Street Grid Connections

[TBKS1]

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/1600+Woodland+Drive,+Maumelle,+AR/34.8811059,-92.407887/@34.8774262,-92.4087426,15z/data=!4m9!4m8!1m5!1m1!1s0x87d29f1db47124bd:0x5f3402152924413f!2m2!1d-92.4075721!2d34.8802813!1m0!3e0

This is the one that I usually think of off the top of my head. It's not very long drive, but the gap between the two roads is only like 30-40 feet.

[mgk920]

^ 2.3 miles is tame.  I recall seeing one example in Florida where it's a 7 mile difference driving between two adjacent houses.

This one. An 11.5 km drive between adjacent houses, now that is something crazy.

They are probably two different housing developments; after all, one has golf course access, and the other does not. They do seem to share a "lake", which is just a man-made depression to create fill to raise the elevation of homes, and provide stormwater discharge.

But I do think there should be at least 2-3 ways to access a suburban neighborhood, depending on its size or number of homes. I can understand reducing cut-through traffic, but there's always reasons why you'd want a few ways in/out (improve arterial traffic flow, make up for restrictions or construction, et al).

Emergency vehicle access, too.

From what I am aware of, some of the worst areas for this neighborhood non-connectivity are in the Atlanta suburbs, especially the east ones.  There are some places there where these developments deeply intermingle with long tendril style streets, but with no connections between them except by the areas' legacy rural roads.

Mike

[Duke87]

"Mom, can I go play with the backyard neighbors?"

"Sure, let me check how much gas I have left"

(https://www.google.com/maps/dir/29.5895657,-95.6897933/29.5895261,-95.6903807/@29.5936765,-95.6920865,16z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e0)

The killer here is that the ROW to connect the two streets appears to exist and may even be public property. The connection just has not been built.

It appears the houses to the right of the gap are older. Would not be surprised if the folks who owned them at the time the newer subdivision was built had gotten used to living on a dead end street and were not thrilled about the increased traffic that would result if it were to go through.

I'm sure as well that despite being physically quite close together, the people in homes on either side of the gap do not consider themselves to be neighbors and probably don't even know each other. This was the case in the development where I grew up - the houses along one side of one street had property that backed up against a row of houses in a different development, and despite being adjacent properties the shortest route to drive between them was well over a mile. Everyone within our area where the streets connected all knew each other to some degree, but those folks on that other street that didn't connect to any of ours... we had no idea who they were. Never talked to them. They lived in a different neighborhood as far as we were concerned.

And never once was the lack of a street connection between them and us something that anyone complained about. We both had easy connections to main roads and could get to the store, to school, to work, etc. no problem. The folks in our neighborhood liked that there was only one way out of it and therefore no thru traffic. The folks in that adjacent neighborhood, we can only assume, felt likewise.

Indeed, this is why setups like this are so commonplace and not viewed by your average suburbanite as problematic. Building minor local streets on a branched layout functionally works, because despite it being potentially quite circuitous to travel between adjacent branches, there is little to no demand to do so. And when there is... everyone owns a car and is used to driving it everywhere anyway, so they barely notice.

[TBKS1]

I've found a few more of these. All of these examples are more than 2 miles.

https://goo.gl/zU9tWX
https://goo.gl/pVqU86
https://goo.gl/hvDfTX