[lafard]

I'm not sure why you keep putting US examples? You do realize that most suburban subdivisions in the GTA either don't have any cul-de-sacs, or have a very small amount of them, don't you?

The simple reason for that is that the pie-shaped lots are quite inefficient of land - the 25x90 rectangular lot standard in new developments is actually just about the most efficient use of land possible in a detached subdivision. Given that developers can get away with it and people will still buy the houses they aim to cram as many in as possible. That's also why we see the newest developments moving back to straight grids of streets - fewer curves mean more efficient land use. This is also partially responsible for the return to rear-access laneway garages; the garage can take up the full width of the lot at the back rather than having to leave space for the front door and saves a couple feet of width on a narrower house.

I'm no fan of sprawl, but the developers are on their own increasing density to very high levels, simply by the economics of it. The fact is that Canadians are comfortable with tiny lots while Americans are not.

Cul de sacs are common where land is cheaper (as in KW and Calgary) or where the development site is small and there is no other option (common in BC) The pie lots give larger back yards which are popular, and foster a sense of community.

What I find amusing about that, is that the virtues of suburban life are kind of a bit hard to follow when you see how crammed in new houses really are. There's barely space for kids to play, or you can have a garden (but good luck with that as you'll find the yard is sod tossed atop a packed, infertile mixture of subsoil and construction debris), the front yard is a 6 inch strip of dirt between your and your neighbour's driveways and the traffic is hardly relaxing. The desire to own a house is one thing, but when they're like that, I don't see how it's any better than a more centrally located condo with a largish balcony.

 

[doady]

I'm no fan of sprawl, but the developers are on their own increasing density to very high levels, simply by the economics of it. The fact is that Canadians are comfortable with tiny lots while Americans are not.

Yeah that's why I find it hard to take term "McMansion" seriously when it is applied to the GTA. Same with the term "exurb". It doesn't make sense for the GTA.

The thing with cul-de-sacs is that they block travel. But developers in GTA are usually required to facilitate pedestrian access to arterials (and access to the bus stops). The pedestrian walkways and openings negate the effect of the road pattern on pedestrians. Suburbs in the US don't have this... in US suburbs, pedestrians are blocked.

Try to find a suburban arterial corridor in the US will the same bus service and ridership as you find along any major road in the 905. You probably won't even find a Mavis Road in the US, let alone a Hurontario Street.

So I don't see how US examples can be applied to the GTA. I'm not saying GTA suburbs have no problems, but let's be reasonable...

 

[W. K. Lis]

Two articles on the internet describe how young people are not rushing out to get their driver's licenses or car ownership.

The first, Is the Digital Age Changing Our Desire to Drive? at this link, describes how the:

Younger generations seem to have less interest in automotive use, making apartment living in dense, walkable and transit-oriented urban areas a more natural fit for their lifestyles.

The second, Young People on Car Ownership: Meh at this link, describes how:

When compared to earlier generations, this generation of 18-35 year-olds seem to be less and less interested in cars. Younger people these days are more interested in spending their money on socializing with friends or the latest technology. They are more and more likely to put off buying a car and take public transit. Some young people are making the decision to forgo driving altogether.

 

[TrickyRicky]

Interesting theory but I suspect the drop in automobile use is almost solely economic in nature. 18-35 year olds are having families later and have less economic means than their parents generation, or rather they have more life-style expectations and so are putting off major life decisions such as career, family and home until later in life.

 

[nrb]

The simple reason for that is that the pie-shaped lots are quite inefficient of land - the 25x90 rectangular lot standard in new developments is actually just about the most efficient use of land possible in a detached subdivision. Given that developers can get away with it and people will still buy the houses they aim to cram as many in as possible. That's also why we see the newest developments moving back to straight grids of streets - fewer curves mean more efficient land use. This is also partially responsible for the return to rear-access laneway garages; the garage can take up the full width of the lot at the back rather than having to leave space for the front door and saves a couple feet of width on a narrower house.

I'm no fan of sprawl, but the developers are on their own increasing density to very high levels, simply by the economics of it. The fact is that Canadians are comfortable with tiny lots while Americans are not.

Cul de sacs are common where land is cheaper (as in KW and Calgary) or where the development site is small and there is no other option (common in BC) The pie lots give larger back yards which are popular, and foster a sense of community.

What I find amusing about that, is that the virtues of suburban life are kind of a bit hard to follow when you see how crammed in new houses really are. There's barely space for kids to play, or you can have a garden (but good luck with that as you'll find the yard is sod tossed atop a packed, infertile mixture of subsoil and construction debris), the front yard is a 6 inch strip of dirt between your and your neighbour's driveways and the traffic is hardly relaxing. The desire to own a house is one thing, but when they're like that, I don't see how it's any better than a more centrally located condo with a largish balcony.

Are you sure about this? I was fairly certain it was the opposite. According to this: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/publications/en/rh-pr/tech/socio75.html

Efficiency is chiefly the result of combining two standard street types—loops and culs-de-sac—with long blocks. Contrary to popular opinion, the curvilinear streets that are typical of conventional suburban subdivisions are not inefficient; they reflect an aesthetic preference and have little impact on land consumption.While irregular lot shapes do not pack efficiently, this is of relatively little consequence at low densities. In fact, for comparable residential densities, loop and cul-de-sac street patterns are more efficient than traditional gridiron geometry (which is why they are preferred by most developers).According to the technical literature on street planning, conventional suburban street layouts consume 16-25 per cent less land than the traditional grids advocated by new urbanism

The average buildable area for a cul-de-sac layout is 76% versus 64-68% for grid systems.

There are other reasons developers chose twisty roads over grids for new developments. Mainly, that it's really convienent for driving. With a grid system there are stop signs everywhere and it's annoying to drive through. Try driving through a street car suburb, it's just stop, look both ways, go, stop, repeat, ad nauseum until you get to the arterial. For most recent developments you have maybe one intersection you have to cross before you reach the arterial.

 

[W. K. Lis]

This article is from Conservative Planner:

Life imitates art? Or does urban planning imitate mass-produced industrialized art?

The kids’ play area at the Salt Lake City airport was designed by an artist or industrial engineer who had a keen sense of how to replicate the dilemmas of city development patterns, circa 2010. Perhaps Reid Ewing can venture from his new gig at University of Utah to evaluate this emerging planning conundrum near the E Gates (see full-size image at bottom of post for reference).

A: School: The school site is located on the cheapest land on the fringe of the town, making it inaccessible to nearby residential neighborhoods.

B: Safe Routes to Schools: The lack of sidewalks, combined with the railroad crossing, create an unsafe situation for children whose parents would like to have them walk to school.

C: Abandoned Train Station: The town recently lost out on the eighth round of stimulus grants geared toward funding new High Speed Rail investments.

D. Random Park Bench: This is the tell-tale sign that a landscape architect was involved with this beautification project in the early 2000s to help bring life back to the west side of downtown. The project stalled when overruns by the Public Works Department left the project without its water feature.

E. McMansion: Gargantuan house is out of scale with surrounding neighborhood. The residents terrorize the neighborhood and children trying to walk to school with their matching SUV.

F. Barrier Effect of the Railroad: The tracks create a barrier to walkability in the town, prohibiting residents from walking to enjoy the quaint downtown.

G. Underutilized Downtown: Even without those dirty deeds by developers to bring a Walmart to town, the downtown is suffering from a lack of businesses and street life. The town’s goal to bring artists and boutique shops was never realized due to personality conflicts between the local planning board and the chamber of commerce.

H. City Park: The park is unfortunately located on an environmentally-degraded site on the edge of town, the result of a manufacturing plant that skipped town 20 years ago and left the town without a major employer or a business generator for the freight railroad.

I. Surface Parking Lot: The downtown merchants complained of a parking problem downtown after years of being in a state of denial over their employees occupying parking spaces on Main Street, prohibiting shoppers from accessing their stores. The town spent millions to acquire land on the edge of downtown to build a non-descript parking facility that is rarely used except by vagrants wishing to make drug deals.

J. Hospital: The town’s only medical facility is located on the opposite side of town from the residential areas, which increases emergency response times and hampers the city-owned ambulance services ability to efficiently serve the populace without annual budget increases that exceed the annual growth rate of the city’s budget.

K. Airport: The airport was over-built in hopes of luring an aviation-based industry or serve as a reliever airport for the international airport in the capital city, which is 25 miles up the road.

L. Pond: Old Farmer Johnson’s pond, which served as local fishing hole for kids for more than 50 years, is being converted to stormwater retention facility for the airport.

M. Farm: Farmer Johnson’s barn is in violation of the newly created Airport Overlay Zoning District which has restricted the height of buildings to make a sixth attempt at luring an air freight business to the airport. This has resulted in…

N: Tuscan Sun Meadows: The over-regulatory nature of the town makes Farmer Johnson’s agricultural endeavors a drain on his limited resources. He has optioned the land to a developer who is in the process of bulldozing the original Johnson homestead.

O: Streets: The lack of a contiguous street system in the town (it only has a link-node ratio of 0.85) combined with the new residential lots within Tuscan Sun Meadows will over-burden the town’s intersections. The lack of density prohibits transit from being a variable option for travel. Walk Score gives the town a “96 – Walker’s Paradise.â€

 

[lafard]

Are you sure about this? I was fairly certain it was the opposite. According to this: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/publications/en/rh-pr/tech/socio75.html



The average buildable area for a cul-de-sac layout is 76% versus 64-68% for grid systems.

There are other reasons developers chose twisty roads over grids for new developments. Mainly, that it's really convienent for driving. With a grid system there are stop signs everywhere and it's annoying to drive through. Try driving through a street car suburb, it's just stop, look both ways, go, stop, repeat, ad nauseum until you get to the arterial. For most recent developments you have maybe one intersection you have to cross before you reach the arterial.

It needs to be pointed out that that 76% is offset by the fact you need a perimeter road around such a subdivision, and it's probably 6+ lanes wide. In the grid pattern there is not usually a perimeter road and if there is it is not usually that wide. The economics have also changed based on road allowance width; compare a new development to the old houses south of U of T.

They've since returned to favouring squarer systems. It is also not just about "buildable area" but how many houses you can fit into a given area of a lot. A square lot can be 25 feet wide front and back; a pie shaped lot has to be about 20 feet wide at the front to fit a garage in and widens out dramatically at the back. This is not land-efficient.

Compare this to this. The first is in Maple (very new, not gridded but everything's parallel), the second in Waterloo (a very American style subdivision). Look at how dense the Vaughan development is; there is no way you could fit that many houses into the waterloo subdivision. You'll also see on the Vaughan subdivsion that the only patches of "wasted" land are on the curves.

Canadian tolerance of the Vaughan sized lots allows developers to really cram them in, which favours straight roads over curvy.

(edit: to show what I'm saying, check out the generous yards in the Vaughan subdivision

 

[W. K. Lis]

This link takes you to an article by a traffic engineer, titled Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, by Charles Marohn. Despite years of training and millennial of precedents, Marohn now feels that the common practice of traffic engineering is creating bad and even unsafe streets.

Of course the people who wrote the standards knew better than we did. That is why they wrote the standard.

When people would tell me that they did not want a wider street, I would tell them that they had to have it for safety reasons.

When they answered that a wider street would make people drive faster and that would be seem to be less safe, especially in front of their house where their kids were playing, I would confidently tell them that the wider road was more safe, especially when combined with the other safety enhancements the standards called for.

When people objected to those other "enhancements", like removing all of the trees near the road, I told them that for safety reasons we needed to improve the sight distances and ensure that the recovery zone was free of obstacles.

When they pointed out that the "recovery zone" was also their "yard" and that their kids played kickball and hopscotch there, I recommended that they put up a fence, so long as the fence was outside of the right-of-way.

When they objected to the cost of the wider, faster, treeless road that would turn their peaceful, front yard into the viewing area for a drag strip unless they built a concrete barricade along their front property line, I informed them that progress was sometimes expensive, but these standards have been shown to work across the state, the country and the world and I could not compromise with their safety.

In retrospect I understand that this was utter insanity. Wider, faster, treeless roads not only ruin our public places, they kill people. Taking highway standards and applying them to urban and suburban streets, and even county roads, costs us thousands of lives every year. There is no earthly reason why an engineer would ever design a fourteen foot lane for a city block, yet we do it continuously. Why?

The answer is utterly shameful: Because that is the standard.

 

[Dan416]

A lot of recent development in the remaining farmland left in Mississauga has been "grid-like". My question is, why not just go all-out and do a GRID. It can't be that hard! Why ruin a grid with squarish crescents and angles?

 

[W. K. Lis]

Despite all the forecasts of rising fuel prices, people are still buying SUV's. Seeing as how Toronto got in an anti-transit mayor, it should be of no surprise.

From www.washingtonpost.com:

SUVs lead U.S. auto sales growth despite efforts to improve fuel efficiency

If U.S. consumers are in the midst of a green revolution, the news hasn't reached car buyers.

With the end of the recession, bigger vehicles have made a comeback, sales figures show, and it has come at the expense of smaller, more-efficient cars.

Leading the growth were sales of midsize sport-utility vehicles, which jumped 41 percent through the first 11 months of the year, led by vehicles such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the Honda Pilot, each of which get about 18 miles per gallon.

Sales of small cars, by contrast, remained flat despite otherwise surging demand for automobiles. Sales of the Toyota Corolla and the Honda Civic declined, and even the fuel-sipping Toyota Prius, the hybrid darling of the eco-conscious, dropped 1.7 percent.

"You have about 5 percent of the market that is green and committed to fuel efficiency," said Mike Jackson, the chief executive of AutoNation, the largest auto retailer in the country. "But the other 95 percent will give up an extra 5 mpg in fuel economy for a better cup holder."

Overall, car and light-truck purchases climbed 12 percent from January to November, led by the consumer tilt toward SUVs and pickups, according to recent numbers from Autodata.

The rise in SUV sales comes as the auto industry, government officials and advertisers have been agog this year with environmental sentiment and boasts about the fuel efficiency of new battery plug-in cars, such as the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf, which recently went on sale.

General Motors ads have touted the Volt, which runs on a battery for the first 40 miles, as "something we can all be proud of."

Nissan has pitched the all-electric Leaf with an ad about a polar bear displaced by global warming. It calls the car "innovation for the planet."

And President Obama, following the government rescue of GM last year and investment in battery plants around the country, has predicted a "new beginning" for a domestic industry that would manufacture "the fuel-efficient cars and trucks that will carry us towards an energy-independent future."

But building more-efficient cars and getting consumers to buy them are different issues. Consumers' tastes are a critical factor in determining the extent to which the nation can reduce its gasoline consumption and, in turn, greenhouse gas emissions and dependency on foreign oil.

In one sense, automakers have been improving fuel efficiency for years, selling cars with ever-more-efficient engines. In fact, a car purchased today is able to extract nearly twice as much power from a gallon of gas as its counterpart did 25 years ago.

But those gains in efficiency have been used to build bigger cars with more power, not save gas. The average mileage of the cars and light trucks on the road has barely budged since 1985.

"We have the technology, but what consumers choose is another matter," said Gloria Bergquist, a vice president with the industry trade group Auto Alliance. "We need to get the technology out on the road."

Brendan Bell, vehicles lobbyist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes that consumers have scaled back their enthusiasm for the very largest SUVs and that forthcoming changes in federal fuel economy standards will force cars in all classes to be more efficient.

"It's not like we are going back to where we were in 2007," he said.

The most recent round of fuel economy standards, which were announced earlier this year, will push carmakers to achieve an average of 34 mpg by 2016 through annual improvements of about 4 percent.

Coming up for debate early next year are the rules that would set standards through 2025, and already some environmental groups have called for a goal of 60 mpg, an achievement that could add more than $2,000 to the cost of a car, according to some estimates.

But corralling U.S. drivers into more fuel-efficient cars can be difficult, particularly because gasoline has remained off its peak prices of 2007. When fuel prices are low, it takes longer for consumers to get a return on their investment in fuel-saving technologies, such as hybrids and plug-in vehicles.

This is true even when the government offers as much as $7,500 in incentives, as it is doing for the Leaf and Volt.

GM expects to sell about 10,000 Volts this year, and Nissan expects to sell about 25,000 Leafs in the United States, a very small number compared with the millions of sport wagons and SUVs purchased by Americans annually.

Jackson likened the appeal of small fuel-efficient cars to broccoli and the fuel-gulping one to that of doughnuts.

"If you are selling both, most people are going to go for the doughnuts," he said. "As long as you have cheap fuel, it's hard to get people to do what's good for them and good for the country. . . . It's been the same for a decade."

 

[GraphicMatt]

You've got to be careful with the rising fuel prices thing. What we saw when prices spiked the last time was that people a) cut back on recreational trips with their vehicles, and b) put more weight on fuel economy when it came time to choose their next vehicle. Even SUVs and pick-ups saw fuel economy improve. People are getting better gas mileage today than they were five years ago.

But it would take a hell of a spike to make a significant impact in people's day-to-day commuting patterns - we're talking like a several hundred percentage points increase. The slow price increases we're seeing aren't going to result in significant change. Mostly people will just complain about it. Worse, it will encourage politicians to push for more environmentally destructive methods of oil extraction. We're already seeing this in our country.

Relying too much on one metric (oil prices) is dangerous because it leads people to think that the current sprawl-based lifestyle is sustainable, if only we can all switch to electric vehicles or whatever. Of course, the reality is that it is unlikely we'll be able to move to infinitely renewable energy sources wholesale and so still the best solution is to encourage more urban development where people live close to where they work.

 

[gabe]

SUVs are a lot cheaper in the states, brand new Honda Pilot in the states is nearly 30 thousand, in Canada that same SUV is almost 40 thousand!! Cross over to Buffalo just about every house has a Cadillac Escalade in the driveway.

 

[W. K. Lis]

I have owned the same Ford Taurus (2000) for the past 11 years. 10 years ago, it would cost me about $20 for a fill-up from a almost empty tank. Today, I would have to spend $60 for a fill-up from an almost empty tank. That is a fill-up each week, if I actually filled-up each each week, which luckily I don't. I use the TTC instead, but use the car only when I have to carry heavy or large trunk loads.

 

[cmd uw]

"If you are selling both, most people are going to go for the doughnuts," he said. "As long as you have cheap fuel, it's hard to get people to do what's good for them and good for the country. . . . It's been the same for a decade."

It's amazing how quickly people forget the past and the 'panic' that set in when gas hit over $5/gallon in the US. Anybody who buys a vehicle that 'eats gas' is hoping that fuel prices will remain as is or stay low are in for a big surprise. If the current price of oil is sitting at $90 US/barrel while most economies are easing out of a recession, what will the price be when it recovers? 5 years from now I wouldnt doubt if the price of gas will be averaging $5/gallon in the US and $1.75/L in Canada.

 

[GraphicMatt]

Even at $1.75/L you're talking about $105 to fill up a 60 litre tank. That's certainly not cheap, but I don't think that cost - even assuming four fill-ups a month - is enough to convince a die-hard driver that public transit is the way to go.

More likely they'll just complain, leading to conservative politicians in both Canada and the U.S. running on "Let's drill in nature preserves" drill-baby-drill type platforms, all in the hopes of keeping costs down for another few years.