Snow Storms Expose Inherent Weakness of Suburban Design

Hopefully, It's self evident that road systems with many redundancies are inherently safer, and less exposed to catastrophic traffic backups.

A Washington D.C. based blog did a short post on how the region's beltway designs made the recent huge snow storm much worse.

"Urban street grids are more resilient than road systems focused around large highways, because of how they're laid out.

The great thing about interconnected grids is that if one street becomes blocked, there's another perfectly good street one block over. And another one block down.
If a wrecked car or fallen tree or whatever blocks the street you're on, you just take a different street. There might be some additional turns involved; it might not be quite as direct. But for the most part 28th Street isn't all the different from 29th Street.

Contrast that with suburban-style systems where all traffic in a particular area funnels onto one big highway. If that one highway becomes impassible, everyone in the area is stuck. Or, at best, they have to drive miles out of their way to find the next big highway."

Amazingly, our "expert" engineers and central planners have spent the last 70 years replacing, naturally rational and resilient street grids with designs prone to massive failure.

That's part of what happened last night. There were a lot of accidents crashes. If they happened on arterial highways with no parallel roads, which a lot of them did, that road would succumb to gridlock.

Snow In A Real Livable City

OK, I noticed pretty quickly here how generally reluctant people are here to those who make even mildly critical remarks about the city and how it's run. You can't fool everyone all the time, so this condition quickly leads to war between those who want to look on the "bright side", and those who hole up on a hillside and call in to radio hosts to tell people the city sucks.

The truth I think most people know, is that the city is very beautiful and could be very livable if it was run better.



I mean sh-- Snow happens, and for the most part it should not cause a city that many problems-- even in large amounts, especially one in that does get some regular significant snow.

OK, I have to admit to finding it somewhat funny and sick that the city needs national guard troops to help shuttle people around and help with emergency response. Yes, many people live in out of the way places, on narrow winding streets (and that's a subject in itself) but--hello many of these streets were blocked and too narrow to be plowed because of parked cars.

The adult thing to say when a major storm is known to be coming is --get your car off any narrow street or it will be towed. Get your car off any major snow route or it will be towed. Move your car to one side of the street so we can plow and the other side the next day, so we can plow.

There is no such thing as a city without any chance of a lot of rain, or snow or some other natural problem and there can be no livable city run by children. (just look at yinz pension fund)

What are Yinz living in a Rob Rogers Cartoon here? Be back with more thoughts about snow.