- Lead out in cuffs
- Sep 18, 2012
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"That's right. We've evolved."
"I can see that. Cool mutations."
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My impression of housing in North America is also that wood frame was kind of a good idea back when there were still old-growth hardwood forests to cut down (leaving aside the environmental externalities), while modern wood houses basically follow the same construction plans, but with lovely lumber grown in short cycles on plantations. The consequence is that while 100-year-old+ middle-class housing is still good today, the houses built post-WW2 are largely being torn down.
By comparison, the UK has a ton of two-up, two-down row houses that were built from brick before and after WW2, which are all still standing.
On another note, do you have historical figures on the number of people renting, size of houses, etc? Not doubting you, mostly just curious.
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Dec 13, 2016 12:20
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May 10, 2024 06:53
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- Lead out in cuffs
- Sep 18, 2012
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"That's right. We've evolved."
"I can see that. Cool mutations."
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as a note, 'gridlike' or 'grid based' streets do not have to be straight. that's more appropriately a 'gridiron'. gridlike streets have a lot of interconnectivity and small blocks, as opposed to superblocks with dendritic streets
different kinds of street layouts (this is not inclusive just the first thing i googled)
grid on the left, more dendritic large block 'grid' on the right
I made some effort posts in the Traffic Engineering thread a while ago about Milton Keynes in the UK:
On the topic of traffic circles and bicycles/transit, what do you think of the traffic planning in Milton Keynes?
It's a city that was built from the ground up in the 60s, so the designers and engineers had free reign. They decided to build a 1km x 1km (~0.63 mile) grid of major roads and structure the city around these. In the original design, these were meant to be 30 mph roads lined with mixed commercial and residential zonings, to be the core of the community, and with traffic lighted intersections. However, in the final design, the engineers decided to turn them into 70mph dual carriage freeways with traffic circles at every intersection.
The result was a city made up of tiny islands of suburbia with few amenities, very poor pedestrian and bicycle access, and a generally lovely transit system (due to there being few places where buses can safely stop). Most of the amenities have ended up in the city centre, which looks like a gigantic strip mall, complete with massive, largely empty parking lots. Mode share is about 70-80% private vehicles, way above the national average, and more in line with a city in the south-eastern United States than south-east England. There's a separated network of bike lanes, but these are incredibly poorly designed, and their safety record plus low cycle use are often used as a strawman to argue against any kind of separated cycling infrastructure in the UK at all.
Of course, car traffic moves very freely.
Article in Traffic Engineering + Control making the strawman argument against separated bike lanes
A blog post providing good counter-arguments, with photographs of the terrible, terrible design of the separated bikeways
An article in the Journal of Urban Design by one of the original designers, explaining what went wrong.
I think the main and biggest mistake they made was in turning the grid into a freeway system, rather than the network of urban high streets it was intended to be. At least, that's what the article I posted in that last link argues -- and the author was one of the original design team.
I've found a PDF since then: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/4642/1/4642.pdf
His suggestions for fixing things are to set the speed limit to 30mph, replace traffic circles with traffic lights, and rip up the forests lining the grid, to be replaced with high density commerce. This would bring it back in line with how the original plan was intended to be.
Fat chance of any of that happening, though.
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Dec 20, 2016 20:40
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Dec 13, 2016 12:20
