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.

Planning for the paranoid: Not the only one connecting Trayvon Martin case to sprawl

Someone else did a much better job making links between design and the Trayvon Martin case. It's hard to tell how much communities of this type are the product of paranoia or the cause of it since it's very much a self reinforcing cycle. The need for freedom from crime is of course, universal but in spite of the sales pitch, the standard gated community offers only the false promise of safety.

I was going to do a much better post about this with screenshots of the area from google maps but--I don't know how to grab images. (In spite of the post title--the development where this happened was far from all white-but it had undergone rapid changes which likely played a big role in what happened.)

Gates, sprawl, and 'walking while black'

Those who don’t drive are likely to be on the economic margins or intrepid teenagers—old enough to be on their own but without wheels—who can hurry across huge crossings and ignore conditions that are miserable for anyone on foot. Walkers in this environment are therefore the recipient of pity or suspicion—in this case, the extreme suspicion that resulted in the death of Martin, who was walking to the 7-11 to get Skittles and iced tea on the evening of February 26.

The development’s gate creates a fortress mentality, with some people viewed as legitimate and others as threatening outsiders or interlopers, notes Laurence Aurbach of Pedshed. The gate is most effective for cars. Pedestrians are able to slip in and out easily through the woody buffer that separates the project from the arterial roads. Pedestrians are most feared by some residents, according to a story in the Palm Beach Post. “It’s a gated community, but you can walk in and steal whatever you want,” said one resident.

This might be one of the best articles with backround on the development where this happened.

Trayvon Martin's killing shatters safety within Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford

I still hope to get back and do a much better post about this and or possibly upgrade this one.