BrainStuff Classics: Why Are Suburbs So Unwalkable?

Many modern cities feature grided streets made for walking, but suburbs' wide, winding roads require cars to get around. Learn why, plus how it might change, in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/civil/why-so-many-suburban-streets-twist-and-turn.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
laurenvogelbaumb here with another classic from the podcast's archives. This
one goes into the history of suburbs in the United States,
specifically why they were all built seemingly to discourage anyone
from walking anywhere. Hey brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And

(00:26):
if you've ever driven through the sprawl of an American suburb,
you know that the streets twist and turn, even in
the absence of hills. Rarely are they set up like
a grid. Take one wrong turn and you could end
up looping around a cul de sac forever. It can
feel like. But how did these winding streets become so
ubiquitous with the suburbs. The answer lies in the days

(00:48):
following the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Though the period led to all of the modern technologies
and food ways we currently enjoy at the time, it
seriously worsened living conditions for many city dwellers. We spoke
with Paul Knight, an architectural and urban designer here in
Atlanta and the executive director of the Douglas C. Allen

(01:09):
Institute for the Study of cities. He said, at any
time before the early twentieth century, you really did not
want to live in the cities, especially after the Industrial
Revolution in places like London and New York. They were filthy,
they were truly dangerous. Along came British urban planner Ebenezer Howard.
In eighteen ninety eight, he published the book Tomorrow, A

(01:30):
Peaceful Path to Social Reform, which was reissued in nineteen
oh two as Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Knight said of
the book, one of the ideas that came out of
Ebenezer's work was this idea of living in the country
and then working in the city, so that you could
get the best of both worlds. Sound familiar. Thus what
we know today as these suburbs were born around the

(01:51):
turn of the twentieth century, but their early success depended
on street cars, which allowed many people to travel to
their jobs in the cities, and Henry foully Ward automating
the assembly line and introducing the Model T car really
helped the suburbs boom. But the biggest move to suburbia
came after World War Two ended in nineteen forty five,
millions of American gis returned for war with housing benefits,

(02:13):
and the suburbs became the place to be for us families.
So what does all this have to do with the
curving streets we know today? While many big cities during
the Industrial Revolution had terrible living conditions for the working class,
they did have something desirable, the grid network. A look
at New York City planners laid out the streets in

(02:34):
a right angle rectangular formation, as opposed to the spoken
wheel layouts of cities like Paris, and that's no accident.
A grid network is efficient and it promotes walkability. The
typical suburban street network spurned this layout in favor of
wide roads with sweeping curves. One reason why was to
make the suburbs appear closer to nature and to Ebenezer

(02:55):
Howard's idea of living in the country. Knight said, the
reason that people wanting to leave the city is that
idea of a return to nature and to provide a
yard for their children, and to get out of the
unsafe environment of the city. It's just this bucolic idea.
If you want to promote this idea of nature and
natural topography, then you can't have this rigid grid iron
on your landscape. You've got to curve the streets in

(03:17):
order to allow people to experience the curvilinear nature of nature.
Another reason for winding streets stems from that giver of
suburban life, the car. The grid network is built around
the idea of people walking from place to place, but
the suburbs rely on cars, and curved streets allow cars
to travel faster than the grid network, which has constant

(03:37):
stops at intersections. But curving streets have a cost. They
are less walkable, precisely because they make four longer roads
with fewer intersections. The road network also has fewer streets
than a grid pattern, which means less street frontage and
therefore less space for retail offices and other mixed use developments.
Having less walkable streets with less development forces people to

(03:59):
drive more often. That leads to another cost of curved streets,
more car accidents. Urban driving can feel chaotic because of
the increase in walkers and bikers, but it also creates
slower speeds and therefore fewer fatal accidents. Data from the
US Census Bureau backs this up. In twenty fifteen, about
nineteen percent of the US population lived in rural areas,

(04:21):
but rural fatalities accounted for forty nine percent of all
traffic fatalities. The US continues to become more suburbanized, so
it's unlikely that these winding streets will go away anytime soon.
Knight says infill building, the development of spare land and
otherwise largely settled areas, provides opportunities to change the face
of these neighborhoods. The challenge to achieving the grid network

(04:43):
in the suburbs is both political and legal. Though right
now most suburbs require developers to clear hurdles in order
to make a pedestrian friendly grid pattern, while those who
create car centric called sac subdivisions are on easy street,
Knight said the law is not in walk of favorite.

(05:06):
Today's episode is based on the article why aren't modern
suburbs built on a walkable grid? On HowStuffWorks dot Com,
written by Adina Solomon. Brain Stuff is production of I
Heart Radio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com, and is
produced by Tyler Plang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.