[atomicUpdate]

> So when you speed up travel inside a metropolitan area (from suburb to city/other suburb), what you do is that you incite people to live further and further away from their workplace and from the stores they patronize.

I don't understand this point. Living further away doesn't mean they stop patronizing stores entirely, they just patronize different stores. If a store sees their clientele move, they can either move themselves, or if both regions now have enough customers to support it expand to another location.

[jacobolus]

What he is saying is that highways encourage people to build everything more spread out, including residences, offices, and stores. He’s not claiming this is problem for the stores per se, or that it inherently changes the relationship between people and stores.

The problem is the increased money and land spent on transportation, the increased pollution, the unfriendliness of the system for pedestrians / anyone who can’t drive, and the inability to build mass transit to cover the same areas.