Back in May, I wrote about an ordinary residential street in Herndon, Virginia, a few minutes from my home. I say “street,” but this feels like a road, or even a highway. It’s very wide, and that has the effect of making a safe speed feel unbearably slow. Take a look at the piece.

As you may be aware, Northern Virginia had a pretty good snowstorm a couple of weeks ago, and I happened to be on this street the next day. Here it is after the snowstorm. It has been narrowed down quite a bit by the snow at the edges and by some in the middle too. It works just as well. In this photo, I’m standing on the sidewalk.

And here, I’m standing a few feet into the road.

Look how far to the left the sidewalk is in this second photo. And look how far to the right the other edge is. And yet if you block that out, this photo easily looks like it could have been taken from a sidewalk. That’s how wide this is.

(Also notice that the right-hand sidewalk has not been cleared, even though it’s full of footprints. People clearly use it, but it doesn’t get cleared the way the road does. That’s a whole other issue.)

This phenomenon of snow effectively narrowing a road is known as a “sneckdown.” “Neckdown” refers to narrowing a road, and sneckdown is a neologism of the term “snowy neckdown.” Whenever it snows, you can go and look at where snow persists on a roadway, and that basically tells you how much you could narrow the road with no loss of utility, but with savings in maintenance and, say, more room for sidewalks or other non-car-oriented things.

I don’t particularly like the term sneckdown, because if you don’t already know what it means, it isn’t at all intuitive. (Plus, I always want to say it “snakedown.”) But the concept is an invaluable one. It’s similar to the concept of “desire paths” (check out the related reading link!)

These ideas are part of what I like to think of as a sort of urbanist consciousness. Urbanism in this context has nothing to do with cities per se, but rather with how people use and inhabit the built environment, and how it can be made to work better for them. It’s the opposite, in fact, of “telling people how to live.”

Here’s one more view.

What I’ve learned to see is not something to the effect of “why haven’t they cleared the road!” but rather “look at how much space is effectively unused day to day, and how much could go there instead, in every subdivision and neighborhood and city in this country.”

Related Reading:

The Path of Most Desire

Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World

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