Dead-end exit lane: when a road is not a street.  (Or an alley.  Or a stroad.)

Suburbia of 2026 might feel as middlebrow and car-dominated as it probably did in 1966, even if “suburbanization” was a novel phenomenon back then—a condition just emerging, of which social theorists were not yet fully aware.  But the design of residential communities from sixty years ago reveals subtle if powerful differences, judging from the equivalents that are springing up like dandelions today.  It isn’t just the distance—suburbia of 1966 was almost certainly much closer to the city center than it is now—nor is it about the amenities that most people expect in new construction: central air conditioning, garbage disposals, an attached garage, vents and ducts for washers and dryers.  None of these was an expected feature for a middle-class house in the suburbs back in 1966—some were in fact luxuries—but households in the market for a new suburban home would expect them all today.  The core components of a subdivision have evolved in ways both conspicuous and subtle.  The subtle ones are more interesting (the whole point of this blog!), and I can think of few with less journalistic coverage than what I’ll call the dead-end exit lane.

I can only hope to articulate my perplexity at this unusual road feature through a quasi-suburban development in Indianapolis.

I deploy the terrific weasel prefix of “quasi-” because it’s hard to define this seemingly nameless development on the far south side.  It still sits within Indianapolis city limits, but it is less than a half-mile from the border with neighboring suburb Greenwood.  And while the 8500 block of South Meridian Street is the “city” by every surveyor’s definition, the character is overwhelmingly car-oriented and suburban.  This portion of Indianapolis was unincorporated until the Unigov act of 1970 that merged the city limits with the respective Marion County borders.  Overnight, areas that were suburban or even rural in character acquired a city address, and the constituents joined the Indianapolis electorate.  But the development patterns 8.5 miles from downtown Indy weren’t urban in the least; homes built at that time did not have to abide by City standards for road or sidewalk or street light or even wastewater infrastructure.  While most homes built within the bigger, post-Unigov Indianapolis had to follow higher standards, those built in rural Marion County before that date simply basked under the grandfather clause.  To this day, many homes on the south side of Indy use septic wastewater systems (though a massive, multi-decade upgrade initiative is in place). 

I don’t know how many homes on the road featured here still use septic systems—perhaps none—but it’s obvious by looking that this road doesn’t abide by 2020-era suburban design standards.

No curbs, no storm sewers, no sidewalks, no defined space for on-street parking.  Most of the homes date from the 1960s, if not earlier; though I also suspect those first few homes on the left side are infill from thirty years later.  But the biggest consideration that tells me this is “early suburban” or even “pre-suburbanization rural” development is the way the road ends.

David Lane is the road in question, and its western terminus is at South Meridian Street (State Road 135), the most significant north-south arterial in the entire city.  But notice that yellow placard midway down the street sign, informing motorists that David Lane is a dead end.  Such a sign is only typically in place if a road terminates abruptly, with no easy means for a vehicle to maneuver without making a 10-point turn.  It’s a warning.  If a road ends in a cul-de-sac, drivers can make the 180° turn easily; thus, no dead end sign.  David Lane ostensibly is a true dead-end, with nothing more than guardrail (at best) at its eastern terminus, with no other streets allowing egress.

But is that really the case?  Here’s that eastern end:

To the left is a gravel driveway.

However, to the right at this terminus, the paving material doesn’t change at all for that right angle.

It’s a road.  Yes, it’s barely much more than one lane in width, but it’s what I call a dead-end exit lane—a stub that gives drivers a relief by providing a linkage with the street parallel to David Lane to the south.

To be fair, this dead-end exit lane can marginally accommodate two cars traveling in opposite directions.  It’s a little narrower than normal but hardly undeveloped.  But it doesn’t seem to have street sign, and, from the standpoints of that “DEAD END” road sign where David Lane meets Meridian, this dead-end exit lane doesn’t even exist.  Drivers can find relief from the dead end by turning at this right angle.  It’s not a true dead end.

What’s going on?  Google Maps seems to recognize it as a road.

There it is, outlined in purple, known as South East Street.  It has no homes on it but it operates at a capacity akin to or greater than an urban alley.  The City almost certainly maintains it and recognizes its as a viable stub.  Initially, I suspected this tiny South East Street might have been an addition decades later, but I see no evidence that this is the case.  It has always been there as a dead-end exit lane, even while the “DEAD END” sign hangs at the subdivision’s entrance.

Putting the pieces together by delving back to the neighborhood design standards of yesteryear, I suspect that the original developer, back in the 1950s, purchased a deep, narrow farm parcel, fronting South Meridian Street but perched quite a distance away, with considerably more land extending eastward behind the home.  This developer built the farm parcel to full residential capacity with two parallel streets (what the market would support at that time) in the form of David Lane and East Stop 13 Road.  Recognizing that neighborhood connectivity is more appealing than two long dead-end roads, the developer built a road to alley standards to connect the two, while guaranteeing that it would never serve as a primary connection point to the driveway of a private residence.  If it ever served as the main driveway entrance to a home, it would need to be built to the same width as David and Stop 13.  (The homeowners at the northwest corner of East and Stop 13 did in fact design a driveway with access on this dead-end exit lane, but it’s an arc-shaped driveway with a separate ingress on Stop 13.)

The subdivision of the old farm parcel, therefore, yielded a design with two primary residential roads and a slightly narrower stub—the dead-end exit lane—connecting the two, in the form of South East Street.  The design for this subdivision predates the era when cul-de-sacs had yet become the norm, and besides, the developer determined the better strategy was to link the two roads, rather than create two disconnected “lollipop” streets.  At this time cul-de-sacs were uncommon and potentially a riskier market draw.  Meanwhile, since South East doesn’t meet the design standards of a road that can host residences, the City or County—whoever was in charge of subdivision approvals at that time (presumably the latter)—still defined David Lane as a dead end, one that simultaneously exists and doesn’t exist: Schrödinger’s dead-end exit lane.

It’s not the only example of its kind.  Take a look at the parallel streets just to the south of Stop 13.

Near the bottom of the map is Dixie Drive, another long street stretching eastward from South Meridian.  Methinks this development again represented a former farm parcel, deep but with limited street frontage, that a developer purchased in the middle of the 20th century, to convert into suburban ranch-style homes.  The developers didn’t have enough room for a second parallel street, at least not to build homes with half-acre lots that the homebuyers’ market at the time would support.  So they fabricated a little stub street, branded it South East Street yet again, and it serves as another dead-end exit lane—a means for motorists to turn around.  I outlined it in pink.  The problem is: it’s much less of even an alley than the one that links David Lane and East Stop 13.  To the southern terminus of Dixie Drive, South East Street is clearly indistinguishable from the driveway to a house; on the northern terminus, South East Street is just a gravel path to nothing.  Yet somehow the City of Indianapolis recognizes this as a dedicated public right-of-way called South East Street, while still calling Dixie Drive a “dead end” at the entrance where it intersects with South Meridian.  These dead-end exit lanes serve little other purpose than providing a publicly sanctioned space for vehicles to turn around much more easily than a situation where the road just terminates into a guardrail…

…and that scenario perfectly describes Crosby Drive, the parallel street sandwiched between David/Stop 13 and Dixie Drive.  Unlike the other parallels in this series, Crosby Drive features a road with curbs, storm sewers, and sidewalks.  The homes rest on smaller lots with a more consistent architectural style—only three or four ranch typologies.  The road’s genesis almost certainly comes from a different developer who purchased a separate long, narrow farm parcel fronting Meridian Street at a different time than the others—presumably later, since Crosby Drive offers road design elements that suggest higher standards, either imposed by municipal fiat or an attempt to appeal to a slightly higher market demographic.  Yet, as the maps indicate, Crosby Drive does not terminate with a little perpendicular stub called “South East Street”.  No dead-end exit lane; just an old fashioned dead end.  And, back on the western terminus, the intersection with Meridian does indicate that Crosby Drive is exactly that.  

The condition I’m exploring here is hardly profound, but it reveals a marked difference in suburban street design in these early decades of suburbanization—the 1950s and 60s—compared to the present.  Whether these four parallel streets—and the weird dead-end exit lane that defines three of them—completed development before Unigov consolidation or after, the road design standards were moderately lax in Indianapolis compared to present (where all new streets must have sidewalks on both sides), and even more lax in unincorporated Marion County.  The cul-de-sac had also not yet achieved prevalence, though by the late 1960s it was the overwhelming choice for terminating a street if a T-shape is impossible.  Cul-de-sacs may require a little extra public right of way and pavement, but they are a more graceful and aesthetic way to cap a dead end, to the point that, by the 80s and 90s, many municipal codes only permitted dead ends for special circumstances, like a stub that anticipates a subsequent phase in land development.  Otherwise, cul-de-sacs have been the way to go ever since.

I will conclude by postulating that the average American adult is quite well-attuned to the age of a suburban home.  Even with little or no overt training, most adults have lived and witnessed enough that they can probably guess the age of a subdivision within fifteen or twenty years of accuracy.  The signals are all right there in front of them: lot sizes, frontage, massing, cladding material, ornamentation.

And then there are the more subtle ones to the roads themselves, of which most people remain unconscious: the naming scheme (surnames or trees get replaced with geographical features or whimsical unifying themes), the road width, the geometry (straight versus curvilinear), and the absence or presence of cul-de-sacs.  Or these inexplicable dead-end exit lanes, which, when it comes to suburban street design, are best labeled “a work in progress”, before the developers pull a better design—a tastier lollipop—from the bottom of the bag.