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A
thousand suburban homes could be reached from the traffic circle at
the bottom of this diagram, in the center of a hierarchy of culs-de-sac.
Having
reached the circle via any of the three blue highways, you leave it
in any of three other directions. Only the northbound four-lane
boulevard is shown.
You
soon arrive at the Elm Center shopping area, where you have six
choices: six avenues leaving Elm Center, called Purple, Blue,
Green, Gold, Orange, and Red.
(TEXT
CONTINUED BELOW)

If
you go west on Orange, you find yourself at a smaller neighborhood
circle called Orange Elm. Here you have another half-dozen
choices: six numbered streets, each with ten home sites grouped
around a cul-de-sac. The home sites shown in color are on this
neighborhood circle's Fourth Street, and their addresses would be 40
through 49 Orange Elm.
Culs-de-sac
can serve more homes with less pavement than the more traditional
system of gridlike streets. But to achieve this efficiency,
they sacrifice redundancy.
In
the traditional system, as you leave your driveway you can turn
either left or right and still find your way to your
destination. But in the system shown above, if the avenue
between Orange Elm and Elm Center were blocked by an accident or a
fallen tree, Orange Elm would be completely cut off from the outside
world. Those 60 families would be trapped. They would be
unable to drive to work, and fire trucks and ambulances would be
unable to reach them.
Therefore,
it would be necessary to construct alleys behind the home sites
(along the hexagonal pencil lines in this drawing) to serve as an
emergency access. |