If you want to learn even more about this topic, check out the video Vox just posted (cool coincidence!): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vWhYlu7ZfYM.html
I am showing a possible alternate future of Worcester, MA! It shows the hallmarks of suburban development, with plazas (strip malls), and full sized malls in most towns.
Seriously, even the new and so called "planned" neighborhoods have zero implementation of cul-de- what. All they know is how to raise multi-storey buildings after buildings. City planning is a totally alien concept to our country. I bet if you talk about T sections to an Indian Administrative Office involved in city planning, he will look at you as if you have grown horns😏
In the Netherlands we don't do cul de sacs. Our version of a cul de sac is a street which just stops suddenly, and you will have to figure out how to turn your car.
I cut a door into my fence because it cuts my commute time to the bus stop by 20 minutes. It's a massive time saver but apparently I'm the only one who likes it, I've had several complaints from the neighbours and several cop calls because it's unsightly. But I am not about to buy a car when I can't afford the insurance and maintenance.
Tell me about it. The nearest city bus stop to my house is 3 minutes away if I cut through the church parking lot or 7 if I go around, which is fairly convenient as that bus route runs clockwise and goes almost straight to my job in ten minutes. Since the church also runs a school, they try to discourage people from cutting across as much as possible, which I'm normally happy to do. But, for the last month or so, there have been construction workers doing upgrades to the sewer system on the main road, which means going around is basically impossible so either I have to ignore the posted signs and cut across the church lot, or go the other way down my road to get onto the next main road then go even further to the next connecting road that would take me back around to the more direct bus route, which would take almost an hour. If I'm going to spend an hour to take the bus, then I might as well just use the counter-clockwise bus route that has a stop on my street, but takes an hour to get to my job as it goes all the way through downtown and the historic old town sections before going back up the hill, and all because the city planners couldn't be bothered to put a few more crossroads in town to connect isolated streets and neighborhoods. The last town I lived in was designed with a more grid shape, so if one road was closed off for sewer work, I only had to go about five minutes out of my way to get around the closure and to my destination, not an entire freaking hour.
el tapa we have super shitty street designs in my city as well. A lot of streets at the edge of the city don’t even have asphalt, crossroads or sidewalks (and when they do they tend to be wanky or asymmetric WHICH DRIVES ME CRAZY) Also, one-way streets are hell. They build “better” (EMPHASIS ON THE “”) sidewalks recently and now, instead of going straight towards the main street, we have to go the opposite direction and go through a million small, confusing streets before reaching the main street. A waste of like 20 minutes with car, at least. I’m so sick of the shitty designs. They might as well destroy every single home and start anew cause it’s all so fucked up, it can’t be fixed
Walkability + cycleability. If a neighbourhood can be cycled by people of all ages / abilities, that usually means it can be navigated by mobility scooter too.
Counterpoint; I just want to be able to predict the general direction a turn is taking me in. Curves make navigating without GPS difficult and being distracted in a residential area is a hazard to everyone involved. Until we get self-driving cars, a non-resident finding an address in a housing development made with arbitrary and irregular layouts is a very real and essentially unavoidable risk to children in the area.
yup it's basically network hierarchy (watch Sam Bur's video on it). You want to A) Minimise length of journeys, hence the localised elementary school/services, and B) route traffic travelling further by necessity to incrementally larger and higher throughput roads. It's worth mentioning that this video doesn't touch on the American typically subpar public transportation - if you don't have robust public transit, developers won't build for it (assuming you won't develop your transit); as such newer developments are difficult to serve with public transit, and so cities are unwilling to improve it. A beautiful positive feedback loop of apathy and delegated responsibility
Public transit isn't a partisan issue, it is a 'money in politics' issue. Big oil and car manufacturers gain massively from car-centric infrastructure. The only political aspect of transit is social mobility, but the far better incentive is increased economic output
My problem with cuz-de-sac design is when there is only one way in or out of the area. There needs to be multiple ways in and out of an area in the event that one is not accessible during emergencies. We have that problem in Southern California with some of the newer neighborhoods getting hit worse during fire season because emergency vehicles can’t get to the area because the only road is blocked off or over-crowded due to people fleeing.
It's crazy how people love culs-de-sac for the privacy and neighborhood environment they encourage by blocking thru-traffic, but hate superblocks and greenways for accomplishing the same thing but better
The privacy is an illusion, too. Lived in a cul de sac the first 20 years of my life. Creepy and scary shit still happened there. Not everyday, of course, but unfortunately places that have a bunch of kids will attract the occasional creep.
This again is an issue with the lack of good walking connections, if it was easy for people to walk to bus stops on the neighbourhood arterials the busses wouldn't need to drive all around residential streets that were not really designed with large vehicles in mind.
@@DoubleBob how is it ugly, it’s beautiful and orderly. Meanwhile, cities like Boston or London are seizure-inducing on a map. Plus, not everyone wants to find their way around on a map. Part of the adventure is figuring it out for yourself, which grid systems like NY make so much fun.
@@JustANervousWreck "cities like Boston or London are seizure-inducing on a map" Cities ought to be designed to have a good life there, not to create a grid on a map. "Part of the adventure is figuring it out for yourself, which grid systems like NY make so much fun." Maybe for tourists, but who cares about tourists.
Dude. I am a NYC tour guide and I love your channel. When I get stuck in traffic, I usually talk about city grids and street planning, and the difference between east coast city and west coast cities. You have helped me make some money. THANKS!
The grid plan is why going for walks in America isn’t as magical as going for walks in the rest of the world where you’ll never know where you’ll end up
@@silverbullet2008bb Where I live in Britain, each town had their own way of doing it. My hometown was a historical coastal holiday town, so towards the coast its a grid pattern, but away from that its just a jumbled cul-de-sac and close mess. One of the major towns near me, its so confusing, nothing makes sense you just learn certain landmarks and walk in that general direction. Driving in the town......is a big no, no one knows where they're going, I had to use a sat nav in that town when I went to college because it was sooo confusing.
I grew up in a small town that was a 1 square mile grid. It was great. My friends and I could bike everywhere--stores, to get ice cream, the playground, etc.
@@jan-lukas A small town inside a grid is not the same thing as a city. By definition, a city requires more functions than a town, like medical care centres of some capacity.
Yea man, fuck my house and neighborhood is right next to a exit on a major highway so there is like 8 cars passing through by my house and up the street every 5 minutes, also there is hardly any sidewalks only segments at certain areas so if im gonna walk its gotta be on the road or in someones yard most the time.
My childhood was mixing it up with neighbors, white asian black latino, whatever. WE wanted to play stickball, we playin stickball. When I visit fam and shit in the suburbs, it's a culture shock to me. There's acres for kids to run, but by themselves. Not healthy mentally.
Odd Mad but the school is planned into the neighborhood. You live in the same neighborhood as most of the kids you go to school with. I grew up in a neighborhood like this and all we did was wander around and hang out. Much safer than walking around a grid as well
@Generous Principle Or make cul de sacs with walking and bicycle paths through them / interconnecting to each other instead of fenced off to force people to go WAY around the long way (and drive to do it). I'm fine with keeping cars from shortcutting through the area but giving every square inch for private property and allowing no pedestrian access is just stupid.
@@danmobile Maybe one day people will rediscover all the stuff that was developed over the millennia of human civilisation :) Analysing tradition to see if it still makes sense is perfectly fine. But just _ignoring_ such loads of stuff is quite another thing entirely. There's many reasons why European cities looked the way they did (sadly, many were devastated in the world wars and rebuilt poorly); but every once in a while, people feel like they can central plan everything better, now that we're ten times smarter than the people who came before us :P Mind, I'm not saying this is universally an American thing or anything - just look at how ridiculously France was rebuilt after the revolution and then again after WW2, and needless to say, many cities expanded in the 19th and 20th centuries in a rather silly manner. North America just didn't have the centuries of organic growth, so it was obvious earlier how hard it is to plan something well, rather than having it develop in an evolutionary manner. Though somehow the lessons are easy for many people to miss even today, as evidenced by how many people in the comments here think that grids are a great idea for cities where every family has three cars :P
Suburban neighborhoods aren't just circuitous streets. They're difficult to navigate specifically because they were designed to essentially make intuitive navigation impossible. Since streets intentionally don't link up. If you don't know your destination there's a pretty decent chance you'll be hitting many dead-ends and loops. Which is the point, to prevent thru-traffic.
I grew up in a cul de sac, my parents always liked it because our house was difficult to see from the street at most angles. It was really just a false sense of security since it didn't actually make much of a difference for privacy since our backyard was right up against our neighbors' backyard, but regardless, even as a kid I found my parents' needless paranoia to be kind of sad. Moving out of the suburbs was the best decision I've made for my sanity.
If it's only a quarter mile away then just because there's not a paved path doesn't mean you can't walk there. I walked to high school and there was no path from my house to the school. When I was a kid we walked to a park through a small wooded area, no paved path there either.
@@christianfaux736 Oh I agree with you. I was being facetious. There are many foot connections, dirt or otherwise as long the neighborhoods and city take the initiative. Thinking back my high school and middle school, I lived probably a half to 3/4 of mile from it as the crow flies, but not one student could walk or bike there. It was all expensive school buses or having to drive. Glad I don't live there anymore.
Craig F. Thompson What? The autobahn was created as a job creator and their is nothing wrong with infrastructure especially one begun under the weimar republic not the Nazi regime. Plus California was never a dense place to make any kind of private passenger infrastructure. And the point of why we have a highway was mainly for its better flexibility during wartime than trains, civilians were only a second thought.
@Craig F. Thompson Hang on, lemme hit a bump of crack and then i'll try and take a swing at understanding this. "The word is contracted from "automobile" and "alienation"." Yes. That was very subtle, i'm glad you pointed it out for me. You're picking a very weirdly specific example of you driving a couple blocks to buy condensed milk. I mean, i've driven farther for less, but mostly what I, and those I know, drive for is for work, for a week's groceries, and to socialize... the latter of which kinda disputes your point of cars making us less social. ... WOW. So... so california helped Hitler, and Hitler, through some 4D chess, engineered a way to kill the spirit of humanity in southern california? That is fucking amazing, please write a book, just put all that you know about this kind of shit in it, i'll buy copies for me and all my friends. We'll make a drinking game, we drink every time we laugh involuntarily. We'll die in a night - it'll be great.
Lol, in my neighborhood people have found a way to crash at T intersections. They just drive right through and crash into the house at the top of the T
I lived in a cul du sac when I was a kid, and sometimes when I missed the school bus in the morning I would jump the fence in my backyard and cut through my rear neighbor's yard so I could catch the bus as it was leaving the neighborhood, because it took several minutes for the bus to go around all the winding streets.
6:00 Simple solution to that is, make a bike path between those 2 neighbourhoods. That way you don't get motorised through traffic and you make it more attractive to use a bike. Basic Dutch infrastructure.
@@brandonmartin-moore5302 but definitely not on the level that the Dutch do it, the Netherlands is way more advanced because its not just "let's put a random path here", a lot of the infrastructure in the cities are based around cyclists. If you're actually interested in how all that works, the youtuber "not just cycling" made a couple interesting videos about it
@@THEHamBot1 You'd be surprised, it can be rather easy to miss a street sign and wind up having to keep driving a couple miles until you hit the next opportunity to turn around. GPS, especially with voice commands, makes it easier, but it's still a much bigger pain in the neck due to the difficulty in figuring out how far you are from your intended turn.
In Phoenix we have a grid system for our streets which in fact makes getting around the city so easy as you only go north east west or south nothing else.
Most of europe: let's throw asphalt over these donkey roads and call it a street edit: I am a european in greece so a) i damn well know we have old countries b) americans are not out to attack you on the internet, this was a joke by a european. bye.
@@PTZOUTZ it's a joke on the fact that yes that's how most of our streets are because we couldn't plan them beforehand cause our cities are old and our countries are not as huge as the usa is.
The grid patterns are much less confusing. However, neighborhoods with the cul- de-sac streets do look more luxurious for some reason but are extremely annoying to navigate in. I personally prefer the grid pattern which is much easier.
@D M You can have suburbs with connecting bike paths and pedestrian paths, too. Better than gridded streets or cul-de-sac streets without connecting pathways.
I suspect in the long run, it will probably be a combination of the two. Here in Seattle, the major streets tend to be roughly 5-10 blocks apart, which would give ample opportunity for cul-de-sac or neighborhoods without through streets without destroying the ability of random citizens to walk or bike about. Having grown up one block off one of the arterials, there was a large amount of traffic that went fast down the narrow street in order to avoid the stop light on the arterial one block over. They'd drive it as if it was an arterial, even though there was barely room for one car between the parked cards
MrSqurk I disagree most people get extremely lost in the cul-de-sacs and most of the curves decrease visibility and create blind spots that are extremely dangerous. Also I don’t know if it’s just me but it a major road is closed for repair you can take a detour that wouldn’t be possible in a cul-de-sac.
Tony Joe mass transit is incredible, it reduces pollution, traffic, increases social mobility and boosts economic output you’d be seriously missing if you didn’t implement mass transit as a major city or metropolitan area. It’s what makes the cities of the Eastern USA, far more productive, populous, large and easier to live in when compared to the cities of the Western USA.
@@tonyjoe1594 As opposed to sitting in traffic for hours a day, if in the U.S. it's only going to get worse. And the solution is to make bigger roads to reduce congestion which cost taxpayer money or add another train to the line to increase capacity. Which cost less? Then there is cost of maintenance, fuel, insurance and monthly payments with interest. which can add up to $500 a month conservatively. Where the cost of mass transit in other countries is $2 a day for most people.
I’m an engineer working on a traffic calming project in a neighborhood built on a grid. It sits between two east/west arterials only three blocks apart and naturally lots of cut through traffic and speeding. We are proposing some aggressive traffic calming including diagonal diverters and median barrier islands. These will be designed to allow full access by bicycles.
I live in Tijuana, a city built on hills and mountains, where they tried to build a gridlock system going up mountains, needless to say, i have to climb up the sidewalk to get home.
At least your town has less chance of being destroyed by tornadoes. Mine is very hilly too but that gives me pride knowing tornadoes stand no chance here.
@@nathanellis622 My town doesnt have any sidewalks except around the main square and the two highway intersections but then again, I live in a town with less than 5000 total people
Back when I was a really little kid I lived in a very short cul-de-sac. One of the houses on the street backed onto another street; we would often cut through that yard to get to the other street, which cut about 40% off the time to walk to school. I wish that sort of thing were official, that would have made life easier. I just looked at the neighborhood again; turns out that house got torn down and replaced with one that faces the other street now.
I gotta admit, it was kind of nice growing up living in a cul-de-sac. It was huge and rarely anyone ever turned into it unless they lived there or unless they were visiting someone who was. We played baseball and basketball as kids in the cul-de-sac, because it was basically our play space and our games would only very rarely be interrupted by cars driving through it.
these types of communities make extremely closed off sects who don't interact with the other people in that city. The entire idea behind these types of neighborhoods was to keep 'the others' out.
@@exi8550 I don't really see a problem with that. What's wrong with wanting to live in a quiet neighborhood? I owned a house on a very busy main street with nonstop traffic for 7 years. From 7 am until about 10 pm, all you heard was nonstop traffic. Motorcycles, loud exhausts, horns honking, trucks, idiots bumping their 10,000 watt subwoofers, etc. I Could never even open the windows in the front of the house to let fresh air in because it was always so noisy. Id have to go in the basement if I wanted any real peace and quiet during the day. Was so happy when I moved out of there.
@@exi8550 I think it is more about keeping fast moving traffic on the main roads and off the side streets where pedestrians can be unintentionally hurt. When people see there is a side street that goes from one main street to another, they will treat it as a highway.
@@327SixShooter What if there was more traffic/noise on your street because of all the cul-de-sacs forcing traffic onto a small number of streets? It's what they do to towns.
I would love to hear you talk about urban development in cities in Europe, South Asia, or Africa! e.g. Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Dehli, Calcutta, Chandigarh, Lagos, Cape Town (district six), Algiers... and others! That's a lot to ask... I know. But I think you would have some really cool insights to how these cities are laid out, the social/cultural/historical influences on urban planing there as compared to the US. Keep up the really great videos, I always love watching!
Medieval cities don't really have a design. Mostly are also based on who lives where. In my town we have it all. Old city is like medieval because depending on how important the house was, you get a larger road, even going narrow later on (same street!). Then we go the awful T intersections and modern grid. Some houses are more near the street than others, so the sidewalk have several different width. If you look at some old european cities, some places have houses so incoherent that you have a cul de sac or a street that can only pass a bike, never a car. Ppl just build wherever they want.
@@drac124 Yeah that's very true. I think somewhere like Vienna would be really interesting to study though because it has an old medieval city in the middle, surrounded by ring streets and then a grid(ish) pattern. Plus there are now some new developments on the periphery of the city (Seestadt Aspern). Plus a lot of other (eastern Europe) cities have those wonderful socialist block-housing. (some of which really is wonderful mass housing, others not so much).
@@CityBeautiful Good idea. There is actually some debate about medieval city planning among historians, since most people used to believe it didn't happen but this one guy found some pretty convincing evidence for it, with patterns across loads of medieval German cities. Even the measurements match and all. But yeah, they certainly don't look planned on a first look. If you're interested, I have a German documentary about it: Gottes Plan und Menschen Hand: Die Entdeckung der mittelalterlichen Stadtplanung Maybe you can find subtitles to it.
Budapest would be interesting too. Especially seeing as how due Pest’s relatively flat geography allowed for more urban sprawl, compared to Buda and Óbuda. That being said, I always find it interesting how they continue to develop neighbourhoods in the hills of Buda and it is always interesting to see new settlements pop up on some hill in Budafok or Normafa for example.
Honestly, the biggest problems are the dead-end roads, which artificially limit the traffic during emergencies, and wavy roads. Grids can still be made even with only T-junctions, by simply having very long straight parallel roads for one axis of the two axis of the map, with smaller roads forming T-junctions on both ends, so you have to go zig-zag to go diagonally and to go on a square zig-zag or square sinusoidal to go up and down if the very long parallel roads go left to right on the map, for example. And you can still have higher-capacity roads which to have 4-way intersections with roundabouts, to get cars faster into and out of the city. And you can even use traffic calming techniques like speed bumps and different bumpier road design, so only the local vehicles use those roads, and have the rest of traffic routed through bigger intersections or have people just move slower through those roads to arrive faster than going through those bigger intersections.
@@ma.jbrony1754 The sad part is that grid designs don't have to give up on anything else except wavy roads and no side-connections. How? Draw parallel lines at equal distance between eachother, now take the space between two of those lines and double it, now use that spacing to draw smaller parallel lines between the odd and even lines in that order (from where you started counting) , then draw similar lines between even and odd lines in that order (from where you started counting drawing the other lines), now you have the basic pattern down. Now, those roads you just drew are meant to be slower roads, with speed bumps and paved to feel bumpier at higher speeds. Now take the very long lines you drew first, and draw intermittent lines between them but still parallel to them, and those are pedestrian roads, where cars can move at a speed of 5 km/h or 3 mph We'll call the rectangular areas split by T-junction roads on all sides a grid unit. Now, you probably noticed you don't have high-speed roads going perpendicular to the very long parallel roads, so we'll fix that by taking something like 4-6 of those grid units as the distance between long parallel roads going perpendicular to the first-drawn long parallel lines. Since you cut through a grid unit every second grid unit you go through when following those lines, it just means you have to make those split-up parts and use them for businesses and parks and plazas, or attach them to the nearest grid unit to them for which you don't need to cross a high-speed street, or simply use them normally with less-long city blocks. There, now you have cities which can have high volumes of traffic, and have areas where only residents and people willing to go slow will want to go through, and you will have walkable pedestrian streets where pedestrians have right-of-way in terms of speed, even if they have to let the cars pass to not block the traffic. Now, only have up to 2 lanes going in each direction, on those very long parallel roads, and don't have them too wide, to calm the traffic by lowering the maximum speeds, maybe making the lane closer to the center of the road slightly larger for the people in a hurry and to avoid frontal impacts, and use the rest of the space for pedestrian walkways on the sides of the road, with trees and benches and bus stops and taxi stops near high-pedestrian-traffic areas (often productive economic areas, too), and build city blocks with ideally 4-5 stories/levels and up to 8-10 stories/levels (which is the maximum you can access without an elevator), and you have much better cities than suburban cities modern USA has, on par with the best cities in the world in terms of walkability, which are most likely in the Netherlands, which is unsurprisingly in Europe. Oh, and for the X-junctions (or + junctions) between high speed parallel roads, have 3 lanes, left lane to get inside the roundabout to turn left, middle lane to continue forward while still getting priority (right-of-way) from the cars from the parallel roads, and right lane to exit on the right lane of that parallel road with 2 lanes perpendicular to the one you exited from, while having the left lane for those who exit from the roundabout. The roundabout would have two lanes, too, for getting more cars through, since getting 3 lanes would be more dangerous without a lot more space which would increase the speeds through the intersection. You can even test it in Cities:Skylines, using normal roads with the mod Traffic Manager to allow you to change the road speeds, so you can check for yourself which ones are better for the traffic and for the economy of those cities. While it's not a perfect benchmark, without using exploits, it's a fairly good indicator of city profitability and urban road planning, including pedestrian roads where everything must move at the speed of a walking human (even if walking fast, like in a hurry). Plus that they also look better, are places where the USA go on holidays to (if they can afford it), strengthen the community more (especially with kindergardens and primary-and-gymnasial schools within 500 meters, hospitals (even if small) within 1500 meters to 2000 meters, and high-schools within 2000 meters (because they can be inside city blocks, since kindergardeners young schoolers are better off not too high above the ground, for safety reasons). K-8 can be 2 stories high (3 including the ground level story), highschools can be 4 (5 including ground-level story), and city blocks can be 4-9 )or 5-10 including the ground floor). There, you pretty much have the starting pattern for very efficient yet compact cities. If you want to go the extra mile (metaphorically and quite literally, too), have the distance between the first-drawn long parallel roads bigger (while maintaining the distance between the roads ending with 2 T-junctions, which separate the grid units, just making that thicker), you can fit two of the dotted parallel lines at equal distances between eachother and the very long parallel lines drawn first, and fit even more people or maybe even parks and recreation areas and community gardens and common leisure areas (like maybe even barbecue areas with nearby seating and tables built from reinforced concrete), if you want to have the grid units large enough for bigger buildings needed for things like the police or big hospitals and big shops to complement the shops which would exist on the ground level of the city blocks every now and then. There will likely be shops (small and tiny convenience stores) within 5 minutes of walking distance for all the important commodities (foods, consumables like batteries something to write on and write with, and some alcohol and juices and snacks, a few spices, and whatever else the people from there buy often). You might have to walk 20 minutes to get to a bigger shop with more variety, or to specialized shops, but you would still not need to use a car, or even a bike, for that matter, everything being accessible by walking alone. This is, in my opinion, some of the safest and most economically profitable and walkable cities you can design, when you put away the cultural differences between different regions of the world. And I also mean in terms of access to health services, when I say safest. Also, when I saw the distance in meters, I don't mean bird's flight, or direct line on the map, i mean actually walked distance. Quite the big message, right? If you want to talk more, on this subject or any other subject, I'll be glad to talk with you.
They are actually laid out to maximize property value. Sometimes there are spot in a plot that cannot be used for building and they will build around it, and then lay streets around the lots.
yea but the problem is, its not really a house selling feature of a community, so there's no reason to spend the money to put in something like that. keep in mind that its not state or really city officials that really make subdivisions, but a group of contractors
@@1TW1-m5i true, but it could also prevent people from building all together, it could also be skewed to help out more established contractors (which the government loves doing). you see this a lot with companies moving to the south to avoid the intense regulation that northern states have.
exactly. Who wants to live on a street that has constant noise and traffic. Grids make sense for Downtowns and commercial areas, but for residential, cul de sac is better for peace and quiet.
But the problem is it seems to funnel all of the through traffic to the “main roads” instead, without any other option to get out of your neighborhood! I lived in a house deep in one of these neighborhoods for part of my life. Though the cul-de-sac was nice for the young kids in the neighborhood to play in safely without too much through-traffic, it was a nightmare trying to drive out of that place in the morning. The traffic would back up so far you couldn’t even turn onto the damn main road from a side road, as only one of these roads connected to the outside world, aka, outside of your sprawling neighborhood area full of cul-de-sacs. It was shaped kind of like a weird centipede with a ton of cul-de-sac legs, some that branched off even more so, but with none but the main “body” of the centipede shape connecting to the roads outside of the suburbs. You could sit in that morning traffic for 15, 30, 45 mins! No one across town would believe me when I told them I was late for school or work because I could literally not escape my own neighborhood. Where I live now is mainly a grid, & it is SO much easier to get around. Even in the worst rush hour traffic you at least have options, including tons of connecting side roads, to help you get around the worst of the traffic. There are still problems, super narrow roads with way too many parked cars on either side being one of them. But at least I can get out of my place of living in less than an hour!
@@tarekyoungapelian4542 of course you should make bigger roads in the main road or as we call it here in the Philippines as a highway. But still for me cul de sacs is much more organized and easy to travel along the neighborhood cause here in the Philippines we lived in a gated communities
You can fucking do that anyway by disconnecting the sprawled housing units away from the traffic. Through traffic only needs to go through if it's actually necessary, culdesac or not. It's. It helpful, just annoying and in some cases outright dangerous
@@tarekyoungapelian4542 - it sounds like your subdivison had too many units. My family would expressly run from any subdivison with more than 40 houses because then it started to loo like its own city and my parents knew that traffic in those neighborhoods would be a nightmare!
@@arrgghh1555 im pretty sure thats bc less people have cars tbh. Went on roads for school trips where the bus was *literally wider than the road, both sides of the wheels were just hanging off* The worst problem was the little villages tho
From the air, the suburbs of big Canadian cities look like mazes from a kids' coloring book: "HEY KIDS! Help the firemen find 114 Petticoat Lane before it burns to the ground!"
I'm a member of local government in Australia and found this extremely informative and interesting, especially now that the City I am in is experiencing some growing pains and an identity crisis over transportation modes.
Focus on walkability and cycling. People always talk about affordable housing but if you make a city easier to walk or cycle, people don't need cars and they can put more money into rent in turn making more housing affordable to more people.
@@BirdTurdMemes You can though. The biggest reason cities are becoming unaffordable is because of urban growth boundaries, green wedges and transportation/infrastructure that encourages more development and jobs in the CBD and less in suburbs and regional areas
If you give anything a French label it makes it more palatable for some reason. If it was called simply a "dead-end" I doubt cal-de-sacs would be as popular.
James Taylor I agree that cul-de-sac sounds classier than dead-end but there is a difference, a cul-de-sac allows for a car to turn around at the end without having to back up, but a dead-end just stops and cars have to k-turn to get out. I grew up on a dead-end street (the yellow diamond street sign even said so) and many a Sunday morning would find my dad repairing the lawn where lost drunk drivers had failed to execute a proper k-turn the night before.
I recently read “The Big Roads” by Earl Swift on the history of roadways, the automobile, and the decline of rail traffic for transportation and there was a large section on ‘Garden Cities’ and a chance to “start over” (get rid of undesirable slums) on urban design when the automobile took off. A group of innovative designers from across disparate fields created Radburn, NJ as a master planned “garden city of the future” with some the first cul-de-sacs in America. Houses had their front doors facing common park space. Paths meandered and flowed around trees, had bridges over the roads (cars were always meant to be hidden from view, and being lower than the surrounding landscape would mitigate their noise and keep them away from children on bikes), and was meant to encourage walking in communal spaces with your neighbors. Reading the philosophy behind the cul-de-sac certainly makes me a believe in incorporating in some way, but as you said in this video, we can’t keep designing residential spaces around vehicles exclusively. It’s bad for our health, both mentally and physically, and the planet.
London doesn't really have the grid system, and instead has 'main' high roads and side streets. It works very well, and not very boxy and territorial at all. I can walk through most of city and feel that I belong there. The only main area of the city that uses the american style of cul-de-sacs and sub-neighbourhoods is Thamesmead, and built with pathways for pedestrians, many of which were closed off due to being havens for anti-social behaviour such as littering and crime.
There's lots of cul de sac parts of London - this video even cites one as the originator of the concept: Hampstead. The difference is perhaps that in the UK there's typically lots of paths meaning that the area is walkable rather than a maze.
A lot of crime is caused by low eyes-on level. If there are more people walking around and seeing specific places from their house at a given time of day, or even just lighting, the willingness to commit crime there is greatly reduced.
I think one of the consequences of have a subdivision is that when you're out of your neighborhood it makes you feel like an outlander, a foreigner getting into someone's territories. Grids provide more individual-city pertencimento feeling because neighborhood aren't so arbitrary divided in a grid design.
If subdivisions make you feel like an outlander while outside the neighborhood, then it would also enhance the feeling of community within the subdivision. Something with which a grid system doesn't promote.
One of the things I noticed moving from NYC into New Jersey was this. Many suburbs in NJ instead of grids they do Cul-De-Sacs. WHat is annoying about it is that it leaves many dead end streets and if you want to get through you'll have to make lengthy zigzags to get from point A to point B.
comment section is about: american: i like cul-de-sac cause it's more friendly to a neighborhood other american: i like grid better french and netherlands people: in my country, cul-de-sac means .... gamer: i like this vid cause i play city skylines other people: [insert your opinion] me, as Indonesian: you guys have urban planning and use it? :/
Vietnamese here, I can relate haha. Feels like there’s no kind of planning here in Saigon (well formally, Ho Chi Minh City). Oh and dont mention the traffic, it’s a total mess 😅😅
Here in rural Bavaria, germany. Planing appers to go something like this: "Oh, look a major road, that's a good place to build a house" and then it just goes like and another one and another one and another one until it ends in something vaguely gridshaped but with a bunch of random roads going everywhere. Surprisingly it's super easy to navigate, mostly because the main road just goes straight thru the middle and everything just spreads out from there
This video was trash. Americans moved to cul-de-sac to sell more cars. This was also the same time auto companies destroyed all the street cars. RU-vid New Urbanism by Andres Dunaway.
As a cyclist, I really feel the difference between a grid and subdivision streets. In my area, I often have to ride on 6-lane arterials because they're the only streets that go through. I tend to avoid those types of areas whenever possible.
I hate it when those are the bottlenecks. They totally block most pedestrians and cyclists, unless you have dedicated pedestrian paths and bike lanes. My home city does a pretty good job in most places of including pedestrian paths, and they're growing the bicycle network, but we still definitely have areas like this which are hard to access without a car.
That is right Ben Ebel, cyclists do NOT want to merge with heavy motorized traffic. Separated bicycle ways or even better bike ways far away from motorized traffic.
@@mardiffv.8775 It doesn't need to be a separated bikeway, it's just preferable to use residential streets rather than arterials. Some areas (like Portland) do a good job of allowing cyclists through places where motor traffic is not allowed, forcing the motor traffic to use a nearby arterial but allowing the cyclists to use the side roads without stopping.
I'm a Brit, so no grids here - but my city is currently building a network of "Cycle Freeways" that mean you don't get run over by cars or buses & you don't run over us pedestrians, either. They've even published a map of what "city cycle network" will look like when completed that looks like a subway or metro map. So there are other innovative ways to not only keep cyclists safe, but try and get more people out of their cars & on to their bikes - we're already a very walkable city. Public mass transport is ok, but could be better, though. I mean it's great the buses have free WiFi & contactless payment, but why do I have to change to get anywhere other than the city centre?
Dude...I cannot tell you how awesome it was to just randomly see a picture of my neighborhood in LA on my screen. I can see that, in 1928, my little street was NOT connected to the main street it is today. That was just...awesome. Thanks dude!
Hey, I justed wanted to say thanks for these videos. I am starting my Master in Urban Geography in a month, so these videos have a big overlap with what I have been studying and will be learning. Maybe you would be interested in looking into the town I live in the Netherlands, called Almere. From an urban planner’s perspective it’s quite unique in that it combines urban sprawl ideas(with Dutch characteristics, called ‘VINEX’) with a very Dutch approach to transport networks. The result is hundreds of kilometres of bicycle paths completely separated from roads. Some cycling paths are as wide as roads for cars and form huge traffic arteries through the town. All buslanes are also completely separate from public roads!
Americans: finally we create the perfect pattern to drive safely in streets Other People: Ow, cool, but what about me who don't own a car? Americans: Wait. That's illegal
@Craig F. Thompson your response has nothing has nothing to do with mine. OMG I did not fully spell out you are in a random comment on the internet. I am sure your so proud of yourself. See I did it again, do that bother you? I am fine with it. Get a life dude.
Here in Russia we have "circular grid" (if that makes sense) city planning. We don't have problems with neighbourhood traffic because all neighbourhood driveways are defined as pedestrian paths so you can't go above 20 kmh in there, pedestrians always have the right of way, they're chock full of parked cars and 90 degree corners and are difficult to navigate, and the government hardly ever bothers to repair those streets so they're always in extremely poor condition to drive on - people always try to avoid these streets and try to use proper motorways instead, which are designed to accept motor traffic and kept in good shape.
@@michaelbuckers it doesn't have to be perfect hexagons though. With slight modifications you could get to all T-junctions. Well, I guess it might more resemble pluses and squares at that point.
Older ones have the same thing or just smaller loops. It's fine to navigate, but this channel is basically sensationalist propaganda that hyper focuses on the 2% bad examples as if they were the norm, just to push certain narratives.
You forgot to also talk about another huge negative about not having a grid format and that is traffic builds up a lot quicker causing more traffic jams all because people think outside traffic shouldn't go through their neighbor hood.
I have a degree (BS and Masters) in GIS. I loved my Urban Planning classes. Your channel makes me want to go back and get a degree in Planning! I'm too old now. 50 years college freshman...I'd be like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School!! LOL
@Craig F. Thompson Look at the UCR on the FBI website and see how the data is collected. The amount of data failed to be collected, or the number of unsolved murders is negligible, and does not detract from the fact that urban areas account for more than double the murder rate than that of suburban and rural areas. A big part of the reason is that nearly 80% of all homicides in the US are drug related.
@Craig F. Thompson Dude, it's not even a contested fact. Crime rates are VASTLY higher in metropolitan areas. It's literally impossible to have the volume of crime in rural areas that urban areas have.
@Craig F. Thompson This isn't even an argument, you have no basis or source, secondly urban areas have a harder time recording crime due to the insane number of cases, you realize Chicago and Detroit don't even have enough officers or investigators to tackle many crimes for WEEKS at times.
It is nearly 5 miles from my childhood home to my elementary school. We live in a rural area and our subdivision consists of 3 separate roads. My grandpa built the subdivision and specifically designed the cul-de-sacks to be big enough for a bus to easily turn around in. Our school initially said that kids had to be picked up at the end of the roads, but parents were mad that they were going to have to send their 5yr olds to the end of the road to wait for the bus when the subdivision was designed with buses in mind. After a few weeks the parents won got their way and buses had to come down the road. Our regular bus driver had no issues turning around and didn’t mind at all. I’ve watched the bus turn around on our road so many times from the outside and they have so much extra space. I can see how this might be a problem in inner cities, but this is pretty ideal for rural cities.
The best of both worlds : Houten, The Netherlands Cul-de-sacs for cars, but full permeability for bicyclists and pedestrians... Thusly 55% of all trips are made by bicycle or on foot, and 11% by public transit...so just 34% for the car, in suburbia !
@@THEHamBot1 Nooo, that doesn't happen. just holding hands between two lovers on a bike. Or giving a friend a ride, so the friend sits on the luggage rack.
The Netherlands is also incredibly flat. Which makes bicycles an option. Around here we have steep hills that are sometimes more than 20% grade and even the flatter ones are numerous enough to cause problems. The moral of the story is that you have to consider what kind of landscape you have when making your transportation decisions as what works in one place may make no sense in another.
6:28 Pedestrian and bike paths in the suburb: Pretty much what almost every city surrounding Portland in the Portland Metro Area has. Love this solution!
As an Englishman I find grid systems intriguing! The only one I've really encountered here is the centre of Glasgow. I like how my city (Newcastle) has developed. Cul de sacs and estates (neighbourhoods) are well connected. We have a mixture of road layouts dating back to the Romans so there's a lot of variety. Great video
Thanks! Yes, this video is very US-centric, and other countries have different traditions. I need to educate myself more on foreign street patterns so I can do a video on those.
@@CityBeautiful Could you also explain why there is so few roundabouts in america ? in my country (France) they're everywhere, apparently we have a higher density of them than anywhere else. i get that it could get pretty slippery in the north with the cold, but why not elsewhere in the states ?
@@Pierrot9315 You would think roundabouts, with their system of whoever enters the roundabout first has right of way, would suit the American mindset of me first, screw everybody else. And there's something commie about those lights telling you when you can drive, the gubmint is controlling mah freedom. Seriously though, you're asking why a country that still uses the imperial system doesn't learn from other country's innovations?
I’d always assumed they switched to these to avoid traffic, because every grid I’ve ever built in Cities Skylines has had huge traffic jams, whereas using cul-de-sacs and closes I’ve managed to build cities with much less traffic, but in my latest city I’ve been using a more grid like structure for them with regular bus routes, bridges and underpasses for pedestrians, and sometimes paths leading directly out of the cul-de-sacs without allowing cars that way, it makes a great city; it’s kinda like the example you showed near the end.
There's quite a few here in Chesterfield Virginia. You got Westchester Commons which is full of them, they replaced a few intersections with roundabouts, they're planning to fix traffic in a commercial corridor and that involves roundabouts AND superstreets replacing intersections...
I’ve only ever lived in one place that had a grid and it was glorious. (Portland, Oregon). Everywhere else I’ve lived is a messy combination of curving highways and subdivisions. It’s so so confusing to find your way around these messes. I would love to tear up these new inefficient road layouts and put grids in everywhere.
I grew up in multiple suburbs with cul de sacs and now live in city with a grid network. And wow it is a massive difference. While in the suburbs I felt disconnected from the people around me as going anywhere needed the use of the car, all of houses felt the same, and there was no feeling of community. It was all just so sterile. Now I can do everything I need to on foot or bike, the environment is interesting to travel through, and I feel closer to the folks around me with festivals or even casually seeing people I know walking down the street.
I grew up in a suburb of Seattle called Federal Way about 30 miles south. It was exactly like you described a hodgepodge of loops and culdesacs. Even back when I was a kid after moving from the city I thought it seemed like they cut up an existing city plan and randomly reassembled it.
“Somewhere in Fort Myers Florida” I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen my childhood home in the first couple seconds of a recommended science video.
6:32 this is my favorite actually. A much nice walking experience, more greenery and shade compared to walking a grid, and probably quieter too with less random traffic.
I thought my understanding, when attending urban planning school for a Masters, was that the cul de sac first took hold (at least in America) in Radburn, New Jersey, in which the original purpose of a cul de sac was to have a park at the end of the cul de sac so as to connect with other nearby streets as well as the park itself, and that it was after WWII that the cul de sac evolved into something for its own sake (with houses at the end).
Europe just has a really long history compared to the USA. My small hometown that nobody heard of is first mentioned in historical documents about 600 years ago, sure it's long history affected the infrastructure. Europe had big cities, like Rome, 2000 years ago. The continents of America were only discovered 500 years ago with infrastructure work starting 100-150+ years later..
Partially agree with you: Infrastructure in the Americas is old as well... if you go to the right places. My housetown of Tlalnepantla, in Central Mexico, was founded in either the 8th or 9th century (historians still disagree) and has had European-style buildings ever since the 16th century... and it's an unimportant town around here. Some big avenues in Mexico City are direct descendants of the avenues the Aztecs cut thru their capital, and so on
Would you mind if your end of a street has a cycle path/ pedestrian path at the end. So cyclists and pedestrians can go, away from cars. No noise polution from cyclists or pedestrians.
@@mardiffv.8775 I wouldn't mind but there really is no where for them to go based on the geography behind me, if it were a walking trail it would be considered a very difficult one to get up all the hills and stuff.
My town in the UK uses cul-de-sacs (specially “closes”, which I think are a UK thing but they’re basically cul-de-sacs with an extended area for walking on outside of the car park, but the beauty of the plan is having pedestrian paths and areas car’s can’t take, which makes moving around a lot more efficient on foot as you don’t need to mess around with driving through cul-de-sacs and curvy side streets. But our streets are still a lot straighter and less circuitous and wasteful than typical US suburbs, and it also has smaller roads and streets as it’s less car centric.
@@Runner-Boy like a little bit yeah, it's a joke about how you can't be the "new kid on the block" in a cul-de-sac neighborhood, since there are no blocks
So you wanna trade peace, quiet and tranquility to be able to walk 5 minutes to a Taco Bell? Geez, people's priorities. It's funny. I live in Manhattan, there's a Taco Bell 1 city block from me, I get there in LESS than 5 minutes. You wanna switch? You come live in Manhattan and you get your 5-minute walk to a Taco Bell, and I can live where you live and get the peace, quiet, and tranquility I've been craving for years. Seriously, you act as if you go to Taco Bell 2 to 3 times a day. Don't complain when the there's 100 people on the side walk in lawn chairs, hanging out in front of your building stoop, smoking weed, filling the streets with double parked cars all blasting their music systems out so the whole neighborhood can hear their favorite song too, the open-air drug dealing, the gangs running up on each other and fighting in front of everybody, oh and the junkies that sneak into your building to shoot up.You would live in a building, not a house. Countless people going in and out since it's a building, and you're neighbors are just those on the same floor as you, you never get to know every single tenant. I live in NICE area in Manhattan LOL, it's not the HOOD. It' actually the Upper West Side, and yes it's still like that. You people don't know what you wish for.
@@lousimms4766 Yes, but why do you assume as soon as the cul-de-sacs are gone a suburban area with houses is going to immediately be transmuted into the most densely populated area of freaking *New York City?*
i live in the middle of a large loopy neighborhood in sacramento and it'd be great if i could... walk anywhere ever! there's a park right behind my house and it still takes ten minutes to walk to it. walking to any store is an hour round trip. bleh! and hardly any of the stores have bike parking, or if they do, it's in a far-off, hidden area that's convenient for bike thieves.
Susannah Anderson, you provide the evidence that the US is still a car centric country. I am very glad that I live in the Netherlands; I can bike everywhere inside my city of 400.000 residents. I do my groceries on my bike, visit my mom on my bike. Bike parking is everywhere and in front of the store/ cinema/ theater. Seperated bike infrastructure is done on the arterial roads. The Dutch city planners give cyclists a direct route and cars have to take a detour. So cycling is faster.
@@michaelcap9550 You are correct; less density is the words I would use. So you need to drive around. Only in dense cities like New York and Boston you can go without a car.
But did you know, that 40 % of all car trips in the US, are under 2 miles distance? That can be done with bicycles. And hill can climbed with gears on the bike or even E-bikes. With a whopping 500 Watt electric motor you can climb any mountain. Just ask the Swiss.
An excellent city to study is Phoenix, AZ. Fifty years ago it was a rigid grid. I found it quite easy to navigate compared to my hometown of San Diego. I returned to San Diego after my time in the military and lost track of the coming drastic changes. The major grid in Phoenix still remain but most of the neighborhoods have radically changed. How the city could afford it, or even survived the transformation is an answer I can’t conceive. It is certainly a place worth studying.
I had to INSTANTLY click on this when I saw it! I've literally always wondered why so many cities DIDNT have tight, rigid grids and instead had weird, curvy, sometimes labyrinthine street patterns!
From what I’ve seen, the curvy roads and cul-de-sacs are always much nicer cities/neighborhoods than the grid ones. And the grid neighborhoods invariably have more concrete, less landscaping, everything is more dense and usually dirtier...
Integrating both grid and cul-de-sacs is currently a good choice so far. China cities have adopted this method for years and it works perfectly well even with huge and dense population.
Ive seen most culdesac without sidewalk or streetlamp or navigability for anything but a car. Houses may be expensive or cheap, but I would prefer walkability with some more concrete and a streetlamp, and most of the time that with grids cus theres less roads so towns have more money to spend on building and maintaining infrastructure other than signs and roads. May not look as green but I think improves the quality of the neighborhood by making it easy for neighbors to interacts and to go on walks and I think protects against blight but idrk lol.
I honestly prefer grids, I live in a grided neighborhood and it feels more alive then any culdesac I've been to. Even suburban grids feel more lively then Cul-de-sacs. You see people walking and playing outside, you just don't see that often in cul-de-sacs
@@kiDkiDkiD12 The point is not that Europe is equal in all places, but that its different from the U.S.A. Besides Europe not being one nation is a moot point in itself, since not all Nations are culturally homogenous and there are different city designs withing the same nation.
@@kiDkiDkiD12the grid structure was born in Rome during the empire. More precisely it is the structure in Latin "Castrum" which also identified the military camps of Roman soldiers. So to say that we Europeans know this thing is quite normal since all Roman cities (therefore many European cities) are born with a grid plan. In Europe many cities then developed on a medieval, therefore concentric, main more recent times ... during the Middle Ages ...
Over 40 years ago my father was in the Military and was sent documents regarding the possibility of civil unrest these documents gave instruction on containment of factions. This was due to the layout of the modern suburban city (UK). The use of loop and cul-de-sac roads automatically creates containment points/divisions. The restrictive movement through these schemes even on foot can be obstructive with no easy access to other roads or cul-de-sacs. The map attached is of a residential area that was built not long after these documents. maps.app.goo.gl/hQn8YKHdaLdoeUuY8
The Tulsa, Oklahoma grid laid out in the very early 1900’s is wonderful: east/west streets are numerical, increasing from downtown, & one mile between every 10 streets (11th, 21st, 31st, etc.) The north/south streets are named in alphabetical order. In between are some later-built suburbs w/ cul-de-sacs but not many. And this city has very little in the way of traffic jams. People also drive way more sanely than in most of the other dozens of cities I’ve lived in 😇
