The term "dead end" is not the most commonly used expression in all English-speaking regions. Official terminology and traffic signs include many alternatives, some only used regionally. In the UK , a dead end street with homes is often called a close. Instead, they are determined at the city or county level, [ 5 ] with most places choosing to use court for a bulbous cul-de-sac. In Australia , a street with a bulbous end is usually referred to as a court , although the naming decision ultimately rests with the state or territory authority.
Dead ends are added to road layouts in urban planning to limit through-traffic in residential areas. Some dead ends provide no possible passage except in and out of their road entry. In this case, this type of dead end is an example of filtered permeability. The International Federation of Pedestrians proposed to call such streets "living end streets" [ 9 ] and to provide signage at the entry of the streets that make permeability for pedestrians and cyclists clear.
Its application retains the dead end's primary function as a non-through road, but establishes complete pedestrian and bicycle network connectivity. The earliest examples of dead ends were unearthed in the El Lahun workers' village in Egypt , which was built in c. The village was planned and built orthogonally with straight streets that intersect at right angles in an irregular grid. The western part of the excavated village, where the workers lived, had fifteen narrow and short dead ends laid out perpendicularly on either side of a wider, straight street; all terminate at the enclosing walls.
Dead end streets also appeared during the classical period of Athens and Rome. The 15th century architect and planner Leon Battista Alberti implies in his writings that dead end streets may have been used intentionally in antiquity for defense purposes. He writes: [ 11 ]. The same opinion is expressed by an earlier thinker, Aristotle , when he criticized the Hippodamian grid : [ 12 ].
For that [arrangement] is difficult for foreign troops to enter and find their way about when attacking. Inferential evidence of their earlier use can also be drawn from the text of a German architect, Rudolf Eberstadt, that explains their purpose and utility: [ 13 ].
