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The traditional suburban street design of winding roads and cul-de-sacs is just as responsible for U.S. car dependency as the distances created by sprawl, according to new Yale research. (environment.yale.edu)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 53 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Easily believable. I used to live in a place in California that was maybe 200 feet away from a local shopping center / strip mall kind of thing; groceries, restaurants, laundromat, couple assorted stores. It would have been real convenient except going there directly would have required walking through a neighbors yard and jumping their fence; so instead the only path to get to this place (again, 200 feet away if I were a bird) was to get in the car and drive in the opposite direction to leave the neighborhood and then double back along the main road.

200 feet became about 3 miles, about half of which had no sidewalk for people on foot.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Most suburbs in Australia have a park &/or pathway between houses every few hundred meters. The only places I can think of with bottlenecks like that are hilly areas surrounded by creeks and gorges.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago*

    I was going to say, it seems like some pretty minor changes would make a huge difference. But with no sidewalks, parks or cut throughs from the beginning, it’s all private property.

    I brought my kids up in a more urban environment. Not quite urban enough to replace cars, but there’s a lot available at a walk. A few years back we visited family in the suburban Midwest and my kids tried to walk to a convenience store. Wow

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