By Sam Balto, northeast Portland resident and co-founder of Bike Bus World.
A recent Bud Light Super Bowl commercial features a neighborhood cul-de-sac transformed into a joyful community hub — kids playing, neighbors socializing, and life happening at a human scale. It’s a striking image, not just for beer drinkers, but for anyone who cares about livable streets. And yet, in cities like Portland, we’ve spent decades resisting the very concept of cul-de-sacs in favor of a traditional street grid that prioritizes car movement.
It’s time to rethink that approach.
Urban planners and transportation advocates have long dismissed cul-de-sacs as a suburban mistake — inefficient, disconnected, and automobile-dependent. But they miss the point: Suburban neighborhoods don’t design cul-de-sacs with cars in mind; they design them with quality of life in mind. By blocking through traffic, cul-de-sacs create safer, quieter streets where people — especially children — can comfortably walk, bike, and play. In Portland, where we claim to prioritize active transportation, why do we let cars dominate our residential streets while the suburbs have already solved this problem?
Let’s embrace cul-de-sacs — not by copying suburban sprawl, but by adapting the concept to make urban neighborhoods safer, healthier, and more connected.
– Sam Balto
The Problem: Through Traffic Ruins Neighborhoods
Portland’s street grid is great for navigating the city by car, but that’s exactly the problem. Too many residential streets are treated as cut-through routes, with drivers using neighborhood roads to shave a few minutes off their commute. The result? Speeding, noise, and unsafe conditions that discourage walking and biking.
Take a typical Portland side street: despite being designated as a “neighborhood greenway,” it still allows car traffic to pass through freely. This means families walking to school and kids riding their bikes are constantly at risk from impatient drivers who see the street as a shortcut rather than a shared public space.
The Solution: Embracing the Best Part of Cul-de-sacs
Rather than rejecting cul-de-sacs outright, Portland should borrow their best elements. We should design more residential streets where cars can’t cut through, but people walking and biking can. This is already a proven concept: Barcelona’s superblocks restrict vehicle access while keeping streets open for pedestrians and cyclists. Dutch woonerfs (living streets) make cars second-class citizens in residential areas, rather than the default priority.
Portland has dabbled in this with diverters on greenways, but they are too few and far between. We need to go further. Imagine a city where entire residential zones are blocked off to through car traffic, where every street functions like a cul-de-sac for drivers but remains fully permeable for people walking and biking. This would make our streets quieter, safer, and more inviting—not just for kids, but for everyone.
A Call to Action for Portland
If we truly believe in walkable, bikeable neighborhoods, we need to stop prioritizing car convenience over community livability. That means rethinking our approach to residential street design. Let’s embrace cul-de-sacs — not by copying suburban sprawl, but by adapting the concept to make urban neighborhoods safer, healthier, and more connected.
Portland doesn’t need to resist cul-de-sacs. We need to reclaim them — on our terms.
