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Comparing New-Urbanist and Sprawl Suburbs
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REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION |
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New Urbanism
- Mass transit—light-rail, buses, subways—is within walking distance of most homes and businesses.
- The goals:
- fewer car trips
- fewer highways
- shorter commutes
- more time for family and community life
- less car-exhaust pollution
- Mass transit can also bring city-based low-income workers into job-rich suburbs—“no car” doesn’t have to mean “no job.”
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Sprawl
- Highways are often choked with traffic and its pollution, due largely to
- street plans that feed cars onto a few big roads,
- lack of convenient mass transit, and
- isolation of retail and residential complexes, which require a car trip for nearly every errand or visit.
- Roads are often widened to ease congestion, which attracts more drivers to the area, who soon fill the roads to capacity again, prompting appeals for further widening.
- Businesses relocate from traditional main streets and scatter along a few wide roads designed mainly for cars—few sidewalks, vast parking lots, and so on.
- Results:
- In the U.S. a two-car suburban family makes ten car trips a day, on average.
- In one year a commuter with a one-hour commute (each way) spends the equivalent of about 12 workweeks driving to and from work.
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STREET PLAN |
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New Urbanism
- An interconnected street network distributes traffic evenly and makes walking easy by offering direct routes between points.
- Connected streets ease traffic by providing drivers with alternate routes.
- With many alternate routes, streets can be narrower, making them safer to cross and less land intensive.
- Sharp street corners, narrow streets, and frequent intersections naturally induce drivers to go more slowly and be more alert.
- Each street follows one general direction—north-south for example—allowing for easier navigation and better orientation.
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Sprawl
- Subdivision street networks and retail and office parking lots often connect only with a wide, pedestrian-unfriendly collector road. A result: quiet subdivisions, gridlocked main roads.
- Residents need a car for even the simplest errand.
- Streets designed for easy driving—wide lanes, vast cul-de-sacs, few and wide intersections, few trees or buildings that block lines of sight—may encourage speeding, endanger pedestrians, and discourage walking and bicycling.
- Subdivision streets often twirl back on themselves or dead-end, confounding even the best sense of direction.
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SHOPS, CIVIC BUILDINGS, WORKPLACES |
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New Urbanism
- Mixed-use zoning allows for shops, restaurants, offices, and homes all to be within walking distance of each other—or even in the same building.
- With most of life’s necessities within walking distance, fewer car trips are made, easing pollution and encouraging community interaction.
- The young and the very old—those carless millions—enjoy a measure of independence, bicycling to the soccer field, say, or walking to the movies.
- Allowing for apartments and offices above stores provides patronage for the shops, living space for lower-income residents, and activity for the sidewalk—and a busy sidewalk is generally a safer sidewalk.
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Sprawl
- Zoning generally prohibits developers from building shops, restaurants, or offices within neighborhoods.
- Some characteristic results:
- A vast office park next to a sea of houses next to a massive municipal center beside a shopping mall—no town center and little sense of community to speak of.
- More homeowners have expansive yards.
- Kids remain dependent on their parents for transportation until they reach driving age.
- The loss of a driver’s license puts many seniors out of reach of the store, the restaurant, the theater—and into retirement communities away from their hometowns.
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