TOWN PLANNING.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 84, 16 April 1913, Page 4

TOWN PLANNING.

Wide streets are generally considered a good and important point in town planning, hut according to the Loudon correspondent of the Melbourne “Age,” wide streets are not in such favor as they used to ho. in] tlio town-planning schemes of twenty| years ago there was a natural reac-j lion against the narrow, crooked, and

dark streets of Old World cities, Model towns wore made with wide streets of regular formation. Xowj it is held to be best to confine width to arterial streets, which will take most of the traffic. Wide streets in residential quarters are found to he a mistake, because they take up land which could bo put to better use, are very expensive to maintain, and may) produce a great deal of dust. In old planned towns in (lermany the fine wide streets arc flanked by huge tenement houses. At the garden cities of Letchworth and Hampstead, there are short, narrow, winding streets in the residential areas, but on each side houses and cottages with gardens, the buildings being well set back from the road. In many cases the streets are purposely made to end in a cnl de sac so far as vehicular traffic is concerned, but with paths for pedestrians leading to other streets. The result is that only the traffic intended for the houses in the vicinity uses these streets, and residents are spared the noise and dust of busy thoroughfares. The correspondent doubts whether the Federal Government is wise in making the main thoroughfares of the new capital a couple of hundred feet wide, and predicts that if the principle of wide streets is indiscriminately applied, rents will be forced up.