Cul-de-Sacs - Great for Homeowner, Bad for City Planners?

RealEstateJournal.com has an interesting article on cul-de-sacs in neighborhoods. Families love cul-de-sac living because of the privacy they afford and are willing to pay extra for the privilege. City planners, however, are not happy with the traffic congestion they cause and many municipalities are passing zoning ordinances to limit or ban cul-de-sacs in future developments.

While homes on cul-de-sacs are still being built in large numbers and continue to fetch premiums from buyers who prefer them, the opposition has only been growing. The most common complaint: traffic. Because most of the roads in a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs are dead ends, some traffic experts say the only way to navigate around the neighborhood is to take peripheral roads that are already cluttered with traffic. And because most cul-de-sacs aren’t connected by sidewalks, the only way for people who live there to run errands is to get in their cars and join the traffic.

Although the campaign against cul-de-sacs continues, lawmakers are making some concessions. As a trade-off for limiting them, cities like Nashville, Tenn., are letting developers put more homes, including townhouses and apartments, on less land. And in some places, measures being planned to increase traffic flow have been beaten back. In late 2004, when residents of two upscale subdivisions in York County, S.C. — Eppington and Knight’s Bridge, with homes in the $500,000 to $600,000 range — got wind of a plan to connect them, by roads, to a proposed development called The Reserve, which had lower-priced homes, residents of the wealthy areas pressured the county council to nix the proposal.

If neighborhoods are for living in, then I am not real sure what the problem is with cul-de-sacs, as long as 52 cul-de-sacs did not exit a subdivision with a single exit. I don’t want people using my residential street as a thoroughfare.