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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's not just the difference in straight-line distance. It's also that it's a lot of back-to-back sharp 90 and 180 degree turns, which are slow and exhausting to drive especially in winter conditions.

Admittedly, this observation is based on the base curves not your catboxes - catbox blocks a surprisingly large chunk of the internet, myself included.

slow and exhausting to drive

This is basically a feature, people should be driving slow in neighborhoods.

Sorry, let me rephrase:

With a conventional layout most of a trip is outside neighborhoods, with only a little bit at the start and end that's slow & exhausting to drive, so it's mostly fine.

With this layout you have to travel far further within said traffic-calmed (read: slow and exhausting to drive) area.

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