It's an absurd meme perpetuated by the ignorant. I've been through Breezewood countless times, I grew up less than a hour away. If you drive just a minute or two away from Breezewood you'll be in the beautiful rolling hills of Pennsylvnaia. Gorgeous countryside, a great place to raise kids.
Breezewood isn't even a suburb, less than two hundred people actually live there. It's essentially a rest stop, a bizarro artifact of some esoteric interaction between I-70 and the turnpike. Any other small town in the area is completely different.
Uhh... ok. If you drive a few minutes past the horrifying automotive blight you arrive at... a shoulderless road going through an empty field. It's not a suburb, but it demonstrates the problem with car-centric development and sprawl. I grew up in a similar area a couple hours away, and it was a terrible place to be a kid. Yeah, I had some fun exploring the woods by my house until I got old enough to be bored by it, but that cost was that I never got to see other kids or go anywhere without having to bother my parents to arrange something and drive me somewhere. I always figured that suburban kids got to play with other kids all the time, but the impression I get is that this doesn't really happen. Suburbs are still car islands, and a kid has to be pretty lucky to have other kids their age they get along with in their general vicinity.
That "horrifying automotive blight" is less than one square kilometer and virtually nobody lives there. If you don't like it (few people do) then don't live there. The rest of Bedford Country has thousands of other square kilometers for you to live in, with numerous small towns that aren't interstate rest stops. Go streetview in Bedford PA, where about 3000 people live vs Breezewood's <200. It's a modest community, the people there aren't rich but they have nice yards, sidewalks all over the place, and few cars on any of the roads. Teach your kids to look both ways before crossing a street and they'll be fine. Only somebody who's hopelessly neurotic would worry about their kids walking to their friend's house in Bedford.
> kids don't like growing up in the country
Most do, but if you think yours won't then go live in a small town or a city. Citing Breezewood as a problem with American society is simply idiotic. It's a tiny aberration that doesn't effect you or anybody else except for the handful of weirdos who choose to live there.
Instantly recognized is an interesting characterization for a place that has no distinct visual characteristics at all (which I think was your point). Although I tend to agree with most urbanist arguments, many people limit their animosity to critiques of the physical land use patterns, but stop short of being so critical towards the emptying of unique cultural capital a place might otherwise have if it weren't filled with only the blandest low-risk franchise investments like Starbucks, Dairy Queen, etc...
In Canada, most towns look 95% alike to this the one you linked, with the exception of a few franchises that don't cross the border. That means I can drop a street view pin in any "neighborhood" that was built in the last decade (often including many mixed-use or more contemporary building types), and more than likely find one giant super grocery, an Orange theory fitness, a Freshii, a Subway, a gas station, a bank, a Tim Hortons, a Starbucks, and at least one mega fucking big parking lot.
I rent a car when I want one for road trips, but after driving through innumerable small towns and cities, it's a sad feeling to visit and just know that... there's literally no good local offerings here, not anymore.
How funny, because when you look at it from the map, there's proably < 100 housing units within a ~3 mile radius. Of course there's not a bike path and roundabouts! It's the ideal place for a stroad: a pit-stop off the interstate with almost no housing nearby, with a cold the climate half the year.
If a truck driver stops for the night, but fancies a meal from the other side of the road there's no sidewalk, and no crossing. Just lots of "no pedestrians" signs.
How do you get from the Tesla Supercharger to McDonald's?
Nobody intended Breezewood to be the way it is, it's the result of a bureaucratic jam between the state and the federal government decades ago. It hasn't been fixed since then because it's profitable the way it is. Virtually nobody actually lives there so there's no local pressure to change it. It is in no way representative of other communities in the region.
This is 3 minutes outside of Breezewood. This is what urban propagandist dudebros would have you believe is suburban hell: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0062641,-78.230818,3a,75y,35...
Breezewood isn't even a suburb, less than two hundred people actually live there. It's essentially a rest stop, a bizarro artifact of some esoteric interaction between I-70 and the turnpike. Any other small town in the area is completely different.