Kevin Smith presents a third option, seen above. A reader writes:
I'll concur with the dissenters. I'm on the grid in a dense part of Seattle. We have a narrow street that everyone parks on, so it's one way. That means that you have to carefully navigate and frequently pull over to let other cars pass. We've got chicanes throughout the grid, which slows traffic further. Balls fly out in front of my car on a regular basis, but I'm usually already stopped. I'm going slow enough that I can see the kids playing ball and prepare for the inevitable. It's a miracle if I hit 20 mph. It means everyone in my neighborhood is out of town on vacation or something. I grew up on a cul-de-sac and was always going at least 30.
Examples of a chicanes here and roundabouts – also common in Seattle neighborhoods – here. Another writes:
I've now lived in a dense grid system, a small town grid system and suburban cul-de-sacs with children, and we've found the grid systems to be much more fun and freeing for our childern.
In a suburban cul-de-sac, children end up needing car rides to go anywhere, they can't go to the grocery or library by themselves even when they are less than a mile away from these places. Cul-de-sacs result in access to conveniences being farther away by road, inaccessible by sidewalk, and the roads that those conveniences are on being more heavily traveled by higher speed cars.
In a grid system, there is almost always a low-traffic path to things like a convenience store or grocery or school that kids can ride their bikes on. This allows kids to learn to be more independent, to explore, and to separate themselves from their families. When my sons first when to the grocery by themselves on their bikes, it was a big deal, and they were obviously proud of themselves. I expect that many suburban kids don't get that experience until they or their friends drive.
Or as one reader puts it:
Moving to a cul-de-sac for "safety" is a bit like installing all those "baby-proofing" implements for your house. As my friend David put it, "don't baby-proof the house; house-proof the baby!"
A previous contributor writes back:
The strong feelings that this topic generates are in part attempts to justify one’s own decisions. While my earlier email extolled the virtues of cul-de-sacs, I choose to live in the city because there’s so much beyond cul-de-sacs that I want to have available. Ultimately both arrangements have their pluses and minuses.
That said, what one poster said about the tendency for suburban kids to get run over in their own driveways is just pap. Some people do stupid, unaware stuff like back up without carefully looking first. Stupidity happens anywhere. Somehow linking it to suburbia is weak.
The reader follows up:
Thirty years or so ago, Berkeley, California installed a system of barricades specifically to cut off secondary streets from being used as primary conduits. At the time most people I know were livid. Since then, we’ve come to accept them, and secondary streets have become both safer and quieter. What does it say that arguably the most progressive city in the country sees fit to interrupt their grid system? Perhaps the answer is that neither the grid nor the cul-de-sac alone is optimal.
The Dish 