To think the people who build new housing estates are on crack?

[NotYourHun]

What was wrong with roads in straight lines? And why does everyone need their own designated parking spaces with no thought for visitors? And how long does it take to include a postcode or area on bloody mapping software?!

I do community visits as a healthcare professional and am sick of not being able to find addresses because they make no sense whatsoever or aren’t on a map (including google maps/satnav), finding postcodes just show up in the middle of a field, and when I eventually do find a house, finding that there is absolutely no on street parking to be found and either having to park ‘illegally’ or walk for miles with heavy equipment.

I’m quite lucky with mine - there are pavements and 2 parking spaces or one space plus garage, though there are still tons of cars parked on the pavement because 2 spaces isn’t enough. I’ve considered offering up my 2 as I don’t drive but unfortunately I have neighbours who enjoy football in the road and they’re constantly hitting the cars, so nobody would take me up on it.

I agree that this is the exception though. There are some terrible estates out there and I feel lucky to have mine. Love the sound of the garden village a PP posted about though!

I visit random addresses for a living, and don't have this problem - 99% of the time Apple Maps (and usually Google) has the address. The biggest problem I have is that builders have applied to get postcodes assigned before even starting to build the properties. I have been to one that was a hole in the ground, and another that they won't even start building for 2 years. (I do sometimes get ones where I'd directed hundreds of miles away though - and once one in the middle of a military base, when it was actually 3 miles away.)

I quite like bendy roads.

But if you really want a confusing estate - look at the area around Forvie Crescent Bridge of Don in Aberdeen.

The bendy roads thing may be a traffic calming ruse but on a number of local wstates they are so bendy and narrow that buses cannot get past each other on long stretches of road . I think the planners of these estates are trying to social.engineer people away from cars but unfortunately we like and need our cars and public transport simoly does not and will not meet suburban needs . If you have four mums trying to get buggies into a space big enough for two and the bus already has pensioners and shopping trollies and other mums and kids ...well best get a car cos this is shit .

The bendy and zig zag roads are definitely to slow the traffic down as obviously these estates are assumed to be occupied by families with children.

I keep thinking about one as an alternative to finishing off our renovation but I was always so against them for most of the reasons outlined on this thread.

Some of the 4 bed ones seem ok assuming you only need 3 beds but I wouldn’t touch a 3 bed.

HELL YES OP!!! I'm an NHS podiatrist and home visits are a bleeding nightmare on new estates, my swearing has got really bad looking for these places. The time I've wasted.

Try getting to one of these addresses in an
Emergency.... does wonders for elevating your BP.

My estate has a lovely s shaped road as the only entrance/exit. Said road winds between two apartment blocks (both of which contain six flats) with no assigned parking! So the s bend becomes a one lane road where only about half of the cars using it actually drive with caution in case of another vehicle approaching from what has become a blind bend.

In response to the previous poster who said these bendy roads were traffic calming, please excuse my slightly hysterical laughter. In their wisdom the developers paved my road with brick. My property is on a sharp right bend with (you guesses it) zero visibility around the parked cars. One year the road iced over (imagine! Ice on a frosty winter’s morning!) and some utter moron took the corner at speed and skidded three foot sideways, narrowly missing two parked cars and a pedestrian. Now I’m not saying speed wasn’t the primary problem but surely tarmac is slightly better in icy conditions then brick.

The property manger for the estate once proudly stated that there was sufficient parking as the developer had allocated 1 and 1/2 spaces to each property. To this day I haven’t been able to find someone living on the estate who only has half a car.

Developers. Logic has long since abandoned them along with common sense.

The only thing worse is doing home visits by the sea, you can guarantee that when there is a massive storm and you are visiting someone on the seafront your patient will take half an hour to answer the door because they have left their hearing aids out and by the time they get to the door you are soaking wet . Im glad I've moved inland.

No different to old rows of terraced houses with no drives and cars parked nose to tail either side with only enough room for one car to drive through the middle, they don't seem to attract the same outrage as new build properties
Because those houses were built before cars became so common. They couldn't predict the future and realise that every house would have 2 cars, and it's too late to change them now. New property developers know that everyone has a car yet don't plan for where they will go. And as for "it will encourage use of public transport" I dont know a single person who moved into a new build, sold their car and gets the bus everywhere.

I dislike the town houses where they can for a 3 bedroom house onto a 2 bedroom footprint and therefore make more money, but leave the house with a tiny living area on the ground floor.
Also many new builds have such teeny tiny windows which I assume is cost saving and means they can give the house a A rating in energy efficiency.

The lack of parking spaces is often not the developer's fault. A lot of local authorities specify a MAXIMUM number of car parking spaces allowed per house. I think our local authority is 1.5 spaces for up to three bedrooms and 2 spaces for four bedrooms plus. And a garage counts as a space. Because we're all supposed to be reducing car use- which is totally realistic when new estates have no facilities (GPs, shops, schools etc) within them and often no new bus routes either.

How long does it take for new estates to get put on Google maps & Google earth? The new estate near me is almost finished after nearly 2 years but still isn't available on Google.

They were marketing the houses on the back of the ‘great’ local secondary school

A fair few years ago a certain builder which may or may not begin with the letter P built on some land near to me and said all about the local secondary school. Well yes it might be the closest but it isn't the catchment school and you haven't a cat in hell's chance of getting in.

Some of the 4 bed ones seem ok assuming you only need 3 beds but I wouldn’t touch a 3 bed.

You say that but we looked at a 4 bed that whilst had more space downstairs (no integral garage) it had a smaller footprint than our then 3 bed. The 3 beds on the same estate actually had better upstairs space.

I am more concerned that so many are going up on flood plains.

There's one being built in a nearby town on an old munitions dump, it's taking forever because they keep finding unexploded bombs, people are still buying them though.
I'd be too nervous to dig in the garden.

So going to be shot down for putting my hand up here, but I'm a Planning Consultant so get planning permission for many developments.

Thing to remember is, these developments are actually restricted quite heavily by design codes and both national and local plans. So many councils are against the idea of drive way parking and wont approve it. Councils also have guidance on car parking spaces, the numbers are restricted in attempt to encourage public transport. In london, if you live in a high PTAL area then developers may be able to build development without car parking at all (besides disabled parking).

The bendy roads, again a lot of it is shaped by council's design and transport officers. Personally, I do actually prefer the bendy nature (not blind bends of course though) of estates than straight roads - cannot stand grid systems for streets. Bends and street scaping also help for place making and way finding (maybe not first time you go but if you go again you'd remember it)

FYI, I'm not sticking up for developers. There are many shoddy ones that I wouldnt work for and some developers present schemes that are awful and again I wouldnt want my name on so wont do it.

But I think it's always easy to blame the developers.

We need houses built, always makes sense to build them in sustainable locations closer to towns that already exist but unfortunately we are so heavily reliant on cars that the planning policies just dont really work in practice. Especially when the transport networks just arent built or when I've seen transport documents really skew the findings and mitigation measures. There is a push for public transport in planning policies which is why there is so little consideration given to cars but until we have a massive change in our attitude as a society I'm sure there will be a continuation of frustration in how new developments are built.

Hope that makes sense, was a bit of a late night rant. Cant sleep due to pregnancy insomnia

@Earslaps Agree it's the "planners" often just as much (or more) to blame than the developers. As to a garage counting as a car space - that's be fine except most garages won't accommodate 80% of current cars.

Yup. Not nearly enough parking spaces so that people have to park bumped up on pavements. Roads to narrow for a fire engine to get down. Houses crammed in. Developers promise to build schools and amenities then do everything they can to get out of building them. Greedy buggers.

build them in sustainable locations
I hate the way planners have hijacked and redefined "sustainable" to mean "a place where some people will move to"

I totally agree. Our estate is new-ish and almost every house has a garage... but the garage doors are not wide enough to be able to fit a car in (even a small hatchback - we've tried!). The pavements are narrow and the roads are narrow and winding, so parking is a nightmare. I'm sure the only aim of the developers was to fit as many properties onto as small a piece of land as possible, to maximise their profits.

About the maps......usually royal mail release the postcode and street name but all the other data i.e
shape of the road and naming extents are impossible to work out from that limited info which is also copyrighted. Ordnance Survey will later release this and is open data for mapping companies but this could be one year behind Royal Mail. Then the mapping companies have to identify this change through their processes and get it added (probably by someone in India) which could take several more months. Then they share the updates with customers that use their map data like Ford or Tom Tom. But some customers may only take annual updates so could be almost another year before it gets into their system and reaches an end user. It could be so much quicker but the royal mail want to charge mapping companies a lot for the data and it needs huge resources to capture every new street through driving everywhere....most mapping companies also have a place on their website where you can add a new street also but still needs to be accepted by them etc.

Sustainable location in planning terms means a place that people will want to move to but also is accessible via foot, cycling and public transport to local amenities and services that arent already over stretched or if they are over stretched then can easily be funded for improvements.

Developers arent reasonable for actually building schools or GPs either, that comes down to CIL and S106 obligations and then it's up to the local authority to ensure these things are built and funded - just these things can take ages! Dont get me wrong though, boils my blood at some of the awful "viability" reports I have seen produced but thankfully councils are now getting these independently verified so hopefully there can be more transparency

Just seen I wrote my above post as a reply and not a new post! Sorry!!

I get that the developers are motivated to squeeze as many properties on to a site as possible, but what I don't understand is why there are not planning laws n place to prevent them building estates where the roads are too narrow to park on (surely everyone has visitors, or tradespeople or deliveries, even if they don't have more cars than their allocated space); why they are allowed to build estates without a shop or a community hall or a little bit of green space; why they think it is okay to have one entrance on and off, causing all sorts of traffic problems in rush hour; why it is okay to build houses with no regard to places at schools or Doctors etc.

The income from selling more houses explains the developers, but not the town planners.

Well I've just moved into a new 2 bed Bellway house and it's lovely! Huge rooms, 9ft ceilings, wide enough roads to double park and still get the wagons through(!) and wide pavements. Lovely & quiet and right next to a Nature reserve

Pain in the absolute arse for anyone to find it and I'm in the process of campaigning to have either a set of bollards removed or sat navs to be altered (is that even possible?!) as I cannot have a single thing delivered without delivery driver getting lost, but once all that is sorted, it'll be fab!

I really do like it.