What Virginia did was say that if you want to build a neighborhood of cul de sacs with only one entrance out of the neighborhood, the Commonwealth won’t be the one to maintain it. That seems fair to me, in that if the only people who can really use those roads are the residents, why not give them the responsibility of maintaining them? Here is an article from the Washington Post with that story.
The DC Metro area must be radically different than the rest of the country in that the close in suburbs in Virginia are pretty nice and are a hell of a lot more expensive then the far out suburbs. The Maryland suburbs follow a similar pattern, with one noticeable exception, PG County, which is a suburban county which has had a large spike in crime in recent years. Some suburbs have a high crime rate and some don’t. Some suburbs have bad parts and some have good parts, just like the city.
Where I live, the Hispanic population has shunned the city to a large degree. They live in some inner suburbs and some outer suburbs.
And people don’t want to live in far-flung exurbs anymore. There are partially completed and abandoned projects in exurbs around the country. The builders can’t sell the units that are finished so they sit empty.
Ed - How’d your city go for Major league baseball? Wasn’t it sent packing because it got in the way of more malls or something?
For others out of the Bay Area, the culture of Palo Alto and San Jose (itself maybe the largest suburb in America) are 20-40 minute drives from the Afghan community in Fremont, and no you can’t really get either place by public transportation.
What does baseball have to do with anything? L.A. doesn’t have a football team but nobody would say it lacks culture.
In any case I had no opinion on the A’s moving to Fremont. They certainly wouldn’t move to anywhere near where I live. My understanding is that the first location was rejected because it was too far from public transit (the new BART station they will build), NOT because it was in the way of more malls. The second location was rejected because it was too close to residents.
But that’s way off topic.
Perhaps I was too broad to include Palo Alto and San Jose. But the main points I wanted to make were:
– I live in a very diverse area.
– Some commutes by suburbans are very short.
– Even suburbans use public transit. I use bus/BART to go to San Francisco all the time.
True, but my understanding of the article is that these types of developments lead to higher costs in that they only have one way in and one way out. All of the traffic is funneled onto the main road, and if traffic on the main road is too congested, ambulances and fire trucks can’t cut through to get to where they need to go. Additionally, if you live in one of these neighborhoods and want to run to the store to get milk, you need to get on the main road, as opposed to cutting through your neighborhood until you are almost at the store.
The article I linked to mentioned Linton Hall Road in Prince William County as the area with the worst traffic and commute. If my link to the map works, you can see the way the development was done there. The issue with this neighborhood is that you have to get on the main road to go pretty much anywhere.
Now take a look at this suburb in Fairfax County that was built in the 70s. If necessary, you can cut through the neighborhoods to get to another main road. If you live in those neighborhoods, you can drive within the neighborhood to get a gallon of milk without spending a lot of time on the main road. The streets are winding and are actually fairly broad for the most part.
Take a look at this map of Falls Church, Va, which is an older area which was developed in the 40s and 50s. You can see how the neighborhoods are more interconnected than the first two.
Just for the hell of it, here is a map of a Tenleytownwhich is a residential part of DC. This is almost completely on a grid pattern.
I was raised in and attended a college in rural areas, moved to a city (Philadelphia) for about six and a half years, then moved to a suburb of Philly. Rather than having the worst of both worlds, the way we live now seems like the best of both. Our house is within walking distance to the closest train station, which is a 25 minute ride into the city, and there are dry-cleaners, a grocery store, a couple of independent restaurants, and a few small shops, all a shorter distance away than I used to walk to work when we lived in the city. We drive more now (we drove for groceries even in the city- it’s just more convenient, though we still only have one car), taxes are higher, the mortgage is higher than our rent, and it’s a huge amount more work. But. Our dogs have a yard, I’ve never seen a bum, never had my purse ripped off, never felt unsafe walking the dogs at night, never seen graffiti or a pull-down gate on a store, never seen chained-down patio furniture, never had a panhandler follow me for several blocks until I threatened to call the cops, never spent all summer smelling garbage, and never had to listen to boomboxes, sirens and arguments all night. Our suburb has its perks.
Where I think the hate for the suburbs comes in is partially resentment. As boring as they are, a bunch of middle to upper middle class people who have kids, own property that they bother to maintain, care about their community, hold down steady jobs, and keep an eye on the neighborhood around them would be a HUGE asset if they moved into the vacant areas of the city. More of them living in the city would almost certainly decrease the amount of blighted urban area, increase the amount of parental involvement in schools, bump up tax revenue, and generally increase the well-being of everyone in the city. So, when they move out to the “hatcheries,” they leave the city poorer for it, eschewing diversity and culture in order to increase their own living space and safety. I think that’s where some of the hate might come from. I don’t think moving out of the city is the most altruistic choice my husband and I could’ve made, and at some point we may go back, but not in the near future. My life is too much better in the burbs.
Are you talking about emergency vehicles which need to get somewhere within the subdivision? Or which need to cut through to get somewhere else?
That seems pretty minor to me. Personally, I would be happy to drive an extra mile or 2 a day if it meant I could live on a cul-de-sac.
Anyway, it’s possible to set up a subdivision so it has multiple roads going in and out but it’s not attractive as a cut-through. For example, there is a subdivision in my town which is roughly square in shape. There are 2 or 3 roads going in on the west side and 1 road on the north side. There are no roads going in on the east or south sides. So there is plenty of ingress and egress but you generally don’t see morning commuters zipping through every day, AFAIK.
Seriously though, I don’t believe it’s resentment. Unless they resent that they had to give up an appartment in the trendy West Village of Manhattan and move out to Morristown, NJ.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Philly, and I wasn’t under the impression that a lot of people live in the city itself. It seems like the type of city where most people live in the surrounding suburbs.
James Howard Kunstler gives a lot of reasons why suburbia is bad, but the biggest elephant in the bedroom is (his contention that) suburban living is physically unsustainable in the face of peak oil. (He does not believe any alternative fuel or technology can substitute for petroleum-powered ICE adequately to maintain our easy-motoring lifestyles.)
And people telecommute. Should the peak oil scenario happen, its fairly likely that a lot of people who work on computers and telephones for a living would start working from home.
There are obviously jobs where you cannot telecommute, but “oh, I’ll take that meeting from home” is becoming fairly common, and I’m seldom on a call anymore where someone’s dog isn’t barking in the background.
For that matter, why are people under the impression that mass transit is not available in the suburbs? Maybe it’s like that in L.A., but in the northeast, most suburbs have decent train or bus service available.
In the event of a serious fuel shortage, it seems to me it’s folks in rural areas who will get hit the hardest. But I don’t hear people claiming that rural living is “unsustainable.”
Depends on your definitions of “suburb” and “decent train or bus service”. Lots of suburbs ( and I don’t consider any part of Brooklyn or most of Queens suburban) have decent train or bus service if the distance between bus lines and train stations doesn’t matter. My brother lives in Suffolk and can take the train to the city- as long as he drives to the train station. His daughter can’t take the bus to the mall unless she gets a ride to the bus stop. Now, that’s better public transportation than I’ve seen in any rural area, but it doesn’t seem to me that a household could survive without a car and I think that’s what a lot of people mean by “good mass transit” - the fact that a car is not a necessity.
I basically agree with you. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that in the event there is a huge oil shortage, a typical suburban family could drastically reduce it’s consumption of oil. Or didn’t need all that much oil to begin with.
For example, consider somebody who drives to the LIRR every day for work. That person might drive 5 miles a day for commuting. Even if gas went to $10 per gallon, the amount that person pays for gas would be pretty small compared to other commuting costs, such as parking, train fare, bus fare, and so forth.
My reading of the article is emergency vehicles trying to get somewhere else.
Except that you are doing it on a busy road with a lot of traffic so add in an extra ten minutes or so. All that extra traffic also means that whenever you are going to work, you are spending more extra time getting there and back.
This is one of the reasons, that the particular subdivision was selected as the nation’s worst commute.
I think that it is very possible to set up neighborhoods so that they will discourage commuters cutting though. They can built the roads so that they are narrower and have a lot of four way stops. They can put in speed bumps. For example on the street that I linked to in DC, they are built on a grid pattern, but the streets are narrower and have cars parked on them. You really wouldn’t want to try to drive faster than 25. This is compared to the streets in a large subdivision which almost seem to be designed to handle high speed traffic with wide rides and the lack of sharp curves.
Even if they go with the cul de sac pattern, they can still have multiple entries and exits. if you make the roads wind and turn, and put in a few speed bumps, they won’t be as attractive to commuters.
There was really nothing there before. If you keep building neighborhoods that feed on to a main street, naturally you are going to get heavy traffic, especially, if short local trips must be accomplished via that main street. There was no issue with the emergency vehicles prior to these neighborhoods being built, because the area was mostly farms and generally undeveloped. Prince William had explosive growth from the mid 90s to around 2005. Because of that growth, the traffic has grown exponentially.
I’m not sure where you live, but heavy traffic in this area is the norm. Strangely enough, it gets worse in the suburbs where traffic is all fed onto fewer streets.
To get back to the original point, the Commonwealth hasn’t prohibited them, they have just said that they won’t be responsible for maintaining them if built.
