Are the Suburbs Getting Worse?*

are the suburbs getting worse now the suburbs are complicated and there's lots of ways to measure them but for this video let's call worse disconnected are there more loops and culd saacs that don't really lead anywhere and are neighborhoods just very separate I asked this question several years ago and actually conducted my own study collected data and as of last month published the results in the Journal of urban morphology what did I find well before I get to that I want to tell you what we already knew now I'm geeky enough to have my own favorite Journal article uh and it's the the evolving Metropolis by Michael Southworth and Peter Owens and it was published back in 1993 and it's just a great study of this question exactly the best part may be this graphic here it breaks down Suburban Street patterns by decade in 1900 just before the street car suburb era cities in the US are spreading using the grid iron plan in the post-war years streets have largely eliminated four-way intersections leading to what these researchers called fragmented parallels every decade after the Street patterns become more curval linear and more filled with culde saacs and Loops the authors further count things like intersection density which is a way City Planning researchers quantify walkability the more intersections the smaller the blocks and the more pedestrian scaled the city we can see that the number of intersections per 100 acres declines precipitously access points to neighborhoods also declines making it hard for residents to leave their neighborhoods this is classically Illustrated like this imagine living in this house and wanting to visit your neighbor one you share a back fence with in some cases you might have to travel miles to get there culd discks are also associated with walkability or the lack thereof cldcs are great for people who don't want cars zooming by their house they only offer access for the people living on them no through traffic allowed Loops are basically CLD aacs only useful for those living there again Southworth and ow and see cxs increasing and walkability decreasing I think all of these Trends make sense to anyone who's given more than a moment's thought to how Street patterns have evolved over time I personally love studies that confirm our instincts about the places we know but you may have noticed that the last decade they recorded is 1980 I'm old but even I wasn't born in 1980 a lot has happened since then the principles of the New urbanist Movement were set to paper in 1991 this movement has been influential in having us rethink how suburbs are designed new urbanists have built Suburban communities that are generally more walkable than past neighborhoods we've also become more aggressive in our policies related to reducing carbon emissions to Stave off climate change policy makers now recognize that Suburban land use patterns can contribute to climate change traffic has also become worse and the kind of Street patterns that typify Suburban development are partially to blame so with all of these Trends popping up since the evolving Metropolis was published have the subers gotten better for walkability and bikeability I'll tell you what I found after the bike belt to answer this question we need to venture to a place where there's been so so much sustained sprawl that there's enough data for each of the decade buckets from the 1950s through the 2010s where can we find such a place well there are certainly many large cities in the US with Decades of sprawling development patterns for this study I chose Wake County North Carolina home to Raleigh Raleigh is the principal City in the Research Triangle region of the state with over 2 million people it's also one of the fastest growing areas of the United States which is perfect for my study because I'm measuring sprawl I had to figure out how to date Street patterns to specific spefic decades to understand how they contributed to walkability over time I did this using subdivision data here in the United States cities grow out not lot by lot or block by block but by subdivision a subdivision means a larger piece of land that is divided into housing lots by a developer the developer also must design a street Network for the new neighborhood and provide services like a sewer system most people have heard of the zoning ordinance but the subdivision ordinance governs the design of these new neighborhoods anyway w County North Carolina provides freely accessible subdivision boundary maps with dates I could then look at the street networks within those subdivision boundaries and know when they were built subdivision boundaries were also helpful to have because the evolving Metropolis counted access points to the neighborhood and I could do the same thing by counting the number of times the streets intersected the subdivision boundary for those curious I did this all using GIS software which is basically a way planners and researchers can put data on maps and compute things spatially in addition I use Python to automate the computation of all of my statistics this was definitely necessary as I computed statistics for Street networks for 1,0 subdivisions I'm pretty sure that the previous study did not use this many subdivisions as I think they had to count by hand okay with all of that out of the way what did I find well if you compare my Trends from the 1950s to the 1980s the trend lines match up with the evolving Metropolis research pretty well this is good news for both of our studies and led some additional validity to the findings this narrative that the US became more car oriented in the post-war years and it shows in our street patterns does hold true but what about the 1990s 2000s and 20 t0s surely we've made progress and our suburbs are more walkable than ever before right well it's complicated first the not so good news cacs have never been more popular as they are right now or at least in the 2010s when the study ends now it's not so much higher than the 1980s but there's definitely not a downward Trend we still love our culdesac but let's get some good news Okay intersection density is higher and the trend is very clear you can see it in this example subdivision I chose it because it's the most average subdivision statistically for the 2010s in Wake County it almost looks gridlike within its neighborhood boundaries lots of intersections the last statistic I want to point out is access points in the 1980s the number of access points to a subdivision bottomed out at an average of four that has essentially remained unchanged to this day you can see it here in the same 2010 sub subdivision there is currently one connected access point and three more stubs to be connected to other neighborhoods when they're built but if you look around W County you'll find neighborhoods where the stub access points never got connected and just ignored basically my study counted this neighborhood as having four access points but it may functionally have one for decades or forever so the results are a mixed bag but I think it would be hard to argue that Suburban Street pans have gotten significantly better over time why is this the case well it's hard to know exactly just based on my data but I do have a few hypotheses I also happened to measure the size of subdivisions and found out that they've been getting smaller over time subdivisions today are 33% smaller than they were in the 1950s yet you have more Lots per subdivision than ever before in the ' 50s Lots were bigger the neighborhoods were bigger and the streets were spaced further apart it's like developers took the same ideas and started shoving them into smaller and smaller subdivision boundaries when you do that intersection density goes up I also noticed that subdivision boundaries have become more irregular over time I didn't measure this so this is just based on me staring at 10,000 subdivisions when I was doing the research but my guess is that many of the Prime large Parcels got subdivided early leaving more marginal neighborhood sites by the 2000s cldx are pretty useful for getting Road access to a narrow subdivision and it might explain why we still see them used so heavily in Suburban Street patterns today I'm also not a big culdesac hater so the increase in cacs isn't super worrying to me I actually think that you can do Suburban Street patterns with cacs well Michael Southworth the guy who co-authored the original study on this also co-authored a cool article called rethinking the culdesac which makes the case for incorporating shared used paths with cacs to create quiet streets for cars but gridlike connectivity for pedestrians and cyclists I actually studied that solution with the shared use paths in my dissertation maybe I'll make a video about that too uh it may not surprise you given the fact that I have now two studies that directly piggyback off of my Mich southw War's work that he was my dissertation adviser back when I was a PhD student uh he didn't tell me what to research I'm just that big of a fanboy that I went to where he was a professor and studied there anyway I think that the lack of change in access points is the most disturbing Trend in Suburban Street patterns I mean the increase in intersection density is nice uh but it doesn't really matter if you never leave your neighborhood part of the problem is that these Suburban subdivisions are almost 100% houses there are some HOA clubhouses but it's almost Universal housing so if you want to get anywhere other than a neighbor's house you have to use an access point to get there and with fewer and fewer of them they're less convenient for pedestrians and cyclists and create a lot of indirect routes if we want to get people to ditch their cars for bikes we need to make clear safe and direct networks in the suburbs that means more access points and safer arterial streets most of the access points for subdivisions don't lead directly to other subdivisions but instead connect to those busy arterials in Wake County where I studied many of these Suburban arterials are former County highways with high speeds drainage ditches and not much space for active Transportation it's a recipe for crashes and most same people won't want to walk or bike on them okay so what can we do to improve walkability and bikeability in the suburbs if these are the trends we're dealing with I think the first thing we can do is amend subdivision ordinances subdivision ordinances sit next to zoning ordinances in a city or County's codes they govern the process and design of subdivisions mandating more access points could create more connected suburbs if enough neighborhoods connect to each other pedestrians and cyclists can avoid busy arterials you could even cut these connections for cars and just require path connections between subdivisions if car through traffic is a concern second you could capitalize on natural features abandoned Railways and other alternative linear spaces to create path systems to allow longer distance travel between neighborhoods there are efforts like this underway across the United States and many places also have so-called Rails to Trails projects perhaps the most famous is the atlan to Belt Line a 22m path loop around Atlanta constructed from four former Rail lines the Belt Line connects dozens of neighborhoods and connects to other Trail systems multiplying its usefulness robust long-distance path systems are also commonly used in Europe to connect cities and Villages allowing cyclists to use them almost like highways if us suburbs had similar long-distance path systems connecting neighborhoods with plentiful access points and internal path systems designed with culdesac you have the makings of a pretty great alternative Suburban Transportation network if cities go even further and allow for denser housing and mix use development then residents can access even more destinations on foot or on bike all of this leads to a gradual shift that could get people out of their cars and onto the trails so my study really only looked at Suburban Street patterns not the types of streets themselves but that can make a big difference in walkability and bikeability in the suburbs in fact I've done a whole video on that very topic and it's available now on nebula you can go sign up and view that right this second I always post my next video first on nebula so anytime you see a video posted here on YouTube my next one's already up over there on nebula because we're filled with thoughtful creators we have some pretty smart features built into nebula first of all all my videos posted on YouTube are already up early on nebula that means you can sign up for nebula right now and watch my next video without waiting a few weeks for it to appear on YouTube that's pretty great already Nebel also has no ads making the entire viewing experience better for you and it also makes it better for the Creator because we're able to produce nebula original series that can focus on being great instead of being great at pleasing the YouTube algorithm these are passion projects that answer the question what would videos from great creators look like if they had more resources to do that thing 2023 was a great year for nebula Originals I even put out a nebula original series called great cities that profiles some of the most influential cities right at the inflection points that made them great you can learn about why Venice built canals and why New York built Central Park it's some of my best work because nebula provided additional resources and it's only available there there is so much great exclusive content on the platform right now too the ever popular jet lag series starring the crew from wind over Productions and half as interesting for those who don't know it's like a travel game show that's incredibly addictive and tailor made for anyone who likes my channel real life lore continues to publish excellent episodes of their modern conflict series real science has a series where two amateur naturalists try to survive using only tools from the Paleolithic in all nebula offers you the viewer an AdFree experience filled with videos produced by a curated group of thoughtful YouTubers and those thoughtful creators are also publishing big budget high quality exclusive content and you get all of this for surprisingly affordable price when you sign up in my link nebula.com memberships for $300 you pay once and never again this is a great way to support nebula and its Mission we're full of independent creators and by taking on investors like you our viewers we can become one of the most premier streaming platforms completely differently than our competitors do by self- financing thanks to support from people like you people who support the vision uh I love that we can offer an affordable monthly membership plan for some folks and allow other folks to go above and beyond and again support the mission and this channel so we've got Early Access no ads Prestige content and more coming down the pipeline now is a great time to sign up so go click on the link in the description or on screen to get 40% off and support this channel thank you so much

Channel: City Beautiful

Views: 49,603

Keywords: city planning, town planning, urban planning, urban design

Id: s9oympJvfmI

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024