Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And if you've ever driven through the sprawl of an American suburb, you know that the streets twist and turn, even in the absence of hills. Rarely are they set up like a grid. Take one wrong turn and you could end up a looping around a cul de sac forever it can feel like. But how did these winding streets become so ubiquitous with the suburbs. The answer lies in the days following the Industrial Revolution
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though the period led to all of the modern technologies and food ways we currently enjoy, at the time, it's seriously worsened living conditions for many city dwellers. We spoke with Paul Knight, and architectural and urban designer here in Atlanta and the executive director of the Douglas C. Allen Institute for the Study
of Cities. He said, at any time before the early twentieth century, you really did not want to live in the cities, especially after the Industrial Revolution in places like London and New York. They were filthy, they were truly dangerous. Along came British urban planner Ebenezer Howard. He published the book Tomorrow, A Peaceful Path to Social Reform, which was reissued in nineteen o two as Garden Cities of Tomorrow.
Night said of the book, one of the ideas that came out of Ebenezer's work was this idea of living in the country and then working in the city, so that you could get the best of both worlds. Sound familiar. Thus what we know today as the suburbs were born around the turn of the twentieth century, but their early success depended on street cars, which allowed many people to travel to their jobs in the cities, and Henry Ford automating the assembly line and introducing the Model T car
really helped the suburbs boom. But the biggest move to suburbia came after World War Two ended in ninety five. Millions of American g i's returned for war with housing benefits, and the suburbs became the place to be for US families. So what does all this have to do with the curving streets we know today? While many big cities during the Industrial Revolution had terrible living conditions for the working class,
they did have something desirable. The grid network. A look at New York City planners laid out the streets in a right angle rectangular formation, as opposed to the spoken wheel layouts of cities like Paris, and that's no accident. A grid network is efficient and it promotes walkability. The typical suburban street network spurned this layout in favor of wide roads with sweeping curves. One reason why was to make the suburbs appear closer to nature and to Ebenezer
Howard's idea of living in the country. Knight said, the reason that people are wanting to leave the city is that idea of a return to nature and to provide a yard for their children, and to get out of the unsafe environment of the city. It's just this bucolic idea. If you want to promote this idea of nature and natural topography, then you can't have this rigid gridiron on your landscape. You've got to curve the streets in order to allow people to exp varience the curvilinear nature of nature.
Another reason for winding streets stems from that giver of suburban life, the car. The grid network is built around the idea of people walking from place to place, but the suburbs rely on cars, and curved streets allow cars to travel faster than the grid network, which has constant stops at intersections, But curving streets have a cost. They are less walkable, precisely because they make four longer rows
with fewer intersections. The road network also has fewer streets than a grid pattern, which means less street frontage and therefore less space for retail offices and other mixed use developments. Having less walkable streets with less development forces people to drive more often. That leads to another cost of curved streets, more car accidents. Urban driving can feel chaotic because of the increase in walkers and bikers, but it also creates
slower speeds and therefore fewer fatal accidents. Data from the U S Census Bureau backs this up. About night in percent of the US population lived in rural areas, but rural fatalities accounted for fort ent of all traffic fatalities. The US continues to become more suburbanized, so it's unlikely that these winding streets will go away anytime soon. Knight says. In fill building, the development of spare land and otherwise largely settled areas provides opportunities to change the face of
these neighborhoods. The challenge to achieving the grid network in the suburbs is both political and legal. Though right now most suburbs require developers to clear hurdles in order to make a pedestrian friendly grid pattern, while those who create car centric called sac subdivisions are on easy street. Knight said the law is not in walkabilities favor. Today's episode was written by Adina Solomon and produced by Tyler Clang
for iHeart Media and How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other winding topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.