[closeparen]

Suburbia is a tree. The best residential property is closest to the leaf nodes, since this minimizes through traffic (think cul-de-sac). The best commercial property is closest to the root, since this maximizes it (think McDonalds). The tree empties every morning and fills every night, placing enormous demands on the edges near the root. Those are generally the stroads. Slashing the capacity of a stroad/arterial by turning it to a street would cut off the entire subtree from the world. Homeowners are right to resist that. Their property would be useless.

If we’re fighting stroads, those have to become roads. One way to get this done is simply banish the businesses. But this strains capacity on the arterials even worse, since you now need to leave the suburb to go shopping.

The other way is to push businesses down the tree, closer to houses, more decentralized. But the residents won’t abide that either, on the theory that businesses will attract traffic to their sub-trees.

To that I say: get over it. It’s utterly insane to have a whole street for the private use of a few dozen families. It’s literally impossible to make arterials big enough to compensate. You can have your street slow, but it’s going to be part of a network and it’s going to be used by more than just the hyper local community.

But of course they don’t see this as particularly less bad than total isolation, so they won’t allow it either. The whole thing is fucked.

[farnsworth]

The takeaway here is a lesson about how we build cities, not that we should decrease the traffic capacity of some stroads and make no other changes.

[fragmede]

In practice, new cities, when that even happens, doesn't happen out of thin air either, not in the US at least. We don't build cities (too much infrastructure investment required), but even when we do, they don't go from 0-100 mph and go from being a small sleepy town into a city overnight. History of a place thus dictates what the future of it will look like. How we build cities, effectively, involves decreasing traffic capacity in some places. Strongtowns.org has a large number of other changes, not just limiting stroads.

[mcv]

No, they need to move the commercial property closer to the leaves. Not at the leaves, but close enough that the distance is still walkable. That would really reduce car traffic, and therefore reduce stress on the road capacity.

[closeparen]

It would bring mild traffic to parts of the tree that currently have almost zero, which is unacceptable to the people living on them.

[drivers99]

There's a great video about that too. "The Suburban Traffic Contradiction" by Oh The Urbanity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E

One of the interesting points is that there is a commonality between those suburbans and people who want walkable urban areas: few of us want to deal with the problems of lots of cars driving around us.