I think this piece takes too long to arrive at a underwhelming point, seemingly that prime transportation and activity corridors all want to co-locate because o

I think this piece takes too long to arrive at a underwhelming point, seemingly that prime transportation and activity corridors all want to co-locate because of interrelated and natural, rational reasons. This finding isn't obvious but is easily revealed, and though it's worth talking about, there's deeper insights if we continue the examination further. Early road bypasses failed precisely because of the lack of development restrictions: they increased traffic and cheap land value drew businesses seeking to capitalize on it, so now the bypasses of yesteryear are of the urban fabric. The classic way to armor against this is to make the roadway limited access, and then you have development concentrating only at intersection nodes. Or the jurisdictions at play can always place additional restrictions on development. But underneath all the SimCity we can play with roads and zoning, the transportation geography will always remain constrained to edges and nodes, corridors and chokepoints. It's these chokepoints that truly define the way people will get around, because getting to a point beyond them will require crossing it, and there's only ever a handful of time-effective paths to take between you and it. Bridges and mountain passes are the obvious chokepoints, but in a car-oriented world so are motorway interchanges and meetings of big arterials. Much criticism is levelled at US suburban development where single-family homes are plopped onto winding streets that only discharge to big avenues at subdivision entrances, so everyone has to take the big roads to get anywhere, but most European cities aren't that different: the lesser streets aren't passable at a pace that motorists have come to expect, and rarely does an uninterrupted network of them exist to get into a different part of the city using only small streets. Although the planning forces, commercial forces, and histories are different, they both arrive at the same result, of cars being channeled to a small number of higher-capacity paths, instead of distributed more evenly throughout. There's cities that have leveraged the grid to great effect to arrive at a less crushing result. Las Vegas is a good example: attractions are located along a narrow corridor with heavy traffic that locals have learned to avoid. The rest of the urban area forms a large grid with dozens of avenues at regular intervals, and amenities and retail are sprinkled among housing. You have many options of traversing the urban area from one side to another. There's other urbanized areas that have the same basic form, but they're imbalanced by a nearby node that draws traffic and upsets the network. Plano, TX looks really similar, but is a surburb to much larger Dallas. Other times, there's far too little commercial in a sea of residential, like much of South Florida or Inland Empire or Oklahoma City, or the desired directions of travel don't match the grid, like in Orange County, CA. Sometimes the grid is limited by natural obstructions that create chokepoints, significantly impairing the utility of the grid, like in Seattle, Minneapolis, or the connections of Manhattan to elsewhere. One of the goals of railroads, motorways, subways, etc. is to "warp" and cheat the natural network and create connections among nodes that previously didn't exist, or weren't even nodes. This requires clever and thoughtful design that goes beyond simply putting transit along every avenue, or putting in more lanes.