Sprawl Madness Redux: Driving 17 Miles to Go 500 Feet in Phoenix

sprawl_madness
These two houses in Phoenix are 500 feet or 17 miles apart depending on your mode of transportation. Image: Google Maps

Last year, Angie posted an unfortunate map of two houses in Orlando that share a backyard but are seven miles apart if you take the disconnected local street system. That’s quite a distance to ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar.

Well, reader Sean Horan just sent this mind-blowing sequel: two houses in Phoenix, Arizona — yes, inside the city limits — that are about 500 feet apart as the crow flies but an amazing 17 miles apart if you drive on streets.

The street network also allows you to take this amazing route, which is half a mile shorter, Google Maps helpfully tells me:

The shortest distance between two points is not this. Image: Google Maps
The shortest distance between two points is not this. Image: Google Maps

You may have noticed in the first map that to drive between those two addresses, you have to go around around a big, mountainous, roadless area. Just to be clear: The point is not that we should build a nice, connected street network across the Sonoran wilderness. The point is that there wouldn’t be crazy disconnected streets encroaching on the desert foothills if Phoenix didn’t have so much spread-out, low-slung development like this everywhere else:

Just to clarify: The mountainous, roadless area isn't the problem. Design like this is the problem. Image: Google Maps
Just to clarify: The mountainous, roadless area isn’t the problem. Development like this is the problem. Image: Google Maps

If you’ve got a sprawl contestant that can top this, please send it. Until then: Congratulations, Phoenix, the champion of sprawl.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Using L.A. Traffic Counts to Justify Sprawl in the Arizona-Nevada Desert

By Phineas Baxandall and Jeff Inglis |
A recent report by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group, “Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future,” examines 11 of the most wasteful, least justifiable road projects underway in America right now. Here’s the latest installment in our series profiling the various bad decisions that funnel so much money to infrastructure that does no good.  Arizona and Nevada have proposed a […]

How to Make Transit Succeed in a Sprawling City

By Angie Schmitt |
In many ways, Calgary, Canada’s third-largest city, is very much like a sprawling American city. But in one way, it’s very different: It’s a huge transit city. Despite being composed mostly of sprawling single-family homes, in this Canadian energy boomtown, 50 percent of downtown workers arrive by transit and another 11 percent by bike — way […]

Lousy Neighborhoods, Not Lax Zoning, Make Sunbelt Houses Cheaper

By Ben Ross |
The middle class is getting priced out of liberal cities, while red-state urban areas remain affordable. Does that mean our cities should be less like tightly regulated San Francisco and more like permissive Houston? It’s a common argument — but it doesn’t fit the facts. To start with, Houston is hardly a paradise of deregulation. In practice, local experts explain, […]