Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And if you've ever driven through the
Speaker 1: sprawl of an American suburb, you know that the streets
Speaker 1: twist and turn, even in the absence of hills. Rarely
Speaker 1: are they set up like a grid. Take one wrong
Speaker 1: turn and you could end up a looping around a
Speaker 1: cul de sac forever it can feel like. But how
Speaker 1: did these winding streets become so ubiquitous with the suburbs.
Speaker 1: The answer lies in the days following the Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though the period led
Speaker 1: to all of the modern technologies and food ways we
Speaker 1: currently enjoy, at the time, it's seriously worsened living conditions
Speaker 1: for many city dwellers. We spoke with Paul Knight, and
Speaker 1: architectural and urban designer here in Atlanta and the executive
Speaker 1: director of the Douglas C. Allen Institute for the Study
Speaker 1: of Cities. He said, at any time before the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century, you really did not want to live in
Speaker 1: the cities, especially after the Industrial Revolution in places like
Speaker 1: London and New York. They were filthy, they were truly dangerous.
Speaker 1: Along came British urban planner Ebenezer Howard. He published the
Speaker 1: book Tomorrow, A Peaceful Path to Social Reform, which was
Speaker 1: reissued in nineteen o two as Garden Cities of Tomorrow.
Speaker 1: Night said of the book, one of the ideas that
Speaker 1: came out of Ebenezer's work was this idea of living
Speaker 1: in the country and then working in the city, so
Speaker 1: that you could get the best of both worlds. Sound familiar.
Speaker 1: Thus what we know today as the suburbs were born
Speaker 1: around the turn of the twentieth century, but their early
Speaker 1: success depended on street cars, which allowed many people to
Speaker 1: travel to their jobs in the cities, and Henry Ford
Speaker 1: automating the assembly line and introducing the Model T car
Speaker 1: really helped the suburbs boom. But the biggest move to
Speaker 1: suburbia came after World War Two ended in ninety five.
Speaker 1: Millions of American g i's returned for war with housing benefits,
Speaker 1: and the suburbs became the place to be for US families.
Speaker 1: So what does all this have to do with the
Speaker 1: curving streets we know today? While many big cities during
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution had terrible living conditions for the working class,
Speaker 1: they did have something desirable. The grid network. A look
Speaker 1: at New York City planners laid out the streets in
Speaker 1: a right angle rectangular formation, as opposed to the spoken
Speaker 1: wheel layouts of cities like Paris, and that's no accident.
Speaker 1: A grid network is efficient and it promotes walkability. The
Speaker 1: typical suburban street network spurned this layout in favor of
Speaker 1: wide roads with sweeping curves. One reason why was to
Speaker 1: make the suburbs appear closer to nature and to Ebenezer
Speaker 1: Howard's idea of living in the country. Knight said, the
Speaker 1: reason that people are wanting to leave the city is
Speaker 1: that idea of a return to nature and to provide
Speaker 1: a yard for their children, and to get out of
Speaker 1: the unsafe environment of the city. It's just this bucolic idea.
Speaker 1: If you want to promote this idea of nature and
Speaker 1: natural topography, then you can't have this rigid gridiron on
Speaker 1: your landscape. You've got to curve the streets in order
Speaker 1: to allow people to exp varience the curvilinear nature of nature.
Speaker 1: Another reason for winding streets stems from that giver of
Speaker 1: suburban life, the car. The grid network is built around
Speaker 1: the idea of people walking from place to place, but
Speaker 1: the suburbs rely on cars, and curved streets allow cars
Speaker 1: to travel faster than the grid network, which has constant
Speaker 1: stops at intersections, But curving streets have a cost. They
Speaker 1: are less walkable, precisely because they make four longer rows
Speaker 1: with fewer intersections. The road network also has fewer streets
Speaker 1: than a grid pattern, which means less street frontage and
Speaker 1: therefore less space for retail offices and other mixed use developments.
Speaker 1: Having less walkable streets with less development forces people to
Speaker 1: drive more often. That leads to another cost of curved streets,
Speaker 1: more car accidents. Urban driving can feel chaotic because of
Speaker 1: the increase in walkers and bikers, but it also creates
Speaker 1: slower speeds and therefore fewer fatal accidents. Data from the
Speaker 1: U S Census Bureau backs this up. About night in
Speaker 1: percent of the US population lived in rural areas, but
Speaker 1: rural fatalities accounted for fort ent of all traffic fatalities.
Speaker 1: The US continues to become more suburbanized, so it's unlikely
Speaker 1: that these winding streets will go away anytime soon. Knight says.
Speaker 1: In fill building, the development of spare land and otherwise
Speaker 1: largely settled areas provides opportunities to change the face of
Speaker 1: these neighborhoods. The challenge to achieving the grid network in
Speaker 1: the suburbs is both political and legal. Though right now
Speaker 1: most suburbs require developers to clear hurdles in order to
Speaker 1: make a pedestrian friendly grid pattern, while those who create
Speaker 1: car centric called sac subdivisions are on easy street. Knight
Speaker 1: said the law is not in walkabilities favor. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Adina Solomon and produced by Tyler Clang
Speaker 1: for iHeart Media and How Stuff Works. For more on
Speaker 1: this and lots of other winding topics, visit our home planet,
Speaker 1: how stuff Works dot com.