Are the Suburbs Getting Worse?* 

I don't know if you all have noticed, but I'm doing "Suburbs Spring" on this channel! I really wanted to do a series on ways to make the suburbs better. There are two more videos in the series coming, then I'm headed to Japan to do a series on Japanese planning!

I grew up in a 1920s suburb and while it's still car-dominated, the difference between it and what we've built since the 1960s is night and day. Newer cities are so much worse.

Imagine living in a far flung suburb in Phoenix and walking to the nearest store in the summer. Literal chance of dying.

I don't understand why subdivisions aren't linked with footpaths. In the UK we have similar cul-de-sac patterned suburbs, but there are usually lots of footpaths providing connectivity

I live in a very wealthy suburb (more like a village) just outside of Los Angeles. The housing developments were designed largely in the 70's and 80's. There are lots of terrible things about how everything is spread out, but they did account for an incredible amount of walkable parks, easy access to grocery stores by foot, and most importantly, walkways and paths between developments. A lot of people gawk at where I moved, but it actually feels more urban than Hollywood in a lot of ways. It feels more like a walkable city than the flats of Los Angeles.

If I had a penny for every "access point" that hasn't been connected, i'd have a fleet of private jets on 24/7 standby

Cul-de-sacs are awesome. All you need is an opening of 3-4 feet that allows foot/bike traffic. It will be walkable, and without through traffic kids can actually play outside with the neighbors' kids. I grew up in a European suburb that allowed by discouraged through traffic we used to play on the street.

I honestly don’t mind loops and cul d sacs, I just think they need walking/biking paths between them. It’s not that much different than blocking urban roads to through car traffic. It’s easy to add those small paths as well, which massively increase walkability.

I feel like the easiest fix to this is to incorporate pedestrian pass-throughs into current and planned developments to make it actually possible to walk/bike to retail areas from a residential area

Abandoned railways need to be turned back into railways for better transportation links. I'm for trails, but not on abandoned railways.

Can you make a video about gated communities? In North America specifically the last video is old and needs to be updated

“I’m old, but even I wasn’t born in 1980.” I felt that.

For comparison: Very new subdivisions here in Germany usually have 1-2 access points for cars and many (!) more (in one case it's 1:8) for bikes and pedestrians. If there's only one regular car access, one other is wide enough, but blocked with a bollard - this serves as a fallback if the regular is blocked by construction or such. This secondary access is also often placed as inconvenient as possible, leading you only to the next subdivision (with the benefit of having a very wide/fast bike connection between them!).

1:31 This! 🤬 It's a two-mile walk/drive to visit the neighbor behind me. And while the grocery store is 2.5 miles away, it isn't walkable unless you want to walk on a 45mph road with no sidewalks and no shoulder.

Linking subdivisions with foot and bike paths should be mandatory. I think road access and standard intersections aren't necessarily the healthiest approach, anyone who's lived in a neighbourhood with streets parallel to a busy arterial can tell you the horrors of trying to get people not to speed through because they see your street as an alternate route and not a place where people live. It's also important because it provides a direct incentive to use other means of transportation; if it's faster to walk or bike to my favourite restaurant or library then weather permitting I'll do that instead.

I live in Wake County NC, and growing up in the suburbs of Raleigh was what made me interested in urban planning. Your videos helped me get into it and now I’m going to school for a minor in Urban Studies.

US suburbs make Canadian ones look urban and functional... and ours are such depressing sprawl.

My city designed suburbs to be walkable with shops in the centre of each suburb and sidewalks, paved footpaths and parks allowing shortcuts across the street network. The shops might be a small supermarket, a bakery, newsagent, doctor, takeaway etc around a carpatk. Plus an adjacent petrol station, sometimes a single-story office building. It mostly still works well - especially in wealthier areas where restaurants and bars became typical tenants - but some of these little shopping centres weren’t viable and lost shops and the few worst ones have boarded up shopfronts. The petrol stations mostly closed as well. A cluster of a dozen or so suburbs, about 60,000 population, would surround a mall and a light industrial/retail/office precinct, the whole gridded with dual carriageways connecting the township to adjacent towns and freeways. Then radial bus routes serving the town centres and express bus services connecting the various town centres. The city is starting the replace the express bus routes with light rail, which is expensive and controversial, but the city government has won several elections with light rail as its main policy.

I grew up in suburbs that were built in the 60's and 70's. All of the cul-de-sacs and subdivisions were connected with walking paths, so visiting my friends or walking to school was easy and I didn't have to ask my parents to drive me. It blows my mind that many newer developments don't have these paths.

I used to live in Wake County. I left in '95 or '96 and when I went back to visit about 20 years later the sprawl was just crazy. And yes, I think the suburbs *are* getting worse. These newer, denser suburbs give you the bad parts of city life (congestion, noise, traffic) without the good parts (walkable neighborhoods with things actually worth walking to).

Used to live in Wake County, NC and chose to live there due to perceived growth opportunities. It was hands down one of the most boring, soul crushing, and cliquey places on earth. Made me realize only way to get a walkable neighborhood is to vote with your feet and pick a place that already has it. In Wake County, there’s no point in driving anywhere to do anything if all there is for hundreds of miles in any direction is YET ANOTHER sprawling big box shopping plaza with YET ANOTHER Walmart, Bojangles, Target, and/or Carrabba’s.

all of this doesn't address the the underying problem of suburban desolation. sure, it would be a step in the right direction to increase interconnectivity between sub-devisions by modes other than cars but if you can't use this new connections for anything other than meeting up with other suburbanites in their home, you've gained very little. exclusive zoning is still your number one enemy when it comes to walkability.

Just thinking that I could bike to school and walk to a cafeteria or arcade from my home already screams countless benefits.

From a planning perspective, footpaths have to be mandated or there won't be effective connections. Cul-de-sacs usually don't run all the way to the boundary of a subdivision because that's extra pavement and other infrastructure instead of a lot. Tees that can be extended are much more flexible, but it's been a few decades since they were preferred. The size of fire trucks is one of the reasons: they can't really turn around in a tee that's only the width of a roadway.

Having a network of footpaths beyond the roads is key. I live in York, England, which has superb walkability due its offroad paths. My family doctor is about 2.3 miles from where I live and less than half a mile is alongside a busy road, making the journey pleasant to walk despite the length. My walk to the city centre is about 1.2 miles, but I only need to cross one busy road then it's mostly a riverside stroll. I don't know how such a network can be built from scratch. It almost seems as though a different mindset is needed: that walking is its own mode of travel, that it's non--destructive and has very low intrusiveness, thus developers need to explain why they haven't included footpaths, rather than their provision being exceptional. They can even be provided at zero cost: many footpaths in England are simply dirt tracks worn by walkers: the landowner have to allow access but they don't (often) need to provide much beyond that.

I moved to the Research Triangle a year ago to work for one of the major universities. I lived in Morrisville and now Durham. Lots of townhomes and apartments being built, which is good; but the urban pattern is pretty much the same as in the ex-burbs, where residential is built in a community with an entrance and everything. And a shopping center/strip mall is usually built on the corner main roads, abutting the community. They sometimes create walking paths from the community to the shopping center. But most people still get on their car and drive to the corner shopping center to do their groceries. There is no public transport except on the main corridors, so there is no way to get around except by car. Again, it's like the suburbs, but townhomes instead of single-family. If you visit these townhome communities to lease, they'll sell you on the nearby country trails and hiking nature paths. When you ask about shopping, they'll point you to a shopping center or strip mall where you obviously need a car to get there; for them that's nearby. It is still very much a country/suburban mentality here.

I grew up in a cul-de-sac-heavy subdivision built in the 1980s. At that time, there was no interconnection between streets other than trespassing between houses as my friends and I did. In the last 20 years, though, the developers of newer subdivisions nearby have built paths connecting streets to one another. It's like they realized that people actually like to walk places.

Great video, especially like the focus on "how can we improve the suburbs" rather than "burn it all down". For multi-use paths and cul-de-sac passthroughs, I find that newer subdivisions in my Northern California suburb all have these built-in, even gated neighborhoods have multi-use-path access points... I think its great and a practical solution that I appreciate about my own neighborhood. The paths are an amenity that a lot of buyers expect if they're paying $$$$ for homes. Not directly tied in, but it would be interesting to evaluate where we should re-assess how walkability is evaluated given the rise of remote work... Obviously not everyone can work remote, but a "walkable neighborhood" for someone who works from home may mean "I can walk my kids to school, walk the dog, walk to the park, do small errands on foot", whereas urban walkability is often about "can I get to work without a car".

In the UK, we moved towards cul-de-sac style development patterns in the 1960s. Many 1970s estates (subdivisions) are well laid out with quiet streets and lots of off-road paths connecting the cul-de-sacs. These '70s estates also tend to have a major footpath through the middle of them that acts as a spine in the walking/cycling network, linking the cul de sacs together with other areas of the town. Cars have to go around the edge. But I think things have got much worse since the '90s and '00s - many new housing estates are completely cut off from the surrounding town, and the only access for pedestrians is via the 1 or 2 main road access points, forcing pedestrians to take the same long routes as cars. The UK has always been much more walkable than the US, but we have been building more and more car-dependent developments in recent decades.

I remember in school, playing SimCity, I liked to brainstorm cities where greenways and footpaths snaked through the entire town, like one continuous park connecting every neighborhood. I thought it was a pipe dream at the time. I resigned myself to the idea that my urban hikes would always be blockaded by some inhospitable five lane road. It's only in the last few years that I've learned my aspirations are shared by many people and even favored by contemporary urbanism. It gives me hope. Maybe someday I won't need my car to find new and hidden worlds within my city.

"I'm old, but even I wasn't born in 1980." Great, and now I feel like I sipped from the wrong Grail.

I see your point but I'd argue that it takes a special kind of stupid to not connect adjacent cul-de-sacs with a 3 feet wide path for pedestrians...

Really need those access points to increase. Not only is it a detriment to pedestrian ease, but its just dangerous. A natural disaster happens that cuts the one road into a culdesac off and suddenly those people could be in real danger.

People freak out when you make links that bikes can use but (cop) cars can't. In my town, the idea of connecting neighborhoods with bike paths is countered with "crime issues", as if people on bicycles were likely to ride up to suburban neighborhoods for plunder. It being Louisiana, this is all super racially coded.

"I'm old but even I wasn't born in 1980" =O "old"? * groans in born in 1967 *

Thinking about how long it takes to "get out" actually makes me feel super uneasy

I live by a suburban neighborhood and there is only 1 entrance, unless you count the secret back entrance I can use because it's my private property. But there are like 3 roads that branch off to nowhere and only 1 even has a loop. Actually there is a 'stub' which wasn't built because guess where it led? My property

Where I live they have doubled down on sprawl. For every unit going in downtown about 10 sprawl style units are being built. Traffic on the little country roads is terrible 😢

Inner suburbs, outer suburbs, or far-flung suburbs, not all suburbs are equal. I'm sure there are nice walkable suburbs out there somewhere, Evanston Illinois comes to mind.

Around here, stubs seem to have been a thing in the 70s and are absolutely ignored now. And I find, anecdotally, that home buyers do not want connectivity. Particularly focused on cars, but it extends to other modes also - neighbors want to "exclude" people that don't live there. 🤷‍♂️ The conflict in thinking is almost funny. Neighborhoods with access to greenways or other multiuse paths are more desirable and with more. But - ask homeowners to approve a new path project - even a sidewalk - through or beside, and you'll get a resounding "NO".

In Europe, we would call these greenways out of town and pass-throughs or gap-in-the-walls in town. A common solution with busy roads is culverts or underpasses. You would be able to pass through on foot or by bike but not by car. it makes going to yer neighbour much easier and allows for easier mobility through the estate by means of local mobility without getting the traffic overrun. I know these don't solve the density problem, but it's putting a low-impact band aid on an existing problem. It is easy enough to create a pass-through through an estate

I'm not in this field, so forgive me if this has already been said a lot, but it's not just about getting people to "other" things. Those "other" things matter. In Nicaragua, like 1/10 people is running a little store out of their house. People don't need to go to their dentist every day, but having a store a couple houses down is really nice.

One thing I've noticed about trails is that they aren't all that well connected to the road networks around them either, at least in my city. Idea for another video?

Is this a trick question? I can get seriously lost in the maze of beige-house-lined burbs nearby, the nearest sidewalk is a mile away on a baking treeless stroad, and when there are bike lanes they are an insulting joke. Narrow and short. I grew up in a walkable old city and I find the burbs here seriously outright hostile. No sidewalks, no shade, no direct routes, no trains or trams or busses. If you can't afford an air-conditioned lux-pod, stay in the slums, cuz peasants are not welcome here.

One big problem with one or few access points (for driving) is that that's how many access points fire trucks and ambulances have too. If there's a big and spreading fire, an entire neighborhood can be at risk if multiple fire trucks can't physically get into the space quickly.

Seeing that these maps, I can't help but think of where our friends and relatives live in relation to us these days. The suburbs are hardly a place you organically make friends as both an adult and youth -- the people you run into often enough to strike up a friendship, are people you meet through work/school, through mutual friends, clubs, and community activities, and these spaces, due to where they're located and their function, tend to attract people from a wider part of the city. Your friends wind up being a 10 min+ car ride away from you. These aren't spaces like a main street coffee shop, where there's a higher chance the people in there live in that neighbourhood. It leaves this strange situation where you have extremely few friendships with the people who are in walking distance from your residence. That's neither good or bad, but it does make socializing, something integral to our health, something that has to be pre-planned. You can't just randomly decide on a Saturday afternoon to walk a few blocks to a small coffee shop and see a couple people you know. There is no coffee shop, there is no people you know nearby.

Great video, and an excellent observation regarding access points.

I live in a suburb built in the 70s through to early 90s. Pretty good walability, with quite a few paths that make a winding street network into a straigh path network.

Suburbs were never good in the first place.

There is not only the problem that suburbs are not connected for pedestrian and cyclists, but you have only houses. Allowing small businesses like a bakery, a barber, a mom&pop shop etc. inside the residential area or in a comfortable distance for a pedestrian removes the need for driving. For example having a street with limited speed (25mph) and a combined sidewalk/bike lane with a two buildings deep commercial area that builds the border to residential could be walkable from the residential side and still reachable by car. Building the street with trees on the side, bumps etc. would stop cars from speeding. Connect the commercial areas with pedestrian bridges and you are able to walk from one residential into the next crossing the road without danger. This commercial street could lead into an arterial road. Another USA problem are the stroads - getting rid of those things woulds make cities much more walkable. Stroads are death traps for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.

Shared use paths connecting cul-de-sac neighborhoods is the perfect solution. People in the suburbs want space and quiet away from busy streets, so there will always be a demand there. If you do a future video, I'd recommend researching Columbia, MD and Reston, VA, which are very old master planned communities that have neighborhoods connected by a large trail network, very cool!

The county/suburbs are quiet and nice. Unlike the inner cities

5:38 Roundabout! Yay!

Talk about zoning laws or you’re not talking about the problem in which case you’re not serious.

Almost none of the subdivisions in my area (the MD 'burbs of DC) are shaped like the ones in this video -- I think there are a lot of regional variations. Also, many of those "stubs" meant to connect to future roads are never connected due to the neighborhoods themselves trying to prevent it. My folks' house is 2 blocks from one such "stub" -- there's one street in their neighborhood that shares a name with a different street in another neighborhood that were supposed to be a single road, but there is now a permanent(?) break consisting of a county park, wetlands, and nature trail. This is because both neighborhoods mounted strong fights against connecting them because it would've formed a major passthru for traffic between two major roads. I'm sure this ind of thing happens frequently, sometimes due to "NIMBY" reactions but often as a way for neighborhoods to keep their suburban streets from becoming major thoroughfares. We also have several subdivisions nearby that either aren't on the local county Master Plan, or that violate it outright... and it's all legal because the part of the county government that creates & monitors the "Master Plan" is not able to enforce it, and the questions of zoning & development are actually the bailiwick of a different part of the county government.

"Cul-de-sacs are great for people who don't want cars zooming by their house." *immediately cuts to a cul-de-sac where cars zoom by everybody's houses*

Cul-de-sac subdivisions are great for NIMBYs, karens, and developers. The suburban street pattern is actually not only anti-pedestrian but also anti-car. You may ask, "Wait . . . how can that be??". It is because it is really designed to be against _other_ people's cars since people want their exclusivity and preventing so-called "cut-through" traffic. I personally think it's a misconception that today's development patterns are car-centric at the expense of being pedestrian oriented. Its lack of connectivity is worse for pedestrians *and* automobiles. The truth is: it's not pedestrian- vs. automobile-oriented development, but the kind that's friendly to both vs. _developer_-oriented development.

Do not advocate for shared use paths on abandoned railways! They’re graded linear paths that are perfect for building a new passenger rail network off of. W&OD in NOVA is the best example that a shared use path while great, robs the public of a quality passenger train line

Catwalks (what we call pedestrian paths that cut between houses in my area) make a huge difference in how accessible a subdivision is. There were three developers who bought the subdivisions in my neighborhood and one of them put in catwalks to connect the loops and cul de sacs to desirable points like parks, schools, and arterial streets. I'm lucky enough to live in one of those subdivisions and it's so much more easier to walk around and bike through than the others nearby.

Great story one of things that happened in the early 1950s was that houses changed from being made to lived in to being made to be sold quickly. This is shown by the rampant gooeyness of the sales prospectuses. Two stand out,first is calling the houses,homes and the second are the lamest names given to the developments.

the cul-de-sac with multi-use paths is standard "suburban" design here in sweden, and it's absolutely a good model, and it's such a trivially simple fix to existing cul-de-sacs!

For me as a Scandinavian, it's just depressing to see pictures of American suburbs. Primarily because of my fond memories from childhood. For example, I walked to school with a classmate who lived down the street from me when I was 8 years old. There were always things to explore along the 1 mile walk. And after the walk home when school ended, you quickly ate the food mom served and then went out to play with friends. And there were plenty of shortcuts between the houses.

I tried to use the light rail to visit a friend in Highlands Ranch in the south part of the Denver metro yesterday. I rode an eScooter from my apartment to the station near me, then planned to ride it from the station nearest his place (the Mineral station on the D line if you know the area.) It was supposed to be a 3 mile ride, but the single trail that "conveniently" took me to his place was closed. I had to turn around and take a huge circuitous detour of about 7 miles because none of the roads had sidewalks let alone bike lanes. My scooter died about half way there and I got to experience just how *shit* suburbs are for anyone outside a car. I finally arrived about 2.5 hours later. No wonder everyone complains about how bad the traffic is. You literally can't get anywhere without driving. Highlands Ranch is a relatively new development founded in 1981; the newest ones up by the airport that are being built now are even worse. The traffic is so bad getting to them that they've now started a two year project to widen the highway going to the airport Suburbs are definitely getting worse in the Denver metro.

To find out if lack of access points are a problem, ask Police, Fire, Ambulance Services, and delivery companies and also trash haulers. Aside from the residents, all these other entities have to deal with the mess of disconnected suburban road networks. The amount of wasted time and motor fuels to get from one place to another is probably staggering, if it could be measured. And in the case of emergencies it adds too much potential for delays that threaten life and property. Where does production AGRICULTURE fit into all of this?? Why do we have to completely give up active farms to build friggin houses?? Farmers Markets have limits on how beneficial they are for farmers and patrons -- mostly they are a huge waste of time for farmers. It would be far more efficient to have neighborhood farms that people could walk or bike to. On-Farm sales are better for farmers and can be year-round 7 days a week versus a once-a-week seasonal events that get ruined on poor weather days. I think it is stoopid to force out farmers in order to pave over their formerly productive land to build stoopid housing developments. Production Agriculture CAN and SHOULD co-exist with neighborhoods. Living next to a fruit orchard or a farm field or even grazing land is not so bad -- I know I would prefer that to neighbor's homes. I have predicted for many years that someday, we are gonna be bulldozing housing developments to regain farmland, tho nowadays it might be more true that we are gonna rip out solar farms after they fail to regain the farmland. Housing Developments built on good, precious, productive farm lands really makes my blood boil. Build your silly houses among forests and hilly land and leave the farm land to produce FOOD.

I live in Raleigh. If your featured "representative neighborhood" had more than a passing resemblance to a gated community, ding, ding ding you win a prize. The whole point is to limit access, not expand it. I suggest you rerun your sample data and only count the as build road connections, you'll be shocked and likely appalled. If you have a filter to include club houses with a pool that will make the findings even more convincing. Good luck. [edit] A new park is planned just up the road, it will connect with existing green space but will explicitly not connect with residential neighborhoods, except by car.

We live in a town with cul-de-sacs from the 70’s. Not that cul-de-sacs are always that good, but we have no problem walking around here. We can always find a route that is quiet and pleasantly developed. The downside is if we want to go to some major shopping or transit areas we have to go on the few busy through streets. This is less desirable but not that bad in our town. To get to the big box stores on the edge of town is not optimized-people usually take their cars. There are also paths that cut through in natural planted green belts. Better local transit would be a help. There’s no way to reasonably grab a short ride.The transit is only good for leaving town.

"I'm old but even I wasn't born in 1980" I feel attacked! Lol.

"I'm old, but even I wasn't born 1980" - Ouch, I felt that.

As much as urbanists love to hate on Houston, they have some of the most walkable suburbs I’ve ever seen. Fairfield in Cypress is a great example. All of their culdesacs are connected with multi use trails that lead to stores, parks, schools, etc. The Woodlands is another great example, it’s basically what I just described but 44 square miles. There are plenty of new areas like this going up too, indigo in Richmond, and Riceland in Mont Belviue just to name a few.

I got out of the U.S. 21 years ago and have no regrets. This is one small reason among many. I fear the U.S. is irredeemable.

Coming from Japan, I still find it surprising that here the norm is to own a car for commuting and to stock up on groceries weekly to sustain oneself and family for extended periods. As for the urban landscape, subdivisions are shrinking as traditional farmlands because generally those are passed down through generations and are sold to private developers. These developers adhere to laws and regulations to satisfy local codes while maximizing profits from homebuyers who value privacy in their neighborhoods. One of my neighbors frequently posts camera footage on the next-door app, inquiring about strangers on her lawn every time she spots one. Cul-de-sacs, while common, prove to be impractical, inefficient, and not environmentally sound, highlighting a peculiar double standard among suburban homebuyers.

4:57 Why is a Pokemon in the bottom right corner?

it's pathetic this form of development is not outlawed already

The paths are really good for walkability, but I think the biggest problem is zoning. Because you dont visit other peoples house everyday, but you have to buy food everyday. So if in every subdivision you had a mini market and a restaurant, people could walk there, some of them could work there. Same with other services, my mechanic has a repair shop attached to his house and dont have to commute anywhere. And people who live close can just drive 5 minutes for tyre change or repair. That eliminates a lot of car journeys on transit roads.

I could see loops and cul-de-sacs being ok for walkability IF they only prevent car traffic from going through. If you required pass throughs that allow people walking or biking to go through easily while still blocking car traffic.

Down here in NZ, shared-use paths aren't universal but have been common enough since at least the 70s. In some journeys, it's almost as quick to walk as to drive because of it.

I'd love to see a 'happiness index' for suburbs, etc. in the US.

Born in 1980 . Pffft!

Ok, so then how do we get the cities to change their code? It seems most small cities are about 10-15 years behind the times. And how can we get developers to push for more access points and a higher walkability?

As an "older person", born before the 1980s. I think the pattern for these subdivision is based on the mobility of residents. This seems to be a US phenomena. People move when they attend college. When they graduate they move to where the jobs are. New subdivisions usually are in newer suburbs. Taxes are lower and the house/lot to mortgage ratio is desirable. If you want to solve the problem force the amalgamation of suburbs with the adjacent cities. Only then will you see a rightsizing of the costs for the new suburb that would dissuade the construction of these kinds of subdivisions.

10:22 I am very familiar with that neighborhood in West Sacramento. While the trails connecting culs-de-sac are nice, the neighborhood itself is just single family homes, linked only to an arterial, removed from commercial areas, and limited bike paths. Also the sidewalks around that school should be wider to accommodate the flood of kids before and after school. Parents driving should also have a better drop off zone that doesn’t require driving that deep into the neighborhood. Bottom line… the paths are a step in the right direction for connectivity, but taken as a whole, not ideal.

The suburbs should not exist. They are unsustainable and soulless.

I will say that housing developments sucks. I am from New Hampshire/New England. We have them, but we have far more older dense grid neighborhoods. I was just in Florida and having to get in and out of my brother's housing development was driving me INSANE!

People are preferring get inside bedroom and see the neighborhood through the surveillance camera

i grew up in a suburb and i always hated the American suburbs. when my parents passed away i moved into my city of Syracuse New York. i love the traditional old fashioned city grid layout plus sidewalks and traditional style houses. With front porches and tree lined streets. the American suburban landscape really sucks. i would never move into a modern American suburb ever

Calculating per acre isn't all the good when we are comparing subdivisions that have different lot sizes, as you clearly saw in your pictures. Given that changing of lot sizes is basically impossible in a world of HOAs, The right unit is the residential lot. So the way I see it, what your picture shows is that the design is basically the same, and walkability is only marginally increased if there is a nearby business in walking distance of the subdivision. I live in a"walkable" 60s, subdivision, not because the streets are well connected (they aren't), or because there are many outside connections (4, 2 of which just point to useless subdivisions with no amenities), but because two of those connections lead straight into useful strip malls, and an elementary school. So while I see avantages in subdivision reform, I think that just avoiding enough adjacent subdivisions without commercial is probably more effective. The subdivision might be easy to traverse, but what if there's nothing next to it? Basically every disaster subdivision I know involves such a patchwork of residential subdivisions with nowhere to go.

10:28 That picture looks like big chunks of neighborhoods in Calgary. Was always fun knowing the local trails that kept you away from the cars.

You weren't born in 1980, you're not old. Probably a 7 year old will believe that you're old.

There's a neighborhood in my home city like this, worse they actually put up locked gates blocking the few connection paths. Ostensibly they are supposed to be left open during the day, but in practice they are almost always closed.

Ok, I'm halfway through this. Are you paid by burglars or rapists or something? You can't think of why we don't want walking paths behind our homes or 15 different entrances?

The crazy thing is that you can build footpaths, and suburbanites will find any reason to hate something that isn't car centric. My cousins lived in an incredibly affluent neighborhood that had a bike path that ran along the backyards of the houses and made for easy connection to shops on the arterial road. They ended up selling their house because they didn't like that people on the bike path could look into their yard. They felt like people on foot/bikes might try to break into their home, while apparently people in cars wouldn't do such a thing. Its wild.

Bicycle highways are being created in the Netherlands. There’s one from Breda to Tilburg to Waalwijk.

There should totally be footpaths and bikepaths all over those cul-de-sac suburbs.

I lived in the city for the first 23 years of my life. I only moved to the suburbs when I got married. After 13 years and a divorce, I moved to a somewhat rural county because I was tired of both the noise of the city and the big vinyl box houses on postage stamp lots in the suburbs. The trade off is that I’m now 15-20 minutes from anything other than a grocery store or gas station. I don’t know what the answer is, but I work from home and don’t really go anywhere, so hopefully I’m at least doing enough to reduce my carbon footprint.

Except more intersections means more paving, less greenspace, which is also problematic.

Raleigh mentioned Raleigh mentioned!! As a new construction sales person for a national builder in the Raleigh area it is fair to say a lot of neighborhoods are built along stroads and other high speed roads. Connectivity is not very sought after and the emphasis on cul de sac’s are meant to give homeowners a maximized private experience at the detriment of other development.

I think walkability is not the best term. The real trick is making walking more desirable than diving. A healthy human can walk in an amazing array of places. I lived in a subdivision in Rosemont, IL that had only two access points. It was hemmed in by superhighways and railroad tracks with only two access points. I like walking, so I walked from there to the forest preserves and other subdivisions. I even walked into O’Hare airport in the snow. But all that took lots of gumption. I lived 3/4 mile from work, but I never walked there. It wasn’t pleasant, especially in the winter. And the car was easy. The new suburbs have simpler plans and more intersection density primarily because of the cost of infrastructure, and in some places, the cost of land. But as others have pointed out, they’re typically far from work and shopping, which are the two places we mostly go to. They’re also far from restaurants, entertainment, fitness, beauty shops, spas, and everything else. And, like in Chicago, the weather is uncomfortable in a lot of cities in the US a lot of the time. Part of the problem with sprawl is shown by your map of a subdivision with rural land all around. All the commercial operations need lot of customers. If the customers are all spread out, it’s going to be a long way to any enterprise for most of them. So they’ll drive.

In my country only gated neighborhoods have so few access points to the rest of the city, normal neighborhoods are almost always grids. I currently live in what could be considered a cul de sac but it happened accidentally because a renovation a decade ago severed the street from the avenue nearby when a park was constructed, I don't complain because it's nice having a park like 20 meters away from my house.

They are. The suburb I live in was built in the 70s, has many bike trails everywhere. This is not the case more recently

7:40 - I just wanted to say that. Keep cul-de-sacs for cars, but add pedestrian and bike paths. Crucial to that doing nay good is having basic amenities like kindergarten, primary school, gorceries/markets and public transit access within, say, 10 minute walk.