Click to embiggen.
The houses marked A and B on this map are essentially touching butts, and yet if you wanted to drive from one to the other it would take nearly 20 minutes. And god forbid you wanted to walk — if you stick to the roads, that would take more than two hours.
Google is always warning you that walking directions are in beta, but this isn’t a map glitch — this neighborhood, a suburb of Orlando, is just a masterpiece of nonsensical sprawl, peppered with cul-de-sacs that make it easy to drive your Canyonero around for hours without getting anywhere. And this map sums up handily the problems with this suburban shitscape — the lack of density promotes car dependence, but the road layout actually hinders you from getting around. Hell, in a lot of places it does that on purpose, twisting streets into labyrinths to make neighborhoods feel like too much trouble for riffraff and shortcut-takers. It’s the QWERTY keyboard of urban planning.
In short, suburbs are awful, cul-de-sacs actually keep people apart, and the residents of Orlando might want to look into personal hover-planes.
(Via @urbandata)
