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In the standard new suburb, built as quickly as possible by developers working exclusively to maximize short-term profit, little thought is given to making a rich, vital whole. New suburban streets meander arbitrarily, making navigation almost impossible for outsiders. The houses are often needlessly ugly mongrels. Even worse, they are plopped down on lots with almost no regard for how the houses might exist together, as pieces of a larger fabric. They are too far apart to provide the coziness of small-town or city streets, too close to create the splendor of country privacy. Corner stores or neighborhood post offices are almost unheard of.
The single biggest difference between modern suburbs and authentic towns is the dominance of the automobile. Suburban street-design standards have been drafted by traffic engineers, and so the bias is in favor of -- you guessed it -- traffic. It is now a planning axiom that streets exist almost exclusively for cars, and for cars going as fast as possible.
Duany and Plater-Zyberk challenge the urban-planning orthodoxies that, they say, encourage traffic congestion. With dead-end suburban cul-de-sacs leading to "collector roads" that in turn funnel all traffic to the highway, every driver is jammed onto the same crowded road. Why not have shops reached by small neighborhood streets, thus keeping errand runners off the highway? Why not have stores' parking lots connected so shoppers could drive from place to place without heading back out to the main road? Because local codes, drafted by experts, won't permit it.
Thomas Brahms is the executive director of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the field's main professional association. He is patronizing, even contemptuous, toward the new movement. "It would be nice to turn the clock back to the walking cities of the early 1800s," Brahms says, "but I don't think we can do that. It would be utopian to think that you could draw a circle and think that people would stay within that circle and not leave it."
Duany, Plater-Zyberk, Calthorpe and the rest agree that five minutes is as far as most people will generally go for an errand on foot, which means that the natural size for a neighborhood, equipped with the basic shops and services, is 200 acres -- an area a bit larger than one-half mile square. No one is suggesting that people will remain locked within these neighborhoods, only that they should not be required to leave any time they want to shop or work. "These pedestrian neighborhoods create a stronger sense of community," says Calthorpe, who has produced designs for a score of such places, mainly on the West Coast. "They re-create the glue that used to hold together our communities before they were slashed apart by the big expressways."