Suburban sprawl and its roads are down to the finest detail, exactly as regulation require them to be. There is a deep and longstanding intellectual tradition b

Suburban sprawl and its roads are down to the finest detail, exactly as regulation require them to be. There is a deep and longstanding intellectual tradition behind the whole thing, why the roads must be so wide, the curves so gentle, the homes and the shopping so far apart, the parking lots so big. All of it lovingly crafted by planners and traffic engineers in the names of safety and quality of life. That tradition looks at any place which is compact and pedestrian-friendly and says, this is a backwards and inhumane relic of the past, progress demands that we never repeat it. Where will they park?! Any such place that you see is either grandfathered, or built on hundreds of variances. The buy in for lots of regulation and coordinated city planning is so pervasive that you’re like a fish unable to see the water. The good news is that you don’t really need to change the degree of the regulation or the bureaucracy responsible for administering it. You just need to replace every rule with its opposite.