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 episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And 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 a looping around a
cul de sac forever it can feel like. But how

(00:24):
did these winding streets become so ubiquitous with the suburbs.
The answer lies in the days 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's seriously worsened living conditions
for many city dwellers. We spoke with Paul Knight, and

(00:46):
architectural and urban designer here in Atlanta and the executive
director of the Douglas C. Allen 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. He published the

(01:11):
book Tomorrow, A Peaceful Path to Social Reform, which was
reissued in nineteen o two as Garden Cities of Tomorrow.
Night 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 the suburbs were born

(01:33):
around the 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 Ford
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 ninety five.
Millions of American g i's returned for war with housing benefits,

(01:55):
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

(02:16):
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

(02:36):
Howard's idea of living in the country. Knight said, the
reason that people are 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 gridiron on
your landscape. You've got to curve the streets in order

(02:58):
to allow people to exp varience 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

(03:19):
stops at intersections, But curving streets have a cost. They
are less walkable, precisely because they make four longer rows
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

(03:40):
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
U S Census Bureau backs this up. About night in
percent of the US population lived in rural areas, but

(04:03):
rural fatalities accounted for fort ent 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.
In fill 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 in

(04:25):
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 walkabilities favor. Today's episode

(04:48):
was written by Adina Solomon and produced by Tyler Clang
for iHeart Media and How Stuff Works. For more on
this and lots of other winding topics, visit our home planet,
how stuff Works dot com.