The land use bug struck me, not fatally, as I attempted to drive through Beaverton recently, not through the tidy grid around which Beaverton formed (the section along Hall and Watson for the first mile or so south of Farmington Road) but to get to a friend’s house in the middle of the suburban spaghetti between Hall, Scholls Ferry, Murray, and Brockman/Greenway. (Similar principles rule west of Murray also.)
If you have tried in vain to visit a friend who lives in this modern Labyrinth, you might have concluded, as I have, that this mess represents a lack of planning. Quite the contrary: Beaverton planned it this way, requiring developers to build these intricate networks of streets to nowhere. The city code even sets out a system for naming the sneak dead-ends, mandating equine names (Rawhide, Trapper, Scout) in one area, geologic names (Opal, Talus, Tephra) in another, and bird names (Teal, Gull, Grebe) in another.
The city’s purpose, as I understand it, was to discourage car traffic cutting through residential neighborhoods. The city has achieved that purpose. But what else has it achieved? It’s forced developers to build neighborhoods that can’t be served by mass transit and made it difficult or impossible for people to walk from their houses to schools, bus stops, and neighborhood shops. Compare these street layouts to those in Beaverton’s subdivisions of 25 to 50 years ago: Ridgeview Heights (along Belaire Drive off of Hall Boulevard), Hyland Hills (along Hart Road between 130th and Murray), and The Royal Woodlands (off Royal Woodlands Drive west of Jamieson Road). They’re all laid out with pleasant, gently-curved parallel streets, and yet these three areas have only one "cut-through" street among them, Hart Road.
If the government wants to encourage us to drive less, it’s not enough to make driving inconvenient; it must also make transit and shank’s mare convenient. Beaverton failed.
Comments
3 responses
i completely agree, thank you for speaking up on it. I lived in Hillsboro for 4 months, and i repaired computers on an in-home basis. I thought it was just me being new to the area, im used to vancouver, but portland was no problem to learn, neither was reno, vegas, or honolulu. but this is 2nd bad Nampa, ID being the worst. it is shaped like a wagon wheel (Mormon thing) i never knew what was north, east etc…you should take an overhead look at nampa through mapquest.com you can see a sattelite picture view. not right, streets go east/west aves north south, stop the madness!!!!
Hart Rd. does not run through Ridgeview Heights. One of the many beauties of living in that area is that it connects directly with Denney and Hall – and there is literally almost no traffic congestion. The rest of Beaverton though… OUCH… I feel your pain… Anything west of Murray Blvd is a nightmare commute.
You’re right that Hart Road doesn’t run through Ridgeview Heights. (It doesn’t run through The Royal Woodlands, either.) Out of all three neighborhoods I mentioned, only one has a “cut-through” street, which is Hart Road as it passes through Hyland Hills. The layouts of Hyland Hills, Ridgeview Heights, and The Royal Woodlands all work well today, much better than the cul-de-sacs we get now.