Urban Dinosaurs: It's Time These 8 Things Went Extinct In Our Cities
We do a lot of writing here about the gold standard for urban design—walkable, human-scale places with a granular development pattern that encourages healthy evolution and adaptation over time. Lovable, resilient, and financially productive places.
But we get the need for pragmatism too: we live in a world where stuff is going to get built that doesn't pass every litmus test for great design. People get to choose what to do with their property, and developers are going to respond to what the market and financing will bear right now and what they believe their customers want right now.
In that real world, there's a need for some pragmatic lines in the sand: Okay, you can have your parking garage, but can you at least not build it like that?!
I hit up the Strong Towns Community site—our dedicated platform for Strong Towns members to meet each other and ask questions, offer advice and spark discussion—to crowd-source some ideas for a list of design features that should go the way of the dinosaur, lest the next generation be forced to cringe 25 years from now at our hard-to-reverse bad choices. And our brilliant members obliged with some good ones.
Some of these pertain to the public realm—the streets, the sidewalks, things the government itself ought to permanently stop doing. Some of them are about the private realm: things we might consider prohibiting developers from ever doing on their own land, because it harms and degrades the public realm when they do.
Either way, as a Strong Towns advocate, I'd be happy if I never saw another one of these urban design mistakes again in my city. How about you?
1. Sloped parking
One no-go for me is parking garages with exposed, sloped floors. I was walking near my downtown a couple months ago and stumbled upon this view down an otherwise awesome residential street, and it made me mad.
Aside from the eyesore factor, sloped parking is effectively impossible to ever retrofit into other uses. You can sometimes retrofit a parking garage with level floors. This one is just doomed to look like this forever until someone tears it down, even if demand for parking were to plummet a decade from now.
You don't have to even get into a debate about whether parking is necessary (I, like many Americans, live in an auto-dependent place where almost everyone has a car) in order to say, "Sure, you can build parking for your new apartment complex if you want, but it can't be this kind.
2. Snout houses
Oink oink oink.
Member Jared nominated the classic snout house, or a house in which a front-facing garage door dominates the facade.
Nobody needs to live in a glorified loading dock. Homebuilders do these not because anybody especially loves them, but because they're often the easiest way to cram a house with an attached garage onto a lot without applying much thought or creativity. Time to mandate some thought and ban the snout house, which ensures a lifeless, unpleasant street for decades to come.
Unfortunately, sometimes even our local governments get in on the snout-building trend, as Cory observes:
My historic small town just remodeled the city hall to look exactly like this on steroids as the garage doors had to be even bigger for city vehicles. I protested to the city council, planning commission and historic district commission to no avail. It seems we love our cars, garages and parking over all else.
3. Ultra-wide residential streets
If you can land a 747 in your subdivision, something is very wrong. Marianna nominated this menace for our Hall of Shame:
"Wide residential streets meant to accommodate fire equipment that ultimately encourage speeding."
These jumbo-sized streets not only cue drivers to go at dangerous speeds, they also render it impossible for the neighborhood to ever enjoy some of the perks of a great residential street, like a pleasing canopy of shade from mature trees. And Marianna also identified one of the key reasons we keep building them: a misguided insistence on the part of fire departments.
If you're in one of those communities where the fire department insists on a minimum street width so that they have no trouble maneuvering their enormous trucks in the event of an emergency, send your elected officials this one of our all-time great articles by Steve Mouzon. It thoroughly debunks the notion that this practice has any benefit for public safety.
4. Four-lane death roads
I’m going to borrow one for this list that didn’t come from my crowd-sourcing exercise, but instead from a classic Streets.mn post a few years ago that deserves all the attention it can get. The Four Lane Death Road (h/t Bill Lindeke for the term) is not just a stroad. It's a particularly noxious type of stroad. The grandaddy of stroads. It looks like this.
These are the result of transportation planners shoehorning four lanes of traffic into a narrow right-of-way that won't accommodate much else—a shoulder, a median, a bicycle lane, etc. Add the complexities of an urban environment, like people turning in and out of the roadway to access adjacent businesses and homes, and you have a street that is horrifyingly deadly by design.
Not only should we never approve another one of these, every city with these roads should begin fixing the ones it has, right-sizing them into safer, more appropriate urban streets.
5. Retail that turns its back on the street
Photo by Sean Hayford Oleary.
The age of the strip mall with parking in front is waning, and for good reason: nothing kills the sidewalk experience like being sandwiched between a parking lot and a busy street.
But the new replacement trend isn't always positive. A lot of suburban chain retailers have been wrangled by city regulations into moving their parking to the side or back of the store, but they've moved the "front" of the store to the back right along with the parking lot, surmising (probably correctly) that that's how most of their customers will be entering.
The problem is it creates a dead street that's hostile to human activity. Like this gem of an example of malicious compliance, in which a transformer box and some landscaping send a clear message:
"Okay, they told us we had to have a door facing the sidewalk. They didn't tell us we had to make one our customers would ever want to use!"
6. "Pod" subdivisions
Subdivision requirements—your city's blueprint for how the streets and lots in a neighborhood can or can't be laid out—don't always get the scrutiny that zoning codes do. But they should. Especially because ill-fated choices involving the basic layout of the city are much, much harder to undo than a single piece of private property which can be redeveloped later.
I'm ready to call it: huge enclave-style subdivisions with only one or two ways in and out are one of the most disastrous features of the suburban experiment. Every rapidly growing suburb sooner or later seems to develop a traffic problem, and these things are the reason why. It’s because they funnel every single trip their residents take—even a quick run to the store for milk—onto the same few arterial stroads. This is a near-certain recipe for congestion.
And don't even get me started on how lack of connectivity disadvantages those who aren't in a motor vehicle. It's one thing to go half a mile out of your way in a car because there’s no direct through route. It’s a whole different level of inconvenience to do so on a bike or on foot or (god forbid) with a wheelchair or walker.
There's never a bad time to share the infamous photo of two Orlando houses with adjoining backyards that are an eye-popping 7 miles apart by car. So here it is.
7. Reeeeeeeally long blocks
Strong Towns member Paul offers this submission to the list, which offers a practical way of addressing the "pod" issue as well a couple related ones:
I am reluctant to ban most things but I would ban long blocks and large block perimeters. Small blocks provide more intersections and more transportation choices. Caps on block perimeters will limit how far you have to travel to get to the front door of the neighbor who shares your back property line. Both of these are design features that make a big difference if real people are going to live in our communities. They have a safety aspect because emergency vehicles have more than one way to get in and out but the economic value of having more amenities and neighbors in close proximity is my main motivation.
In general I think we ban too much good stuff already. We need to find the things that benefit developers and the local government. Those things we should make legal. With block length and block perimeters there is a lot of benefit to a city for keeping them small but I have not found a benefit that a developer would appreciate.
8. Huge curb radii
An intersection that has been repaired to reduce the curb radius and create safer walking conditions. You can see where the old, more rounded, curb used to be. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The little things make a big difference in street design. For example, the seemingly innocuous choice to have a rounded curb, rather than one that's a bit closer to square, at an intersection seems to facilitate right turns and make life more comfortable for turning drivers.
The problem: it makes life a lot scarier for anybody out walking. A driver flying around a turn at high speed is way more likely to never even see you in the crosswalk until it's too late. This kind of intersection is a tragedy waiting to happen, and needs to never be built again.
Slip lanes in urban environments—with the dreaded pork chop island—are another variant of this trend that needs to go the way of the dinosaur. As Strong Towns member and Transportation for America communications director Stephen Davis wrote for us last year, these lanes would never exist if we prioritized safety over speed.
(Cover photo via Flickr)
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In this episode of Upzoned, co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn discuss the professional silos that often form between the disciplines that help shape the built environment and how those barriers could be broken down.