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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2743 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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For purposes of "traffic calming", urban planners (1 2) often make the roads in residential neighborhoods curved rather than straight. What if a developer were to simply use a space-filling curve to lay out his residential subdivision on a single ridiculously curved road?

Example subdivisions appropriate for the International Zoning Code's R1d single-family-residential zone: 1 (Hilbert curve), 2 (curve name unknown), 3 (Peano curve)

See also: Small intestine

@Southkraut: "Outmanoeuver"? A daring synthesis, as the cool kids say.

I imagine people wouldn't want to live there considering how much more time-consuming it would be to get in and out of your neighborhood.

In the biggest Hilbert-curve subdivision, the distance from the center to the nearest edge is 8000 feet (2400 meters) in a car versus 2000 feet (600 meters) as the crow flies (or on one of the pedestrian paths proposed by another commenter). Is that such a huge price to pay for an ultra-quiet neighborhood?

@Felagund

It would be worse if you scaled it up, though. Or were you planning just that size?

Under one state's subdivision law (§§ 4.1 and 4.2): The biggest Hilbert-curve subdivision that I've drawn would generate traffic of around 3600 trips per day (362 single-family houses × 10.1 (trips per day) per house). That already is a little above the permitted limit of 3500 trips per day for a "minor collector" street, which is the highest-level street on which houses should front. So this is just about the biggest Hilbert-curve subdivision that you can make without running into problems.

10 trips per house per day? That sounds like way too many.

Two commuters, a school bus, a mail carrier, and a trash/recycling truck or a delivery van add up to ten trips (in and out are counted separately) pretty easily.

Note that this is for ordinary "single-family detached housing". "High-rise apartment" generates only 5.0 trips per day, and "senior adult housing—detached" generates only 3.7 trips per day.

A school bus, a mail carrier and a trash/recycling truck do one trip for all households in the subdivision. It seems disingenuous to multiply them by the number of households.

The developer probably can make that argument to the zoning board. (And I'm not a traffic engineer, so I may be misrepresenting it anyway.)

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