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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 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Valuy@lemmy.zip to c/science@lemmy.world

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[-] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 16 points 2 days ago

You can mitigate this by allowing commerical zoning at the perimeters of suburban areas. You could go further and strategically place commercial zoning at specifc corners within the suburban nighborhoods themselves.

Additionally many suburban neighborhoods are designed to prevent through traffic at the expense of blocking all traffic. However what can get around this are sidewalks and trails that cut through the neighborhood. In this way you could strategically link neighborhoods with nearby parks and trails so that one could create a meandering route to their destination while avoiding busy roads. We do this where I live in Colorado a bit.

[-] bluGill@fedia.io 5 points 2 days ago

Both old and new suburbs do this. The street car suburbs (which date to the 1880s) had a grid and so you could get through, but often the streets are not easy to drive on. The latest suburbs are built with the idea of "the park will be here and people want to walk their dog and kids there". However suburbs between the 1970s and 2000s (very approximate) often didn't realize that would be important and so tended to be disconnected.

In all cases natural barriers like streams will disconnect things though, and knowing those existed they tended to build cul-de-sacs against them.