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Fused Grid
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The Fused Grid represents the synthesis of two traditional North American approaches to residential neighborhood planning: the traditional, nineteenth-century grid plan, and the curvilinear pattern of looped streets and culs-de-sac of modern suburbia. The goal of the fused grid is to provide a balance between vehicular and pedestrian movement, and to create safe, sociable streets and easy connectivity to community facilities.
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Encyclopedia
The Fused Grid represents the synthesis of two traditional North American approaches to residential neighborhood planning: the traditional, nineteenth-century grid plan, and the curvilinear pattern of looped streets and culs-de-sac of modern suburbia. The goal of the fused grid is to provide a balance between vehicular and pedestrian movement, and to create safe, sociable streets and easy connectivity to community facilities. These attributes are achieved while retaining the land use and infrastructure advantages of conventional suburban plans, compared to the traditional grid advocated by New Urbanism.
The fused grid consists of a large-scale grid of collector streets, carrying moderate to high-speed car traffic. The blocks are usually about 40 acres (16 ha) in size (1/4 mile x 1/4 mile or 400 m by 400 m). Within each block, the layout of residential streets in the form of crescents and cul-de-sacs eliminates through traffic. In addition, a continuous, open-space pedestrian path system provides direct access to parks, public transit, retail and community facilities. Residents can cross a block on foot in approximately five minutes. The most intensive land uses such as schools, community facilities, high-density residential uses, and retail are located in the center of the plan, reached by twinned arterial roads. The plan provides efficient vehicular traffic, without sacrificing safety and convenience for pedestrians. At the neighbourhood scale it treats pedestrians preferencially by making their routes more direct than vehicular ones. It also provides new opportunities for bicycle routes on roads that are less travelled by cars, as these are continuous for bicycles only. These neighbourhood attributes have been articulated and codified by several 20th Century planners, most rigorously in Christopher Alexanders A Pattern Language . Patterns 49 (Looped Roads), 51(Green Streets), 52 (Network of Paths and Cars, 23 (Parallel Roads), 61 (Small Public Squares) and 100 (Pedestrian Street) are assimilated in each quadrant configuration of the Fused Grid. Though it differs in its exact geometry from others, every configuration retains all of the intended characteristics. The Fused Grid is promoted in Canada by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
A similar debate has also been taking place in Europe and particularly the UK, where the term filtered permeability was coined to describe urban layouts which maximise ease of movement for pedestrians and cyclists, but seek to restrain it for motor vehicles. See: Permeability (spatial and transport planning).
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