General Township Updates and Rumours

[ijmorlan]

Why don't you try reading the entire thing next time? You'll see in the very next sentences I acknowledge that grids predate the automobile. As I pointed out, they go back thousands of years. But obviously we're not discussing ancient Babylonian, Roman or Indus or even more "modern" middle age European or Asian cities which utilized grid plans. We're discussing contemporary grid systems and their effects on modern planning in relation to automobiles, safety, permeability of navigating a community...you know, things we are concerned about in 2024.

There's plenty of research out there on the design of cities both past and present if you're inclined to educate yourself on why I'm correct, but you state your time is limited so I assume you don't actually want to understand, you just thought you might have a gotcha moment.

Well, you might start by deciding which grid systems you think are “contemporary”. The cities you gave as examples are all old enough that their grid systems clearly have nothing to do with the automobile.

Even if grids do tend to lead to problems, I’m skeptical the problems are inherent to grids. For example, maybe grids of streets with wide road allowances make planners think they can fix traffic by adding lanes, whereas a network of twisty narrow streets obviously can’t be fixed that way (short of destroying much of the city). But if the planners just don’t add the lanes and instead use the space to build great transit and pedestrian/bicycle routes, you could have a grid city with traffic like a non-grid transit-oriented city.

Getting back to the original topic, we’re talking about a single subdivision, not an entire city. You have a high burden of proof if you want to say that having straight streets that connect through the new neighbourhood is necessarily worse than a bunch of culs-de-sac.