[mc32]

I like some suburbs. However, not far from downtown San Jose, within the city limits, there is some interesting tract housing developments: they have soundwall like structures surrounding these neighborhoods that are built like a maze. Once in it can be hard to find your way out without GPS to one of the few entrances/exits.

So that’s in a city, not even the maligned suburbs!

[randycupertino]

I think some of the walls like that might even be for "traffic dampening" ie- so people don't cut through the neighborhoods to get somewhere else.

[pharmakom]

This is correct. Where this often goes wrong is that the planners don’t allow pedestrians and cyclists to take shortcuts, making driving the faster option for even short trips.

[VHRanger]

Are those single family zoned?

Because if so they're also responsible for housing prices being insane in the area

[mc32]

Pretty sure they are. Look at a map of San Jose and check out the areas around Quimby or Tully Roads in east(ern) San Jose.

[bombcar]

I just see standard developments - anything more specific?

Heh found a trailer park.

[mc32]

To me a place like hidden glen north is odd. It's a tract surrounded by soundwalls and has few exits from the development, whereas in normal developments you have intersections with all streets. This kind of development follows the thoroughfare model where smaller streets feed larger streets which feed boulevards/expressways which feed freeways. They are built in such a way the actual city neighborhood is disconnected from its surroundings and makes transit by anything other than car difficult -buses don't go in, and biking is fraught -all relatively close to the downtown area. Suburbs are better designed than that.

[handrous]

> It's a tract surrounded by soundwalls and has few exits from the development, whereas in normal developments you have intersections with all streets.

I'm not sure any development built after about 1975 in my midwestern metro area isn't like this, including the sound walls if they're next to an interstate or major highway.

My neighborhood, with... oh, I dunno 150houses? At least a dozen named-and-numbered streets present in it? It has two exits. Get this: one of those can only be entered if you're going a particular direction on the road it intersects, because there's an unbroken median curb there. So it's more like 1.5 entrances.

Our neighborhood before this one? Two exits (it's bigger than this neighborhood and still developing, so I expect it'll get a third pretty soon).

Our neighborhood before that? One exit. One. technically two, but the second was marked "dead end" (it wasn't, really, but that was probably still the right thing to label it) and took you on a weird barely-developed road with no other intersecting roads, which looped you back up to the same highway the the neighborhood's other route would have put you on, so even for people who lived right by the connection to that road, leaving the normal way was faster.

The general rule seems to be: no more than one exit on any major road bounding the neighborhood. This means neighborhoods that are right next to each other can be slow to travel between on foot or by bike, without cutting through yards.

> They are built in such a way the actual city neighborhood is disconnected from its surroundings and makes transit by anything other than car difficult -buses don't go in, and biking is fraught -all relatively close to the downtown area.

Some folks for whom keeping a working car around isn't a big deal, consider it a feature that their neighborhoods are hard to reach by a combination of public transit and foot. Crime rates go up and the homeless population shoots up, they say, when they add a bus stop next to your neighborhood. Time to sell before the market drops if you see them working on a new bus stop in walking distance of your house, they say. (seriously, this is straight from several people I know, not something I'm inventing or guessing at)

[mc32]

You made me recall a time when I was broke while in school. I had classmates in neighborhoods like these. I'd take a bus and then hike to their place. But walking there was weird. People that saw you (most buried in their TVs or whatnot) looked at you like something was wrong. Like, what is someone doing _walking_ here (I usually walked fast, so it was clear I was coming and going), since I didn't visit often, they didn't "recognize" me apparently and walking really threw them off or marked me as "stranger" or slight "intruder" as I had not driven in -which was the normal mode.

[brightlancer]

"Crime rates go up and the homeless population shoots up, they say, when they add a bus stop next to your neighborhood."

Setting aside questions of morality, what part of that is factually incorrect?

In places where driving a car is more convenient than taking mass transit (almost everywhere in the US), mass transit is primarily used by persons who cannot afford to own a car. If a mass transit stop is added to a neighborhood which did not previously have one, that means poorer individuals and families can now live there (or visit there). There are known correlations between poverty (including homelessness) and crime, so it is logical that adding a mass transit stop will increase crime over time.

Why is that incorrect?

[bombcar]

I’ve seen some of those in Arizona - but even though there was one way in and out for cars there were multiple walking paths.