>>Cul-de-sac is the extreme aspect of that separation. I've seen it around here, taken to the extreme - the soil is flat, and apart of a few bays and lakes there are no landscape features which would dictate the shape of streets. Any building lots are created by cutting old forest. But it's so obvious, when looking at a map, that practically every neighborhood is planned as an insulated country, with almost no contact with its neighbors; even when there is no fence, there is no connecting road. And it's not typical of just housing projects and gated communities (or what other name tags they may have), it's the same with the businesses. Each lot has to have its own parking, with its own entrance from the main street. If you happen to enter the wrong parking - because the entrance was obscured by the vehicle in front of you, in many cases you can't just drive over. They're all separate universes.
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>Again, this is mostly the local government requesting it, not the developers wanting to do it. Since local governments are, of course, people who live there, the way to fight it is through the ballot and through talking to your elected officials. I suspect, though, that most people like it this way. You and I are the oddballs here.
The local governments are also influenced by the major theory, social movements etc etc - and I wouldn't count the builders out, they can have a way of being heard. I've read a few works on the urban development of American cities, but they were mostly concerned about the megalopolis, the big downtown and maybe the surrounding boroughs, not as much with the urban sprawl. Either I didn't get the right books, or these books always come a generation too late - but the indelible impression from what I read is that the current theory influences urban planning more than people do. Which, I figure, comes from the fact that it's very unlikely that any city government will be voted out over the layout of the streets or zoning. Their voters were sold the same theory.
Even I've read articles on the relationship between crime rate and population density, when that was the new hot issue of urban development - someone back home probably wanted to get a PhD on the subject, seeing how hot it was in the US, and even did some real research (compiling statistics from police reports and census - not "research" in today's sense of "find references to what others wrote"). As in other things social, it's so easy to find flimsy correlations from partial data for the wrong reasons. Higher density isn't the cause of higher crime rate (or else European or Asian cities would have significantly higher rate than American cities); it's that the poor are packed more densely. Flawed as it was, this theory served to increase the size of building lots, which then need larger houses on them, which then need longer streets to keep them connected, which then increase distances, which then enforce the need for transportation... which was made possible by cheap oil.
Now undoing and remodeling five or six decades of building and shaping a country based on cheap oil is not going to come cheap or easy. What I don't understand is how was the theory brought back into the limelight in the eighties. The oil was once already used as a weapon; it was obvious that it could come up again at any unsuitable moment - there was no guarantee that it won't. And yet, the industry came up with a way to start selling larger cars, to get tax cuts for selling family tanks (sans cannons, though), and the houses went on going larger and larger, the urban sprawl was restarted... so all this time after seventies was wasted. May be the effect of reaganomics and part of the general swingback after (or rather, against) the sixties - if it was, it was short term gain, long term cost.
>There's an interesting story. This borough wrote a master plan that called for a TND, but they had it in mind for a different property. My husband's company came in to propose it on this property (which was reclaimed brownfields) and the borough and neighbors were pretty tough. I think they went through 16 versions of the plan before they got it approved.
Huh? So a mixed-use neighborhood is good as long as it's limited to only one place? What were these guys thinking, TND is a privilege and would be devalued if unleashed en masse?
