Sprawl reaches its absurd conclusion
Streetsblog posted a piece called "sprawl madness" about two houses with adjoining backyards in suburban Orlando. "If you want to travel the streets from point A on Anna Catherine Drive to point B on Summer Rain Drive, which are only 50 feet apart, you’ll have to go a minimum of seven miles. The trip would take almost twenty minutes in a car, according to Google Maps." This may be an extreme case, but the situation is not unusual in recently built suburbs. Early suburbs were curvilinear and less dense than cities, but their streets were mostly well connected. Over the decades, planners and engineers, aided and abetted by NIMBY attitudes, severed every connection possible until we get to the current absurdity illustrated here. This neighborhood in Orlando, mostly built out, has a Walk Score of 12 and average block size of 69 acres. From social connections to sustainability, health to livability, walking/bicycling to transit, everything is harder in such a place. Getting back to a connected network in the suburbs may require time travel — or at least decades of reverse engineering.
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