this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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There's nothing whatsoever wrong with winding roads. Sincerely, a European.
I'd rather be worried if they're straight, are built like highways, and have no sidewalks. If they don't have sidewalks they better be gravel or cobblestone.
Not inherently, no, but in suburbs there is. A 2500ft walk to a store can be 4-5 miles because of the winding suburban streets.
Over here there's tons of small paths that allow you to take much shorter routes on foot or bike. Sometimes official, sometimes the path belongs to a multiple-entries apartment block connected to two streets, or a street and a park, or whatever, in any way you don't know your surroundings without having explored them.
I lived in one of the most viable biking cities in America for sometime, and the paths around and through everything were my favorite part. You could get anywhere in that town and only have to cross 1 or 2 roads, because everything else ran over or under the roads and through beautiful creek paths and walking paths cut through residential and commercial areas alike. Even there, suburbia represents a sort of dead end to all the trails, and you have to bike through miles long streets of housing to get back to a path. Thankfully, there’s great bus routes through those areas, so you can usually get to within a few blocks of your destination even in suburbia.
That's ludicrous - I don't know which hedgerow maze you're navigating to get to the grocery store. 2500ft is half a mile. You cannot make 0.5 miles into 4-5 miles in any reasonable amount of neighborhood streets, and I have never lived somewhere like that in 6 completely different suburbs in different regions/cities.
In my suburban neighborhood, the straight line, as-the-crow-flies distance is 0.52 miles. The driven distance is 0.7 miles. Everywhere I've ever lived it's proportionally similar, though not always as close. Anyplace with public transit - even good public transit - would require more distance than walking and WAY more time than driving.
Are there just a bunch of people out there living in insaneland (where?!?)? Everywhere I've lived is dense city or completely sane suburbia. Are suburbs just an evil caricature of reality in your mind? Is fuckcars just full of people living in some crazy fictional strawman of a suburban hell?
Many suburbs have a single entrance and exit, so if there’s something behind the suburb near your house, your only choice would be to go all the way to the entrance, then around the entire neighborhood to get to what’s behind it.
There’s varying levels of suburban hell, for sure. It seems like more newly built suburbs near me at least think to put walking paths at all angles through the development, which helps mitigate the issues the long, winding roads can cause. I’d prefer not to build more suburbs at all, though.
This is nothing like places I've been, most of which are not new suburbs
Edit: you probably hate new build suburbs that are imitating old suburbs because the population grew too much in the last 50 years and everyone wanted a slice of the pie
Where are you getting this absurd, fictitious distance? I've lived in MANY different suburbs and cities. The driven distance is only ever slightly more than the straight line distance. The only consistently true fact is that public transit takes 3-4x as long to go the same places as driving (and I mean in dense urban areas with real transit). It really seems like there's a strawman that fuckcars participants have in their head for just how bad it is to drive places in less dense areas - I promise it's not. Or you just need to find one that isn't shitty AZ/TX/FL new build HOA hell that exists only to enrich a scummy RE developer.
That doesn’t sound like good transit, however real it is. I can go from where I am to the capital of my state on a regional bus in 50m, it takes 1h10m by car, not including parking time. Busses have their own lane and speed limit, they go significantly faster than the flow of traffic.
I live right next to one of the most bike friendly cities in the US, and even there the suburbs are hell compared to the wonderful creek paths and trails present through the rest of the city. Going from walking down a shaded creek path to walking down a scorching concrete jungle is quite a shock, as is suddenly having to figure out which suburban streets dead end and which wrap around and which go through.
You’re also missing the point, you shouldn’t have to drive to get to grocery stores, work, or ANY OTHER place that you need to get to regularly, regardless of how shitty or not the drive is.
If you can’t get to the store without using a car or walking miles, it’s an unsustainable development, period.