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Old Posted Feb 22, 2020, 12:18 AM
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Urban Dinosaurs: It's Time These 8 Things Went Extinct In Our Cities

Urban Dinosaurs: It's Time These 8 Things Went Extinct In Our Cities


February 21, 2020

By Daniel Herriges



Read More: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/...-in-our-cities

Quote:
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People get to choose what to do with their property, and developers are going to respond to what the market and financing will bear right now and what they believe their customers want right now. In that real world, there's a need for some pragmatic lines in the sand: Okay, you can have your parking garage, but can you at least not build it like that?!

- I hit up the Strong Towns Community site—our dedicated platform for Strong Towns members to meet each other and ask questions, offer advice and spark discussion—to crowd-source some ideas for a list of design features that should go the way of the dinosaur, lest the next generation be forced to cringe 25 years from now at our hard-to-reverse bad choices. And our brilliant members obliged with some good ones. --- Some of these pertain to the public realm—the streets, the sidewalks, things the government itself ought to permanently stop doing. Some of them are about the private realm: things we might consider prohibiting developers from ever doing on their own land, because it harms and degrades the public realm when they do.

Sloped Parking

• Aside from the eyesore factor, sloped parking is effectively impossible to ever retrofit into other uses. You can sometimes retrofit a parking garage with level floors. This one is just doomed to look like this forever until someone tears it down, even if demand for parking were to plummet a decade from now.









Snout Houses

• Nobody needs to live in a glorified loading dock. Homebuilders do these not because anybody especially loves them, but because they're often the easiest way to cram a house with an attached garage onto a lot without applying much thought or creativity. Time to mandate some thought and ban the snout house, which ensures a lifeless, unpleasant street for decades to come.









Ultra-Wide Residential Streets

• These jumbo-sized streets not only cue drivers to go at dangerous speeds, they also render it impossible for the neighborhood to ever enjoy some of the perks of a great residential street, like a pleasing canopy of shade from mature trees. And Marianna also identified one of the key reasons we keep building them: a misguided insistence on the part of fire departments.









Four-Lane Death Roads

• These are the result of transportation planners shoehorning four lanes of traffic into a narrow right-of-way that won't accommodate much else—a shoulder, a median, a bicycle lane, etc. Add the complexities of an urban environment, like people turning in and out of the roadway to access adjacent businesses and homes, and you have a street that is horrifyingly deadly by design.









Retail That Turns Its Back On The Street

• The age of the strip mall with parking in front is waning, and for good reason: nothing kills the sidewalk experience like being sandwiched between a parking lot and a busy street. But the new replacement trend isn't always positive. A lot of suburban chain retailers have been wrangled by city regulations into moving their parking to the side or back of the store, but they've moved the "front" of the store to the back right along with the parking lot, surmising (probably correctly) that that's how most of their customers will be entering. The problem is it creates a dead street that's hostile to human activity.









"Pod" Subdivisions

• I'm ready to call it: huge enclave-style subdivisions with only one or two ways in and out are one of the most disastrous features of the suburban experiment. Every rapidly growing suburb sooner or later seems to develop a traffic problem, and these things are the reason why. It’s because they funnel every single trip their residents take—even a quick run to the store for milk—onto the same few arterial stroads. This is a near-certain recipe for congestion.









Reeeeeeeally Long Blocks

• I am reluctant to ban most things but I would ban long blocks and large block perimeters. Small blocks provide more intersections and more transportation choices. Caps on block perimeters will limit how far you have to travel to get to the front door of the neighbor who shares your back property line. Both of these are design features that make a big difference if real people are going to live in our communities. They have a safety aspect because emergency vehicles have more than one way to get in and out but the economic value of having more amenities and neighbors in close proximity is my main motivation.




Huge Curb Radii

• The problem: it makes life a lot scarier for anybody out walking. A driver flying around a turn at high speed is way more likely to never even see you in the crosswalk until it's too late. This kind of intersection is a tragedy waiting to happen, and needs to never be built again. Slip lanes in urban environments—with the dreaded pork chop island—are another variant of this trend that needs to go the way of the dinosaur.






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