Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

The article mentions that Atlantic Station sits on a large parking deck, but doesn&#x27;t explore how its 7,200 parking spaces can make an otherwise small outdoor mall very busy at popular times. Cars remove you from your immediate surroundings, but they also enable you to temporarily be part of a community physically distant from where you live.<p>The answer to why Atlantans drive so much is not that they are lazy, but that they have somewhere else to be. You can lament that walking is good exercise, or you can appreciate the ability to raise a family in a house with a backyard while having a reasonable commute to a Fortune 500 company&#x27;s world headquarters, a startup community, or a global research university.<p>Walking everywhere is nice as long as you know exactly where you want to live, you don&#x27;t care about space, and can afford high rent.

I did some research on cul-de-sacs using my own neighborhood using Google satellite images: It&#x27;s gotten so out of control that you have to drive upwards of 4 miles just to see your neighbors when they&#x27;re only a few yards away on a neighboring street: <a href="http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/10/the-great-cul-de-sac-problem-and-how-to-fix-alleviate-it/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chrisnorstrom.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-great-cul-de-sac-pr...</a><p>I can understand the allure of cul-de-sacs but perhaps a regular &quot;street grid&quot; system with &quot;pipe sprouts&quot; would be better for everyone. Overall, our American lifestyle is the culprit here. Just compare any small American town with a small Italian town: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fedesk8/7880293850/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;fedesk8&#x2F;7880293850&#x2F;</a> and you&#x27;ll notice what the cause of bad public transit and over-use of cars is. We seem to have a passion for living far apart and having our space.

I&#x27;ll never understand why we continue to design our suburbs for cars and driving with no attempt to encourage walking. Instead, we seem to discourage walking through a lack of sidewalks, concentration of destinations surrounded by parking lots a mile wide themselves, and burying houses in subdivisions that require almost a mile walk just to get out of.

I can see why the story about Atlanta was contrived to run in the winter. I spent some time in the South in my youth and you&#x27;d have to be ... overly acclimatized to intentionally set foot outside air conditioning from June to September or so. Its not just sauna-like, it fits the temp and humidity of a sauna exactly. So you&#x27;re going to need to own a car with AC, and you&#x27;re going to pay the extensive monthly bills if you use it or not, so may as well use it. I never really did anything outside in the south intentionally all summer long. I went out a couple times at night when it got down to the upper 70s as a low, sometimes, but the mosquitos were the size of hummingbirds. Aside from the summer weather its beautiful land and nice people.

If each cul-de-sac just had a walking path cut out of it, I think you&#x27;d have the ideal. That&#x27;s what it&#x27;s like in small-town Holland. Cul-de-sacs do have other benefits like a quiet street and keeping your little kids &quot;corralled&quot;.

I don&#x27;t buy it. Cul-de-sacs experience less crime, fewer traffic accidents and are very conducive to taking safe leisurely walks. The problem is that some neighborhoods don&#x27;t provide efficient pathways for practical pedestrian traffic between major destinations, which isn&#x27;t caused by cul-de-sacs, but poor planning. Communities that provide pathways between cul-de-sacs <i>away</i> from traffic that connect such points have the best of both worlds. I envy them, because I live in a cul-de-sac that is about a mile from our schools as the crow flies, but the <i>only</i> available route adds 2 miles, driving or walking.

Two observations:<p>1. There are far, far more differences between Midtown and Mabelton than urban planning (Midtown is a young, liberal, much higher than average percentage of gay residents, close proximity to Georgia Tech) and Mabelton is pretty much in the opposite direction in every way possible. It is an apples to oranges comparison.<p>2. A huge advantage of cul-de sacs is that people don&#x27;t speed down them like they do on residential connective streets, which is a huge plus when you have children of a certain age.

Startup Founder. Married. 2 kids. We live in Mableton, and our office is in midtown. I know both areas well.<p>Cost of &quot;home&quot; in Midtown, $500k: <a href="http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/847-Myrtle-St-NE-Atlanta-GA-30308/2117688025_zpid/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zillow.com&#x2F;homedetails&#x2F;847-Myrtle-St-NE-Atlanta-G...</a><p>Cost of &quot;home&quot; in Mableton, $200k: <a href="http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4582-Somerset-Rd-SW-Smyrna-GA-30082/14288922_zpid/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zillow.com&#x2F;homedetails&#x2F;4582-Somerset-Rd-SW-Smyrna...</a><p>Midtown, local elementary school is a 2&#x2F;10 on GreatSchools. Mableton, 7&#x2F;10. If you want to live anywhere near midtown and have a decent public school, tack on another $150k and you lose most of the touted walkability.<p>It&#x27;s strange to build Mableton up as the straw man for Atlanta suburbs since it&#x27;s only 10 miles from midtown and a ~25 minute commute to several of Atlanta&#x27;s job centers, and is probably more diverse both racially and economically than midtown. A place like Kennesaw, 20 miles out, 45+ minute commute, and less diverse would be a smarter target.<p>So much of these discussions seem to be single people arguing against places they&#x27;ve never lived, trying to convince people whose lifestyles they don&#x27;t understand.

This is interesting and I always love urban planning discussions, but I feel there is something a little off about this. It seems to be suggesting that that reason people in non-urban areas are overweight &#x2F; drive is because of dendritic street patterns, but those exist and are emblematic of a lower population density.<p>If you took my grandfather&#x27;s fully rural town in the middle of Nebraska, there isn&#x27;t much in the way of cul-de-sacs but people still drive everywhere because of - what seems to me - the more dominant issue of population density.

Recently I was trying to find a new place to live in the suburbs where I could walk to a train. Time and time again, a nice short walk by the way the bird flies. Triple that if you don&#x27;t want to walk through people&#x27;s yards. I didn&#x27;t even get so far as seeing if there were sidewalks.

Some people like dead-end streets and large yards. Some people want to prevent people from having such an option.

&gt;Why do most people fail to walk even the 10,000 daily steps needed to stay healthy?<p>Where does that figure come from? A lazy guestimate of 1m&#x2F;stride puts that at 10km&#x2F;day. That&#x27;s 2 hours of walking a day. Who the hell spends 2 hours a day walking?

This strikes me as an interesting read. I live in an Atlanta suburb.<p>The closest shopping center is more than half a mile away and the one I go to most, and where I go to check my company&#x27;s mail, is 2.5 miles away. The distances themselves are not so bad, but the main road is a 4 lane highway with a posted speed limit of 55 - but people drive faster. Frankly, the thought of walking or biking along that road is scary from a safety point of view, so yes, in general I drive everywhere. Ironically, if I want to go run laps at the closest city park, I have to drive to that too.<p>The area that the author is describing is 25 miles away and takes at least 45 minutes to an hour each way by car, so I go there as infrequently as possible.<p>Frankly the situation is not too bad, because telecommuting is the best work situation ever. The internet beats commuting - be it by bus, train, or automobile - any day!

&gt; Aesthetics matter. We walk farther when streets feel safe and interesting. People who live in central New York or London typically walk between a third to a half mile to go shopping. That’s a four- to 10-minute stroll.<p>I don&#x27;t think aesthetics is really the main point. Older cities like New York and London aren&#x27;t designed for cars. High rise buildings don&#x27;t have parking for every home &#x2F; desk so it isn&#x27;t an option to have that many cars in the city.

Walkable neighborhoods are like environmentally friendly homes... people won&#x27;t usually pay as much more than what they cost as they will for McMansions, so builder&#x27;s don&#x27;t want to build them. I live on a cul de sac and my kids play games on the street with the neighbor kids, but we are the only family on the block that walks to the local park just outside of our neighborhood. We do walk to that park, but drive to the indoor play&#x2F;swimming complex 2 miles away. So the rules of thumb in this article apply to my family, but not the others on my block.

My more ideal city would have higher density housing but with small private yards, if only decks that seem like yards, something like this: <a href="http://www.dwell.com/house-tours/article/mountain-dwellings-urban-development-copenhagen" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dwell.com&#x2F;house-tours&#x2F;article&#x2F;mountain-dwellings-...</a><p>In the US we have high density housing (condo skyscrapers) and low density housing (suburbs) but not much in-between that&#x27;s nice.

Atlantan here.<p>I lived in West Midtown for five years post-college. It&#x27;s the epitome of hip re-urbanization and all that comes with it. I walked from my house to a local restaurant or shop exactly 0 times during those five years.<p>I moved to a cul-de-sac in a northern suburb six months ago. I&#x27;m 1 mile from 270,000 ft^2 of retail shopping and 1 mile from a walkable downtown with tons of shops and restaurants.<p>Do I drive 60 miles to and from work every day? Yes. I&#x27;ve also walked to restaurants and shops on numerous occasions. And as pointed out by rkischuk, I live in a house I couldn&#x27;t begin to afford in West Midtown and we live in good school districts.<p>If you want to live in a small apartment in a high density area away from cul-de-sacs, good for you. Let me make my decisions based off what I&#x27;ve optimized my life for without demonizing me because we place different levels of importance on different items in life. I am happy spending $33&#x2F;day to commute in exchange for a walkable area, larger house, better schools and more family-friendly environment.

Where I live, Columbia MD, roads meander, have a hierarchical structure and there are A LOT of cul de sacs. It&#x27;s a very walkable town, however, because it has walking paths that penetrate at least every other residential street, and provide direct walking routes to important sites, such as shopping plazas, schools and the mall.<p>It&#x27;s not optimal, because commercial and residential area are zoned apart, so things aren&#x27;t as close as they could be, but at least the routes between then are efficient.<p>I&#x27;m a 15 minute&#x27;s walk from a grocery store, a mall, the elementary, middle and high schools that my house is districted to.

As a minor nitpick, the plural of cul-de-sac is &#x27;culs-de-sac&#x27; (not &#x27;cul-de-sacs&#x27; as appears in the title).

tl;dr<p>Connectivity counts: More intersections mean more walking, and more disconnected cul-de-sacs mean more driving. People who live in neighborhoods with latticeworklike streets actually drive 26 percent fewer miles than people in the cul-de-sac forest.

I grew up on a double cul-de-sac street so I am clearly the most unhealthy.