It looks like a cul-de-sac style neighborhood requires you to travel more distance to get to the same places than simply driving or walking down a straight grid. A square grid also looks easier to navigate as long as you know your cardinal directions. The only obvious advantage is that you can make a U-turn at the end of the street.
How come so many neighborhoods were built in a curling, twisting cul-de-sac shape?
They don’t want through traffic, traffic cutting through the neighborhood from one place to another. You can’t avoid having local traffic from people who live there, but you can avoid people coming through.
Some of the more extreme ones want to discourage visitors entirely, to make the neighborhood more exclusive. So you make a map convoluted enough that only the people who live there get a chance to learn it and understand it.
to keep through traffic down.
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/publications/en/rh-pr/tech/socio75.html
- In addition, automobiles required streets designed for speed and driving safety, attributes that were lacking in the traditional pedestrian street. These new requirements found their clearest expression in the Radburn model, named after the pioneering suburb of Radburn, N.J., begun in 1928. Radburn replaced the grid with “superblocks” that excluded through car traffic by grouping houses around culs-de-sac, *
It lets kids play in the streets without getting run down by cars.
Only the residents of the neighborhood have a reason to drive down the roads, cutting down traffic.
It is also useful for paranoid suburbanites, as you can tell if there are cars driving that do not belong.
My parents’ neighborhood has this weird sort of “half” cul-de-sac that seems to just be a way to fit more houses into an odd-shaped space. When I was a kid the neighborhood kids would play baseball there.
Some suburbs are designed with them, because people like the reduction in through traffic, feel it fosters neighborliness, allows kids to play in the streets… If you look on real estate sites, they allow you to screen for cul-de-sac properties, suggesting a lot of folk like them. Me, I’d prefer a quiet through street.
When they are added later, the argument can be made that they are to reduce crime and/or dangerous through traffic. Oak Park, a suburb adjoining one of Chicago’s worst neighborhoods (Austin), installed a bunch of them. Tho I spend a lot of time in Oak Park and grew up in Chicago just NE of there, when I get into some areas, it is like a maze. On Google, I saw an old Reader article suggesting “negrophobia” as an impetus.
For cars the additional driving time is insignificant (say 1/4 block on a 20 block drive). For walking the additional time is significant–but in general suburbanites don’t believe in walking. Thus you see the very bizarre phenomenon of school children being chauffered all over by their parents–while someone like myself either walked or biked when I was young.
Our home is the last of three homes on a cul de sac (aka dead end) that is taken the additional step of being a private road. I love it. The only vehicle that ever comes to our house is someone we are expecting.
They were popular in Ancient and Mediaeval towns ( especially in the Middle East ) because people back then weren’t especially fond of the strangers within their gates.
The term is 18th century, just about the time Soho was getting a loose reputation ( Soho being a French hunting call, and cul-de-sac meaning base-of-the-bag ), but later there were many cul-de-sacs in other parts of London where the police only entered in pairs.
My street was one, back when I moved in. You turn off one road on the highway, and then turn back to a strip of road with a dead end. As kids we were able to do a lot of biking and playing in the road. We drove those little cars, and the neighbor her fast wheelchair. We even rolled out our basketball hoops sometimes. The only traffic were people coming and leaving, and we could easily see and avoid each other. And we know when no one else will be coming back for a while.
Now it technically is no longer a dead end, but it has the same basic feature. It’s just that there was one more house added to the end, and they wanted a quick way out to the high way. So they have this gravel road that’s faster for them than to travel down our little street to the main street and then to the highway. Still, there’s no reason at all for anyone else to use it. It’s gravel, very curved, and there are no intersecting streets. Might as well drive on the highway a little further and turn on a paved road if you need to.
(The road that goes off the highway actually ends up a dirt road after a while. So it’s pretty low traffic, too. There are three cul-de-sacs you can go to, and then a long stretch of nothing, great for driving before we got our licenses.)
Culs-de-sac can also allow a property to be built with more development than if there were nothing but a grid of through streets. For example, the development I lived in as a teen was essentially a rectangular area bounded by three major streets and a property that was owned by the school district. It was roughly square, with sides of 1/4 mile length. At the edges of the property, instead of running each of the internal streets out to the main avenues, the streets ended in a cul de sac, allowing the property that would otherwise have been the exiting street to be developed with two houses. And along one side of the property (the side with the school-to-be behind it), there were a series of “circles” (culs-de-sac without any straight portion) off of a straight street, which meant that there were 24 properties sold (six per circle) rather than 8 - 12 properties along the street.
Often developments with culs-de-sac also have streets that are not straight; curving the streets slows traffic down and discourages driving through the neighborhood. Other aspects include true “circles”, that is, streets that run in a three-sided rectangle pattern, returning to the street from which they originally exited. Some people consider developments like this superior to areas with gridded streets. However, my grandparents lived in an affluent Chicago suburb with gridded streets (La Grange), and I certainly would not assert that it was deficient in charming character for that fact.
I live on a 1/4 mile-long dead-end road, which I guess you could call a cul-de-sac. It’s wonderful. Low traffic, the neighborhood kids learn to ride their bikes on the circle at the end of the street. The only negative: the kids have to walk to the end of the street to get their school buses (which can’t negotiate the relatively small circle at the end of the street).
BTW, the street design was more or less accidental: roughly 60 years ago some developer purchased an old estate to cut up into 1/2 acre lots, and the only practical approach was to run a single road through the middle of it. There was no way to connect it to the public road on the other side because existing houses were in the way. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
*the kids have to walk to the end of the street to get their school buses (which can’t negotiate the relatively small circle at the end of the street)
*I read (probably in Suburban Nation) that cul-de-sacs are so large because they had to accommodate fire trucks which at one time could not back up.
Dead end streets don’t appeal to me. If you want to discourage through traffic, speed bumps and four way stops at every corner should be enough. Or just put a gate across the road leading into the development. That will accomplish the same thing.
The book also mentions that having developments with no through streets, feeds a lot more traffic onto the adjoining main roads which causes more traffic jams because there are no alternate routes. It’s well worth reading, albeit depressing, to learn how sprawl happened.
If you have read the coin packing thread you will know that optimum item placement is not perfect. The designers want the fewest number of roads and the most houses. These shapes are repeated in nature.
A large city is easy to organize in grids but the edges will still have cul-de-sacs.
Fourteen posts without an argument about the correct form of the plural?
Have you all been replaced with pod people?
Around the Chicago area, I’ve increasingly seen signs advertising/warning/inviting? “speed humps”! Anyone for a quickie? 
Seems like most of the newer bumps/humps are broad and low, as opposed to the older abrupt ones. I generally dislike them, and have found that I can traverse these new ones pretty much without decreasing my speed. Same way I roll through the multitudinous stop signs.
Pods person.
There’s an easy solution: don’t live on one.
Recognize that the “alternate route” you’re referring to involves driving through a residential area. One that folks live in.
One of our local streets is a residential street that connects to a major road at each end. Folks that take those two major roads regularly have figured out that they can avoid two traffic lights by cutting through that side street. Speed bumps don’t help: the township has added three of them along that side street. Neither has making that side street a one-way street during rush hour (aside from the township making tons of money on the days they patrol that street during rush hour). The folks who live on that street hate it, as they have to deal with constant traffic involving people who see their community only as a way to save 60 seconds off of their commute. They are agitating to have one endpoint of their street permanently blocked off just to kill off that traffic.
I grew up in a cul de sac. Traffic was rare, not fast, and easy to avoid.
The first house I owned was on a cross street between two major residential streets and traffic was frequent and fast. I’ll take the cul de sac, thanks.
It also wasn’t great that in every major snowfall, that connector street was unplowed while the major streets were plowed, leaving a thick 3-foot high barrier of snow on either end you couldn’t get past. Two years in a row I had to take sick days because the city blocked me in during the winter. I did try shoveling a path but it’s just too much snow to do by hand.
The kids have to walk to the end of the street!! Dear Og what is this world coming to?