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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   2572 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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For purposes of "traffic calming", urban planners (1 2) often make the roads in residential neighborhoods curved rather than straight. What if a developer were to simply use a space-filling curve to lay out his residential subdivision on a single ridiculously curved road?

Example subdivisions appropriate for the International Zoning Code's R1d single-family-residential zone: 1 (Hilbert curve), 2 (curve name unknown), 3 (Peano curve)

See also: Small intestine

@Southkraut: "Outmanoeuver"? A daring synthesis, as the cool kids say.

Exhibit A in 'how to make your local fire/ambulance/police department planning agency very annoyed at you'. Another problem is anything that results in a closure of a section of street will cut off a lot of people. Yet another problem is if this is put anywhere that gets winter conditions.

I suppose one could put in authorized-only cutthroughs similar to how divided highways do, though this would eat into the area for housing, and would require enforcement to prevent them from becoming impromptu shortcuts.

anything that results in a closure of a section of street will cut off a lot of people

It's a loop, with one travel lane and one parking lane (which can be cleared in emergencies) in each direction. I don't see how anyone would ever be cut off.

Anacdote:

The town I live in has had two short sections of street completely car-impassible & blocked off within the past week. Not a problem due to the grid structure except for ~4 houses.

(One due to a water main break, and one due to a power line across the street.)

I think you are underestimating how often this happens due to the normally-relatively-contained consequences.

Digging up the road to fix a water/gas/sewer main or something is the usual reason -- roads also need to be repaved from time to time.

Road work normally is not conducted in such a manner as to block the entire street. Rather, work will be conducted on half of the street, and traffic will be directed through the other half of the street (using alternating flow and flaggers if half of the street is too narrow for two lanes of traffic).

Not in places with sane street grids -- even in cases where you might theoretically be able to dig up one side (ie. not any sort of service main, which doesn't reliably stick to a particular part of the street) at a time it's way more efficient to put up a "Detour" sign and get the work done ASAP. Also safer, as you don't have traffic-worker interaction all the time.

I like the Hilbert Curve one. I would add some backyard foothpaths to it (green = definitely should be added, blue = might be skipped, but they really improve the walkability), as shown on the attached image. This way walking/cycling will become the preferred way to move around the neighborhood.

Another idea: upzone it to R3b, so you can utilize these ring-sector-shaped corner lots better. If you put multiple-unit dwellings on them, they become natural shortcuts and you no longer need blue-colored footpaths.

/images/17395455291457095.webp

AUTISMVILLE LOOKS LIT!!!!

I just need a small loan of one million dollars to bring it to fruition.

I imagine people wouldn't want to live there considering how much more time-consuming it would be to get in and out of your neighborhood.

In the biggest Hilbert-curve subdivision, the distance from the center to the nearest edge is 8000 feet (2400 meters) in a car versus 2000 feet (600 meters) as the crow flies (or on one of the pedestrian paths proposed by another commenter). Is that such a huge price to pay for an ultra-quiet neighborhood?

@Felagund

It's not just the difference in straight-line distance. It's also that it's a lot of back-to-back sharp 90 and 180 degree turns, which are slow and exhausting to drive especially in winter conditions.

Admittedly, this observation is based on the base curves not your catboxes - catbox blocks a surprisingly large chunk of the internet, myself included.

slow and exhausting to drive

This is basically a feature, people should be driving slow in neighborhoods.

Sorry, let me rephrase:

With a conventional layout most of a trip is outside neighborhoods, with only a little bit at the start and end that's slow & exhausting to drive, so it's mostly fine.

With this layout you have to travel far further within said traffic-calmed (read: slow and exhausting to drive) area.

Imgur album

The inside radius of the right-of-way lines shown in these images is 30 feet. When you add the 6-foot sidewalk and the 8-foot parking lane, you get an effective inside radius of 44 feet for the travel lanes. (Standard minimum travel-lane inside radii are 25 feet for a passenger car, 30 feet for a single-unit delivery truck, and 40 feet for a shorter multi-unit truck. A long fire truck can swing wide into the oncoming lane.)

Ok, so less sharp than I was imagining. Thank you for the mirror.

I still think the Hilbert curve one would be slow and exhausting to drive, especially in winter conditions. The Peano curve may be alright - though at that point one wonders why you bother with the Peano curve as opposed to just a Boustrophedon.

You could make it more equitable by making it a one-way road. This way every resident would have to drive the same distance.

"Oh no I drove past my friend's house."

(hopefully this isn't considered a low-effort post)

Should've used the guest parking and walked.

This works fine for someone who is able-bodied and does not need to carry more than a few items into the house.

For someone who does not meet these conditions...?

They can use their motorized scooter

It would be worse if you scaled it up, though. Or were you planning just that size?

Under one state's subdivision law (§§ 4.1 and 4.2): The biggest Hilbert-curve subdivision that I've drawn would generate traffic of around 3600 trips per day (362 single-family houses × 10.1 (trips per day) per house). That already is a little above the permitted limit of 3500 trips per day for a "minor collector" street, which is the highest-level street on which houses should front. So this is just about the biggest Hilbert-curve subdivision that you can make without running into problems.

10 trips per house per day? That sounds like way too many.

Two commuters, a school bus, a mail carrier, and a trash/recycling truck or a delivery van add up to ten trips (in and out are counted separately) pretty easily.

Note that this is for ordinary "single-family detached housing". "High-rise apartment" generates only 5.0 trips per day, and "senior adult housing—detached" generates only 3.7 trips per day.

A school bus, a mail carrier and a trash/recycling truck do one trip for all households in the subdivision. It seems disingenuous to multiply them by the number of households.

The developer probably can make that argument to the zoning board. (And I'm not a traffic engineer, so I may be misrepresenting it anyway.)

Yeah, this is funny, but a horrible experience to live in.

@Southkraut: "Outmanoeuver"? A daring synthesis, as the cool kids say.

I'm just a tired old Swabian who pretends to speak english. I don't get it. What are you saying? What has it to do with roads?

American: Outman(eu)v(er)

British: Outman(oeu)v(re)

Your fascinating innovation: Outman(oeu)v(er)

Ooh, now I see it. Yeah, typo. Thanks for pointing it out.

You know how we Germans fixed it? Manöver. There. That's how you appropriate a French word!

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