The Grid

It dawned on me yesterday that Frye Creek, the corner of which I live along with Moonlight Way in Elk Grove, has no houses on it over its entire length. Not one Elk Grovian house sports a Frye Creek address...a street that's almost a full mile long.

Frye Creek is nothing but a minor suburban collector road with no saleable property. Its sole function is not to house houses, but to house moving vehicles. This kind of shit would not exist if my neighborhood was laid out in a traditional grid.

This could be my neighborhood...but it ain't:

Nope. From above you couldn't tell if this is Elk Grove, CA or Greenville, SC. Sprawl is conspicuously the same everywhere.

Note the curvilinear street (bottom left to the top right). This is similar to Frye Creek in shape except that this street actually has building frontage...but only on one side of the street at a time. The other collector road (top right to bottom right) has exactly zero...no building frontage at all.

The ability to move people and things in and out of a development is a requirement no matter how you lay out. But note, in just this snapshot you can see that about a full quarter of this plot of former farmland is the exclusive domain of motorized vehicles. In other words, a full quarter of this land and pavement is redundant. 25% more dirt, asphalt and concrete than would be required of a traditional grid. And and! the streets are ~25% wider than those in traditional development. No stretch of the imagination is necessary to see how a teenager might easily do 57mph on either of these collectors.

I'm at odds with the notion that, in this era of mega-efficiencies, just-in-time inventories and hypertrophic GDP, we continue to underwrite a universal mechanism to waste 25% of our farmlands, hillsides and praries and 25% of our non-renewables to build it.