City ordinance also requires lots to front public streets, he wrote.

Sure, there are private streets, Arnold said, but they come about because the people who live on them wanted to live on private streets, not because they were forced to.

Unfortunately, there are barriers to the kind of full privatization to which cul-de-sacs, by their very design, clearly aspire.

Aside from their annoying bourgeoisie mystique, cul-de-sacs serve as mirages of escape for lost motorists and are more time consuming for garbage trucks and other public service providers to navigate, among other practical and logistical problems.

Those of the New Urbanism school of neighborhood design are especially critical, noting that cul-de-sacs are effectively built to cater to the car culture, with houses set on cul-de-sacs set in subdivisions set off from the rest of the community by only a couple of main access points.

About the only good reasons to dead-end a street are if it risks running into a body of water or off a cliff or through railroad tracks or into some immovable object. Better for walking, biking and the commonweal in general are neighborhoods with narrow streets, numerous possible routes from Point A to Point B and a multitude of uses.