The Radburn plan, in all its incarnations, was well intentioned: an attempt to protect pedestrians from automobile traffic in the places where they lived. Its results, however, were the opposite of multimodal. In the Radburn version of the English garden city, the only way to get from your house to anywhere that wasn’t your neighbor’s house was by car. Access to any other form of mechanized transport, whether trains, trolleys, or buses, was severely compromised. Since straight lines are the shortest distance between any two points, all other lines are longer, which means that travel is
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152. Radburn plan protected peds by discouraging grids, favored cul-de-sacs. Now the only way they can get around was by car. Curvilinear is not efficient or hospitable for transit.
