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Along Nicholasville Road, just south of the UK campus and across from Central Baptist Hospital, there are a series of dead end streets or isolated neighborhoods bordered on the west by Nicholasville Road and on the east by CSX railroad right-of-way.  This route walked down the northenmost two streets, Cherokee Park and Suburban Court.

This winds up being a story of two streets.  Suburban Court is nice enough, but not as luxurious as Cherokee Park, which sports larger lots, a wide grassy median, even taller trees.  Both streets are long dead-ends (some of the streets further south connect within small neighborhoods even when they don’t provide an easy way across the tracks).  But while Cherokee Park ends in a loop with houses backing to the CSX right-of-way, the end of Suburban Court is less subtle, with a couple of warning reflectors and a few thin shrubs.  Houses on the other side of the track are tantalizing close.  It’s interesting how design decisions made 80 years ago are still apparent today.  Good design is undervalued even now–for example, consider two neighborhoods, one with trees placed in the tree lawn by the developer, the other without.  How much will the difference in curb appeal be worth, relative to the cost of the tree today?  The core of the issue may be an agency problem.  The developer has no interest in planting trees without recouping the cost; it’s difficult to justify such things in a cost-cutting environment.  Still, the end result is needless differences in structural design between neighborhoods.  (Could we ask whether building in such stratification by neighborhood is necessary to begin with?  I think so, but that is a question for another time.)