Community Corner

Planners Rethinking Cul-De-Sacs

Report says prevalence of dead ends burdens main roads with excessive traffic, costs municipalities more.

The 37-page Lehigh Valley Planning Commission report is called “Street Connectivity” but a more apt title might be “The Trouble with Cul-De-Sacs.”

While often popular with residents who live on them, cul-de-sacs have fallen out of favor with planners because they tend to burden arterial roads with excessive traffic, make it tougher for pedestrians to get anywhere and cost municipalities more for road work and snow plowing. 

David Berryman, a senior planner and project manager for the planning commission, briefly outlined the “Street Connectivity” findings to the Lehigh Valley Transportation Study Coordinating Committee recently. The planning commission sent a copy of the report to the 62 municipalities in the Valley in the hopes they will consider it when overseeing development.

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Berryman pointed out that housing subdivisions can sit right next to each other but without a through street, residents have to go out to a busier main road to get from one to another. Through-streets allow residents to spend less time in their cars.

“You save money and time as a resident because you spend less money on gas,” he said. That’s also true for municipalities that have to fix the roads and plow the streets – which become bigger issues for local governments as “funding sources are getting smaller and smaller,” he said.

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Some developing municipalities, such as Forks Township, have been successful at connecting neighborhoods with walking trails and bike paths when it’s impossible to connect streets, Berryman said.

But turning a long established cul-de-sac into a through-street is more difficult because residents feel limiting the traffic makes it safer.  “Home buyers seek the seclusion that cul-de-sacs and limited access have provided, and are adamantly against connectivity,” the report says.

South Whitehall Township, for example, has heard opposition from some residents on 40th Street, which could be connected with Brickyard Road in the construction of a on the former Rutz Farm along Walbert Avenue. 

Cul-de-sacs weren’t always so prevalent in the United States. Older towns and cities largely grew up around a grid model that provides through streets connecting neighborhoods to schools, parks, stores and other businesses. 

In the 1930s, the grid pattern started to fall out of fashion in developments, with planners emphasizing a separation of land uses. One of the earliest such modern subdivisions was Radburn, N.J., which the report said “uniquely separated commercial areas from residential areas by curved and narrow streets that discouraged automobile traffic. The reduction of traffic in neighborhoods was accomplished by the prominent use of the dead end street.”

By the 1990s, under the banner of New Urbanism, planners started promoting “Traditional Neighborhood Design” which called for mixed use neighborhoods with homes, schools, parks and stores and connected streets that lessened residents’ reliance on cars and made towns more walkable. 


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