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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   2572 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 14, 2025

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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.)

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