end streets do have one advantage, which is crime control. Would-be thieves are less likely to enter a stub-end street to scope out or burglarize a home because there is less ease of a quick exit, and the residents are more familiar with who should be driving on their street. That may sound crazy, but I've heard that from a lot of people based on their experience.

 

[RandomWalk]

With the rise of mapping apps and the gig economy, dead ends are the only way to keep the apps from routing traffic down side streets.

In the era of paper maps, people unfamiliar with an area tended to rank roads by size and stick to the major roads. Algorithms see roads as an undifferentiated mesh. Maybe there needs to be some regulation of routing algorithms to enforce sensible use of the road network.

 

[bigpicture7]

With the rise of mapping apps and the gig economy, dead ends are the only way to keep the apps from routing traffic down side streets.

In the era of paper maps, people unfamiliar with an area tended to rank roads by size and stick to the major roads. Algorithms see roads as an undifferentiated mesh. Maybe there needs to be some regulation of routing algorithms to enforce sensible use of the road network.

Ah, but what about driverless cars? Cul de sacs might be the ideal location for them to hang out when idle!:

Waymo woes: Tempe residents frustrated as idle self-driving cars park in their neighborhood

Waymo is expanding in the Phoenix area, but that is causing a level of headache for residents in one Tempe neighborhood, who say some of the self-driving cars are being parked on their streets when they are not picking up passengers.

www.fox10phoenix.com

When people who live along W. Carter Dr. in Tempe wake up, they often see two Waymos parked on the street by the neighborhood's green space.

"These Waymo vehicles have been showing up over the last month in our neighborhood," Roberto Frietz said. "Started out with one. They’re staying here all day, overnight."

Where do driverless cars go when they're on break? Some idle in Phoenix neighborhoods

What does a driverless car do in its downtime? It idles in neighborhoods, whirring and lurking until the next call comes through.

www.azcentral.com

“They’re picking spots where it’s perfectly legal to park. And they’re taking themselves there," he said. "And they’re waiting, with the lights on, and the sensors still running."

 

[kdmc]

With the rise of mapping apps and the gig economy, dead ends are the only way to keep the apps from routing traffic down side streets.

In the era of paper maps, people unfamiliar with an area tended to rank roads by size and stick to the major roads. Algorithms see roads as an undifferentiated mesh. Maybe there needs to be some regulation of routing algorithms to enforce sensible use of the road network.

Nope, not the only way. You can one-way the steets (just for auto traffic) in an alternating pattern, making the grid inefficient for cars to navigate but efficient for pedestrians and bicycles. Many Boston-area neighborhoods do this to a limited extent, particularly East Somerville. It rocks.

 

[bigeman312]

Nope, not the only way. You can one-way the steets (just for auto traffic) in an alternating pattern, making the grid inefficient for cars to navigate but efficient for pedestrians and bicycles. Many Boston-area neighborhoods do this to a limited extent, particularly East Somerville. It rocks.

Absolutely!

A lot of Jamaica Plain is like this and it makes it much more efficient for pedestrians to cut through neighborhoods than automobiles, as it should be.

An example that shows room for improvement is when I was involved with the Boylston Street (JP) redesign and contradlow bike lane addition, I was a firm advocate for reversing the direction of automobile traffic so that it would be:

• Boylston St:
  • Washington to Lamartine: one-way westbound (no change)
  • Centre to Lamartine: one-way eastbound (reversed direction) with the contraflow bike lane westbound (uphill).
    • This did not end up getting implemented and instead the build is a poor setup because the contraflow is the downhill direction while cyclists ride with traffic uphill, causing predictable friction.
• Paul Gore St:
  • One-way westbound (reverse direction) to continue operating as a one-way pair with Boylston St.

 

[stick n move]

Another huge problem with dead ends and suburban street layouts is that its near impossible to densify and grow over time the way a street grid can. Not having through connections for cars, bikes, pedestrians means there is no foot traffic to support ground floor businesses and the point of a cauldesac is to limit traffic which goes against adding a large apartment building (if it were even legal). Theyre not flexible at all the way a grid is. A grid can fit everything from a low density small town all the way up to manhattan. The disconnected suburban layouts are “built in place” developments which are all built at once, all the same building type, and are meant to all be finished at the same time. There is no growth and change over time. This is a huge problem especially within cities.

 

[ritchiew]

Not a huge history, infrastructure, or public policy buff so forgive me if any of this is wildly off base!

But something that’s bothered me about conversations around housing, traffic, and infrastructure and how the three inter-relate is the forgone conclusion that any new development whether it be SFH, townhouse, 5-over-1, etc. will be setup in a one-way-in/one-way-out kinda place.

The older towns within 128 all seemed to have grown by first having “major” roads with double-yellow lines and often numerical route designations connecting town centers. These roads would themselves have houses along them. Then there would be “minor” streets and roads extending off of the major roads that would connect to each other and probably to at least one more major road. A collection of minor roads would be a neighborhood, and the fact that the neighborhood sat between at least 2 major roads meant that someone leaving their house had options in terms of which direction they could travel.

But modern developments seem to be 100% dead ends. You turn up a street and at the end of it there may be a loop or cup-de-sac or apartment complex, but there are no connections to other roads besides the one you first turned off of.

Why is this? Why did we collectively stop building new roads (both “major” and “minor” ones) in favor of a bunch of dead end stubs? And I know some new “connectors” have been built in the last decade or two, but these usually don’t have houses and are just to get from a mall to a highway faster.

I feel like it’d be a lot easier to build new houses in the 128-to-495 belt if the towns there built more roads first for houses to go up along rather than identifying the marshland on the edge of town where they could squeeze a small one-way-in/one-way-out apartment complex using the existing infrastructure.

Any history/policy/planning buffs out there that can make sense of my rambling and explain how we got to our present situation?

This guy gives a brief history of what you're looking for

In short, the disjointed network and culs-de-sac were thought to be traffic safety measures. Professional organizations put them in their standards in the 1950s, states followed, and it's been slow getting rid of them. Those are also the standards that would have been required to follow for people to get any kind of government backed mortgage, so that's what got built.

I think he also skips or glosses over lots of other important trends for why this became popular, some of which people are mentioning here. In no particular order:

• Most people really hate cars, even if they say otherwise. They like being able to drive themselves, but other people's cars are loud, obnoxious, polluting, and dangerous. This neighborhood layout caters to that by keeping traffic low, locally. The obvious downside is that living in a place like that typically means you need to drive to do anything, so you would impose a ton of car traffic on everyone else. It's all negative externalities.
• A lot of urban planners of the time saw cities as gross, overcrowded, and outdated. They wanted to create the opposite of cities in every way. They thought everyone should simply live in spacious, bucolic "countryside." This was their attempt to do that.
• Tied with that was white flight, racism, and wanting to keep out undesirables. These subdivisions kept some people out by making it only really accessible by car. They also have limited access, so you could more easily monitor who's coming and going, or even put up gates and a guard at each entrance/exit.
• I also see this as part of a long trend of privatizing traditional government planning and services. Like you say, cities used to design and build their own roads and streets. That's expensive. It's cheaper to sell off land to a big developer, and they promise to build the streets for a neighborhood (typically). That's cheaper for the city but comes with other costs. Developers build what's best for their subdivision, and not necessarily the city. For example, it can be harder for the city to then build a school kids can walk to, because the subdivision is too small for a school by itself and adjacent subdivisions don't connect. The neighborhoods can't really densify and trying to, say, improve public transportation is between hard and impossible.
• Supposedly there's the safety from crime benefits, and, I don't know, maybe. It's also possible that these places have just been catering to the relatively rich and have good, functioning government services. As poverty in the US becomes increasingly suburban, I wouldn't be surprised if that changes. The design could essentially trap people in, and make it harder for police to patrol. But that's speculation, I don't know.

Is it more attractive? I wouldn’t want to live on a dead end, but maybe that’s just me. I like having a little network of roads to walk around and multiple exits onto different bigger roads.

I totally agree. But other people like it. That's fine. I do wish cities would take some of those negative externalities into account. And also I wish that wasn't basically the only kind of neighborhood allowed to be built in the US in the past 70 years.

 

[stick n move]

^ Yea thats the main problem. Its not inherently bad or inherently good. It only becomes inherently bad when its the only way new streets get built within the entire country. Just like single family homes are not bad or good, until its the only thing that gets built for 30 years.

The street network is THE most important part of planning a new developmdnt/neighborhood, but its been relegated to an after thought. Any building that gets built can fairly easily get demolished and something else built, even if thats just another single family house. Once a street is laid down though it might as well be permanent, because every single property that gets built on it has its own property rights. That shitty cauldesac is going to be there for 1,2,300 years most likely. Its so important to do it right the first time.

As I said in another thread back in the day when manhattan or washington dc was planned the street grid was pretty much all that they planned out and the rest filled in organically over time. (Besides the capital building which had planned to be on the hill). Idk what its going to take but going back in that direction would lead to better cities. These days they plan out the buildings and then throw some roads down wherever. Its flipped completely backwards. If you lay out a quality street grid, its zoned accordingly, and the lots are broken up and sold off the market will fill it in organically according to what is needed. We should go back to this.

 

[millerm277]

Opinions on some points raised:

- I actually think the non-grid subdivisions have to some extent become less effective at "restricting cars" in the modern era. Mapping apps don't have a problem sending you down 25 turns on roads that wiggle all over if they're faster, but no one would have done that 30 years ago besides the most dedicated local. Many subdivisions, especially larger ones, may have some quiet cul-de-sacs but also wind up with a bunch of streets that can be awkwardly combined into a thru route and weren't planned for seeing that traffic at all.

- And now you've got the worst of both worlds once that becomes appealing time-wise, because a lot of the supposed benefits of the quiet subdivision have disappeared. The road at the end of your short cul-de-sac turns out to be busy and you can't let the kids go ride their bikes or run around or whatever, you get a lot of people from out of the area through it, and so on.

- I'm unconvinced on the crime angle, at least in terms of burglaries and the like. Fewer eyes on it seems to me to inspire more crime, not less. Gated communities might be a little different.

 

[bigeman312]

I’m enjoying this discussion.

On the crime front, none of the things mentioned have much to do with crime. Poverty does.

The highest crime states, counties, cities, towns, etc, are the poorest. Some are urban, some are suburban, some are rural. Some have grids, some do not.

Baltimore City and Manhattan are mostly gridded and both urban, yet one falls near the bottom of crime rates and one falls near the top.

 

[kdmc]

I'm unconvinced on the crime angle, at least in terms of burglaries and the like. Fewer eyes on it seems to me to inspire more crime, not less. Gated communities might be a little different.

Jane Jacobs argues this point in Death and Life. ie, the safest streets are in dense neighborhoods of people who feel a sense of duty to look out for one another. I don't have data to corroborate (and if I did, I wouldn't know how to disentangle it from income disparity).

 

[HenryAlan]

Jane Jacobs argues this point in Death and Life. ie, the safest streets are in dense neighborhoods of people who feel a sense of duty to look out for one another. I don't have data to corroborate (and if I did, I wouldn't know how to disentangle it from income disparity).

There's another theory that I think is equally compelling and somewhat related. Those high density neighborhoods with eyes on the street tended to be townhouse developments, which limit the escape routes for criminals. If the street wall is porous, such as we find in a suburban neighborhood filled with detached single family homes, it's relatively easy to disappear through a side yard (or alley for a more urban but still detached structure style neighborhood). But a street filled with party-wall row houses forces somebody on the run to stay in the open and visible.

 

[stick n move]

Theres also the “eyes on” concept I believe it was called, where the more people are looking out their windows, driving by, going to the store, driving down the street, walking down the street etc.. the less likely crime is to occur. There were many reasons why the old public housing projects had a lot of crime, but this is another reason. Because they were made into enormous superblocks with no ground floor retail, no front doors, no people driving through, no people just passing through who dont live there. So there was a huge amount of space without a lot of people there and not a lot of people looking out. The more people there are the less likely crime is to occur. Funny enough back when I was a teenager we would specifically look for dead end roads or cauldesacs to park on the street in order to buy drugs compared to main roads or busy streets. Same exact concept.

Edit: funny we posted nearly the same thing at the same time.

Heres a quick article talking about the concept.

https://medium.com/i-cities/eyes-on-the-street-ab12b39b960b

 

[Charlie_mta]

All good points in regards to burglaries and crimes in residential neighborhoods, and I agree. Density and high pedestrian activity helps, a lower poverty level helps, and a non-porous street wall helps (connected townhouses, walls, etc.). However, comparing a single-family home suburban neighborhood having through streets versus one that has cul-de-sacs or short street loops, the latter type could have less burglaries and vandalism than the former. Thieves shy away from a cul-de-sac because they know once they're in, a quick getaway is less likely due to egress constraints. Also, residents do know who lives in their neighborhood and, with no through traffic, can identify suspicious vehicles a lot easier. But I personally prefer a street grid for the reasons cited in the above posts.

 

[FK4]

Not a huge history, infrastructure, or public policy buff so forgive me if any of this is wildly off base!

But something that’s bothered me about conversations around housing, traffic, and infrastructure and how the three inter-relate is the forgone conclusion that any new development whether it be SFH, townhouse, 5-over-1, etc. will be setup in a one-way-in/one-way-out kinda place.

The older towns within 128 all seemed to have grown by first having “major” roads with double-yellow lines and often numerical route designations connecting town centers. These roads would themselves have houses along them. Then there would be “minor” streets and roads extending off of the major roads that would connect to each other and probably to at least one more major road. A collection of minor roads would be a neighborhood, and the fact that the neighborhood sat between at least 2 major roads meant that someone leaving their house had options in terms of which direction they could travel.

But modern developments seem to be 100% dead ends. You turn up a street and at the end of it there may be a loop or cup-de-sac or apartment complex, but there are no connections to other roads besides the one you first turned off of.

Why is this? Why did we collectively stop building new roads (both “major” and “minor” ones) in favor of a bunch of dead end stubs? And I know some new “connectors” have been built in the last decade or two, but these usually don’t have houses and are just to get from a mall to a highway faster.

I feel like it’d be a lot easier to build new houses in the 128-to-495 belt if the towns there built more roads first for houses to go up along rather than identifying the marshland on the edge of town where they could squeeze a small one-way-in/one-way-out apartment complex using the existing infrastructure.

Any history/policy/planning buffs out there that can make sense of my rambling and explain how we got to our present situation?

I completely agree with you and I have complained about this periodically on here. What you describe is not limited to suburban developments: it consistently happens in the city of Boston whenever large tracts of land get developed. Think of Bartlett Yards, for example. And also, the fact that with the whole Pike rebuild there’s not a complete street grid being built is also stupefying. In urban settings at least, I think this is due to the over power of groups who claim to represent “the community” and who hate any additional cars on their streets, hence, they must be placated by never having new streets making connections into their precious hoods. But on a deeper level, the antipathy to through streets is just another example of the toxic force of individualism which drives isolationism. The very idea of having a car that can drive by your home on its way somewhere other than the driveway next door signals a lack of affluence and an over exposure to the big bad dirty world out there that everyone is trying to escape. It’s the exact same reason that people viciously fight rail trails. It’s incredibly unhealthy, honestly, solitude is killing us as humans are inherently social beings, yet our entire economy and cultural system supports it.

In the human vascular system, good circulation means both open and patent blood vessels of every size, but also plenty of what is called “collateral circulation”: cross-connections between arteries and veins that allow for redundancy in flow. These support an overall system of health, particularly when one vessel happens to get either temporarily or permanently blocked. The more circulation, the better. I would argue that both reactionaries and bike progressives both participate in a hostility to collateral circulation; look at how controversial many have found it to suggest that we ever ran Babcock across the new Pike, into Allston… as if the ability to travel by car on a direct route was some sort of sin. Collateral circulation won’t solve all problems, but it’s a healthier road system if drivers and other traveler aren’t psychologically facing blockages and dead ends constantly. That creates ideas of constriction and lack of circulation. It’s ironic that blood vessel pathology is also what’s killing so many Americans, due to spending their lives behind the wheel.

 

[FK4]

All good points in regards to burglaries and crimes in residential neighborhoods, and I agree. Density and high pedestrian activity helps, a lower poverty level helps, and a non-porous street wall helps (connected townhouses, walls, etc.). However, comparing a single-family home suburban neighborhood having through streets versus one that has cul-de-sacs or short street loops, the latter type could have less burglaries and vandalism than the former. Thieves shy away from a cul-de-sac because they know once they're in, a quick getaway is less likely due to egress constraints. Also, residents do know who lives in their neighborhood and, with no through traffic, can identify suspicious vehicles a lot easier. But I personally prefer a street grid for the reasons cited in the above posts.

I would rather live in a world where thieves had a better chance, to be honest. The rise of “security“ and “safety” in dictating policy is another worrisome trend of modernity, and nearly all the measures end up leading to suppression of human freedom, Including freedom of movement, as a byproduct.