Cul-de-sac

For the musical group, see Cul de Sac (group). See also Dead end (disambiguation).

A cul-de-sac (originally in anatomy: French, literally "bottom of a sack") or dead-end is a street or road with only one entrance and exit. While some are true culs-de-sac, with no passage possible, others allow cyclists, pedestrians etc. to pass.

In modern urban planning culs-de-sac are deliberately created as they are streets with very little traffic, and hence often desirable as residential areas.

Counter intuition

More recent evidence with cul-de-sacs suggests that the lack of traffic may allow misbehavior in the street that a through would tame by the risk of being spotted by motorists.

More generally, the New Urbanism movement has offered criticism of the cul-de-sac and other streets not intended to network with each other. It has been suggested that such street layouts can cause increased traffic on the non-cul-de-sac streets, make navigation (especially on foot) inconvenient and non-intuitive, and reduce the size of any given neighborhood to a single street.

This applies especially to back-to-front housing where the front of the house fronts onto the cul-de-sac lane while the rear fronts onto the main roads. The Macquarie Fields riots of 2005 were a result of this kind of urban design.

See Also

Both cul-de-sac and dead end are used metaphorically to mean a line of thought or action which leads nowhere.

Cul-de-Sac is also the title of a 1966 film by Roman Polanski set on Lindisfarne and featuring Donald Pleasence and Lionel Stander.