[freehunter]

In the cities (where this is true), that is a good thing. City streets are about efficiency of transport. A road that seems to go straight to your destination but then ends abruptly is not a good thing. Freeways are boring for the same reason. They're not meant to be exciting, they're meant to be roads.

Country roads in America are anything but boring, though. Some of them are bordering on downright dangerous with the twists, turns, and hills. I've never heard anyone argue that city streets were too efficient.

[toddmorey]

You may hear the first argument from me, though it's not mine. The Interstate Highway in America was modelled after the Autobahn in Germany. But we made two dramatic changes: (1) we put the highways right through cities instead of alongside them, and (2) we cut through the landscape rather than adhering to it (so our roads could be straight instead of winding).

There have been a few unintended consequences of those decisions. First, the highways literally divided cities like walls, cutting neighborhood access off from one community to another. I live close enough to my downtown to walk, but to do so, I'd have to cross a highway.

Second, there's some consensus among researchers that the long, straight stretches of highway contribute to driver fatigue in a way that a more active driving experience (from the occasional turns) does not.

While the autobahn curves with the landscape, it's not as dangerous as a country road. And by not dissecting the cities, it makes life in the city more efficient and connected.

[Spooky23]

Note that it wasn't always an unintended consequence. When Robert Moses built the expressway and parkway systems in NYC, he expressly targeted black and puerto rican neighborhoods to bear the brunt of the impact. On Long Island, his bulldozers sliced small farms in two, but avoided the great estates of the mega rich -- at huge expense to both taxpayers and generations of commuters.

[rcourtie]

This is anecdotal, but I can see this highway dividing towns pretty starkly in Menlo Park. The town is divided East/West by US-101. The difference between West Menlo Park and East Menlo Park is stark, West is filled with incredibly wealthy, white people whereas the East is filled with much poorer, mostly latino and black people.

[koenigdavidmj]

I-5 is sort of interesting in Seattle. It cut the city in half, and was essentially built right through the middle of a lot of developed areas. Before it was put in, you could walk from First Hill to Downtown, but then they dropped a highway down the middle and had only a couple of roads cross it. It wasn't until recently that walking from First Hill to downtown could require a mile or two of extra walking to get to one of the streets that crossed the highway.

[r00fus]

Your comment is completely factual but interestingly from the POV of a car driver (ie, classically north american).

Walking streets in north american cities is soul-killing compared to cities in other continents.

[acuozzo]

> Walking streets in north american cities is soul-killing compared to cities in other continents.

It's even more soul-killing to walk the sidewalks of the suburbs. Try to imagine growing up in one.

[zem]

One significant flaw in many cities is the lack of distinction between streets and roads:

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/8/20/roads-streets-s...

Quoting a bit from that article:

> To review, a road is an efficient connection between two places. It is high speed and safe, which implies that it has limited access (intersections are inherently unsafe at high speeds) and highway geometries. It is essentially a replacement for the railroad which was, as its name suggests, a road on rails.

> In contrast, streets create a platform for capturing value. A properly designed street will maximize the value of the adjacent development pattern in ratio to the infrastructure investment within the public realm. To do this, auto traffic will be slow and will (equally) share space with other modes of transport, including pedestrians, bikers and transit alternatives.