Town Planning: Terraced houses

Two huge advantages of terraced housing over semi-detached or detached housing are as follows:

1. You don't absolutely need to lock your back door to the garden, and stuff which you have in the garden is far less likely to be nicked. This doesn't apply so much if you are at the end of the row, but it applies even more if your back garden backs on to the back gardens of another row of terraced houses behind. (The minor downside of this, as BJ points out in the comments, is that you have to be a bit careful carrying garden waste through the house).

2. You get less traffic noise when you are sitting in your back garden. I currently live in a detached house, and both my house and the building next door are built to within one yard of the fence, so the sound of cars going past is amplified if anything as it echoes through the gap. If you sitting in the back gardens between two rows of terraced houses, you notice the traffic noise much less, or at least, it is a steady background noise rather then you noticing individual cars.

3. The downside of living in a terraced house is that it doubles your chances of having an idiot neighbour who makes a noise. But assuming only a minority of neighbours do so (3%), the chances of not living next to and suffering from an idiot only goes down from 97% to 94.09%. This is the more relevant comparison.

4. A third more subtle point is that with a row of semi-detached houses, the strip of land between your back door (which in England is usually at the side, go figure) and the fence to your neighbour's house is either used to park the car or as access to a garage behind the house. This appears to be the least valued part.

In the heyday of semi-detached house building, cars were pretty leaky things, so it was good to park them in the garage when not in use, but nowadays, cars are much more resilient, and you can leave them parked outside to no ill effect. It is an absolute mystery to me why so many relatively new houses have inbuilt garages, it is a complete waste of space, you'd be better off leaving the car outside and having an extra room downstairs.

So when people want to extend their semi-detached houses, the first thing they do is a loft conversion (because that's the cheapest), and if they want to extend the footprint, they don't extend at the front (because that would spoil the appearance of the street and is usually against planning regulations for that very reason) and they don't want to lose any of their back garden, so they tend to build sideways, thus ending up with what is effectively terraced housing (image from Francis Builders):Usually this ends up looking a bit of a mess, it would usually have been better to build terraced houses with a wider frontage from Day One.

5. As we also know, on-street parking is in some respects better than in your own driveway:
a. Getting and out of traffic flows and crossing the pavement (half the time in reverse) is a right old faff, you have to be really careful about pedestrians, other motorists don't like it when you have to stop in the middle of the road to reverse in, and they don't like stopping for you when you have to come out again.
b. If your car is on your driveway, burglars know which house to burgle if they want to get the keys. If you have an old car in your driveway, you are at little risk of this, but if you have something swanky, it increases the chances you will be burgled. Apparently, some insurance companies offer lower premiums to people who park on the street.
c. You don't need to worry about some inconsiderate b*****d blocking you in on your driveway.

The obvious down side of on-street parking is that you can't always get a space right in front of your house (although parking spaces could be marked and allocated to houses, I suppose), which is not such an issue.

6. The two observations, that terraced housing is best and on-street parking is best can lead to a conflict if households on a street have more cars than will fit on the street.

Having paced this out on the street just now, I can report that cars parked lengthways on the street require about six yards of road. We also know that the average plot width of a typical terraced house is five-to-seven yards and of a semi-detached is about eight-to-ten yards. So as long as households only have one car on average, there is enough road space for everybody to park on the street; but every household has two cars, then the frontage would have to be about twelve yards.