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Anything other than a perfect grid in neighborhood design is due to classism? Sounds like bullshit to me. Mildly meandering side-streets:

- Block some of the noise from nearby major streets

- Obscure the view of traffic

- Give the neighborhood a less "uniform" feel (think of how you feel in a neighborhood with 20 identical houses in a row. Arrow-straight roads contribute to that feeling)

- Reduce through-traffic- not because "outsiders are undesirable" but because through-traffic is noisy

- Reduce speeds of through-traffic. Neighborhoods near thoroughfares often wind up battling with cars whizzing through at 45mph; gently tangled roads combats that.

You are right that it can make the neighborhoods a little less walkable (although reduced traffic can make them safer to walk). A nice solution I've seen is shared open spaces in the neighborhood; pedestrians and cyclists can then navigate freely, cutting through blocks as they like.

There a dramatic amount of understatement here.

"A little less walkable" is untrue. Meandering suburban layouts are dramatically less walkable - we're not talking about even the same order of magnitude.

Here's a commonly cited diagram of the difference in walkability between a grid layout and a sprawl-suburb. Both of these are real places, not hypothetical illustrations:

http://hbr.org/hb/article_assets/hbr/1005/F1005B_A_lg.gif

"A little less" is an understatement bordering on the edge of untruth. There used to be a better high-res version of this map that I can't find anymore - the right side is Ballard, Seattle, I've forgotten where the left side is (IIRC Dallas). The blue is the area reachable by walk from the central starting point in a given time (IIRC 10 minutes at average pace).

Note that Ballard is far from a "perfect grid" layout - there is still ample delineation between arterials and side streets. The grid is also lightly broken up every few blocks to prevent people from speeding right on through, while not making pedestrians go out of the way in the wrong direction.

The notion that sprawl-type neighborhoods are somehow safer for pedestrians (and conversely, grid-style layouts are more dangerous) also doesn't bear out in reality. Dallas, TX (a particularly famously suburban city) has a pedestrian fatality rate of 1.7 per 100K pop. NYC, the mother of all grid layouts (a perfect grid, even), clocks in at 1.8 per 100K. There's nothing to suggest grid layouts (perfect or otherwise) are intrinsically more dangerous to pedestrians.

The whole traffic business also doesn't jive:

> "Reduce through-traffic- not because "outsiders are undesirable" but because through-traffic is noisy"

Except non-sprawl suburbs with grid layouts have been restricting through-traffic for decades. Throw down a few of these: http://www.nowtopians.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/mosaic-...

They're wonderful and keep side streets from becoming arterial relief valves, while allowing you all the walkability and accessibility of grid-based layouts. No chokepoints, no gates, no driver blasting his way through trying to find a shortcut to work. They also do a great job of curbing drunk drivers, who are more likely to get beached up on one of these than in the side of a house.

They look pretty good too: http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8002/7132823357_600fba9ee3_z.j...

Some people even make them into little parklets, though I'm not sure if I'd want to hang out there: http://www.vancourier.com/polopoly_fs/1.577052.1376349174!/f...

People who live in these neighborhoods aren't idiots. This isn't a win-lose scenario - this isn't pedestrians vs. safety vs. noise. We can have our cake and eat it too, in fact many neighborhoods around the country do. Besides the "uniformity" thing, there's really nothing that the sprawl-type suburb solves that hasn't already been solved in non-sprawl suburban developments. You can live in a house with a yard with a BBQ with a deck with a garage. You can have space for all your stuff. You can still walk to the grocery store. You can still save money and take the bus to work without it being a giant pain in the ass. You can still have nice parks nearby and your kids won't go to school in a skyscraper.

The opposite of the sprawling suburb isn't towers full of people stacked on top of one another, it's another type of suburb altogether.

See, now you are arguing there are ways to do it better, and I agree. But that doesn't prove sprawling suburbs were designed under the influence of classism. That's really the key thing I disagree with. Are you ceding that part?

As for "a little less walkable", that was me hedging my speech because I don't know exactly how walkable the worst offenders are, and I consider "how much less walkable" to be tangential to the point I was trying to make anyway. I was not trying to argue that "the tradeoffs are balanced" or anything like that.

I don't think every person who moved to or built a suburb over the last 50-odd years was acting with explicitly racist motivations, but he's basically just describing "White flight": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

To be fair, I don't think he's denying white flight, and what I'm describing isn't really race-centric (though as with all things socioeconomic in the USA, race is always a factor).

It's true that many suburbs, especially the early ones, were explicitly racist (i.e., bylaw-segregated communities), that's not what's under contention. The question is if the physical design of suburbia is influenced by the desire to keep undesirables out, above and beyond any sort of legislative or extralegal measures already being undertaken at the time.

There aren't any easy answers here. I think it's quite self-evident, but obviously there is room for disagreement. One of the defining feature of modern suburbs is the "gate" - the limitation of access points to nearby arterial streets. It's fairly obvious (and even a perk for buyers) that this effectively separates the road network within from the outside and discourages through-traffic. The main claimed benefit here is safety - but from what?

One oft-claimed safety improvement is traffic. This isn't really true as pedestrian fatalities are still comparable to urban areas. But I am willing to accept that people believe they are getting improved traffic safety in these places.

The other oft-claimed safety improvement is crime. The idea is that if you make through-traffic a giant pain in the ass, then anyone who is there who doesn't live there is likely up to no good, and it makes troublemakers and potential criminals easier to spot. This is not illogical - and it agrees with Oscar Newman's Defensible Space theory.

The question is to what extent that is classist. This is where things get murky. We know a few things from the early days of suburbia:

- Cities were experiencing high crime and violence, and suffering from a particularly compressed housing market due to the sudden return of millions of servicemen. This is the primary force that purged people out of urban centers and into newly developed suburbs.

- Only the middle and upper-middle classes could afford cars. Suburbia (in that format) was fundamentally incompatible with public transit. Occasionally this was an enforced incompatibility - see: Robert Moses and the low overpasses on Long Island.

- Suburban developments were explicitly advertised as an escape from the gritty, dangerous cities of yore. Many were explicitly segregationist. I don't think it's at all a stretch to say that separation from the poor (and black, if you want to go there) was a substantial motivator for early suburbs. Like today, personal safety is one of the main selling points of suburbs, the contention is to what extent that was code for "because no poor people here".

- The design of suburban street layouts to minimize usefulness as through-roads is deliberate and an oft-touted selling point. The contention is to what extent this was an aesthetic preference vs. an exclusionary tactic. This is a hard one, since even during those times people were less-than-explicit about motivations against the poor.

The use of street design as a class/crime barrier has been very transparent and blatant in the past - even the recent past. For example: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-05-03/news/1996124052_...

Most other cases are not quite as blatant and clearcut. There is grayness between simply wanting safe neighborhoods and wanting all poor people out.

One oft-claimed safety improvement is traffic. This isn't really true as pedestrian fatalities are still comparable to urban areas. But I am willing to accept that people believe they are getting improved traffic safety in these places.

I wonder to what extent pedestrian fatalities are comparable because kids play in the street? i.e., it is safer but children engage in riskier behavior and it reaches an equilibrium?

It could also be the low frequency signal problem.

If you're driving in New York City, there are constantly people trying to jump in front of you. Out in the burbs you'll hardly ever see someone walking, so if someone walks in front of you, you may have zoned out and failed to detect it in time.

> Anything other than a perfect grid in neighborhood design is due to classism?

Wow, talk about putting words in his mouth. He's referring to the status quo for American suburbs where those meandering side streets don't connect the arterials except at just a few choke points and there is no walking connectivity either. Fix those things does not imply "perfect grid".

He isn't complaining only about poor connections to main streets, he references meandering side streets several times as well... Anyway, every bullet I listed applies just as well to reducing "entry/exit points" as it does to meandering side streets, so I would argue limited "entry/exit" also does not mean classism was behind the neighborhood layout.

>Wow, talk about putting words in his mouth.

You're right, he should have said "racism" and tackled potatolicious's bullshit head on and not been so polite.

This article discusses suburban Atlanta so it might be worth noting that much of Atlanta is quite hilly. It would be quite difficult to build neighborhoods on a grid system. By using cul-de-sacs and other winding streets, you can better fit the geography.

I was just going to say this - Also worth nothing is the fact that Atlanta sits on a hunk of very uneven granite and has very strange drainage patterns.

I guess it is unfortunate that the suburbs are where the poor are these days [1]. I think your description is accurate although the motivations are not. Neighbourhoods were designed to be convenient to residents and inconvenient to non-residents. This does discourage crime as it makes non-residents more visible and that makes it more difficult to commit a crime and not be noticed.

[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0911/Face-of-US-po...

By non-residents do you mean non-drivers?

Envision a tree, and consider who might be traveling the links near the leaves. It will be fewer people - and more predictably the same people - compared to a grid where anyone could reasonably take any path through the graph.

They're designed like prisons.

They also ensure that there are two cars in every garage, guarantee a lifetime of high oil and gas consumption and are situated around big-box stores and malls. It's a very efficient, gilded jail.

Unfortunately dense urban development in my neck of the woods is essentially a forest of towers designed to be dorm-rooms for affluent twenty-somethings. Anything more than 2-bedrooms is absurdly expensive and rare. And the towers are rapidly turning into empty shells. I had to leave the city (and fortunately found a suitable, pleasant alternative) shortly after my wife and I had our first kid. I was terrified that we'd be forced out and into one of these communities.

It's not about "undesirables", though surely there are some places where residents view that as a knock-on benefit. It's about through traffic. Residential streets that have very little traffic are more livable than ones with regular traffic. This is a design pattern from Christopher Alexander's book, which is not exactly a font of suburban Americana.

Yes, this is why you'll see malls removing bike racks, and fighting against an extension of bus service to them in some areas.

The solution to this problem which has been implemented locally is you set up a bus service regardless of any complaining, to keep one group happy, then you cut the service times and arrange the routes into insanity such that no one can use it, to keep the other group happy.

When I was a kid, living in the same city, I could afford the time to burn to spend 2 hours taking the bus to a friends house and 2 hours back (this is in a roughly 4 sq mile city). When its 8 degrees and snowing, or 105 and sunny outside this is not all that bad of an idea... when its 70 degrees you take a bike or walk.

Also make sure NOT to coordinate your local city bus service with neighboring cities. You can transfer between systems, if you're willing to stand in the rain for up to 45 minutes at times and pay two fares of course.

This is how you have a 100K person small city, major suburb of a 4M big city, and yet from my car when I look into passing bus I never see more than one or two teens, maybe an old person, that's about it. Out of 100K potential passengers.

I could take mass transit to work. I charted it out once at about 2 hours each way. Of course I can drive door to door in a bit less than 30 mins... I would save about $2 a day and that works out to about $1.33/hr which is a microscopic fraction of my current pay rate and tolerance for labor to save money. So I drive.

So that's the "correct" way to implement bus service keep everyone on both sides happy.

The problem I have with light rail in Bellevue is that it isn't very useful unless you live within walking distance of a station. I consider it to be mostly a boondoggle.

I disagree, though I see where you're coming from.

The trick with mass transit - particularly permanent infrastructure like rail transit, is that you're not really building it for right now, you're building it to shape the future.

My go-to example for this is Toronto, Canada. They built the subway in the 50s and put stations in extremely low-density neighborhoods. Nonsensical at the time naturally, but if you take a gander on Google Maps today, nearly all of these subway stations have evolved mini-cities around themselves, and the surrounding suburbs have realigned to maximize accessibility to the subway station.

Rail transit is always betting on the future rather than today. The question is if Bellevue is willing to redevelop around the infrastructure - or if the disproportionate power held by Kemper Freeman et al will put a stop to it. The natural evolution of neighborhoods around transit infrastructure is not subject to the curation of taste and wealth than has been emblematic of the development of Bellevue until now.

> Rail transit is always betting on the future rather than today.

Agree! But it's too late for Bellevue. Its low-end houses are already $500K. It'll take $billions (including plenty for lawsuits) and decades to get stations within walking distance of most people. Better to install next year a more flexible "subway" consisting of buses (Rapid Ride as it should've been).

The plan is for Bel-Red Road to become an artsy light-rail corridor, with densely packed restaurants and condos. When that becomes reality my kids will have mostly only 2 choices: a tiny condo for $500K in today's dollars, or a junky 1950s house for $1 million+. And the city will be a lot more crowded than it is today. I don't think Bellevue will be livable at that point. That's not all the city planners' fault of course.

My go-to example is Montreal's Metro system. I like how they use long buses so there's no loud squealing of metal wheels on rails.

Amazing explanation (and makes complete sense). Thanks!