A reader wrote:

It's true that cars are a lot of the reason towns here in the USA suck.
But I think development rules are more responsible. 

I don't think the two can be separated. The manner in which development rules handles the car are the key to the feel of an area.

Just imagine that the commercial areas (only) of American suburbs had since 1950 been laid out according to the Three Rules (with only a very few other provisions such as allowing mixed commercial/residential use). I think that American spatial pattern would be dramatically different. It is not the residential parts  of the suburbs which are so awful -- it's the commercial areas.

Comments

[Matthew Amster-Burton]

It's not the residential parts of the suburbs that are so bad?

Last year I found myself taking my daughter (then around six months old) for a walk in suburban Portland. Among the horrors we encountered on a blessedly brief outing:

* Streets, including arterials, without sidewalks
* Sidewalks blocked by parked cars because the driveway was too short
* Sidewalks overgrown by trees
* Confusing, fragmented street network with no obvious way to get back to where we had started

And this was fairly dense for a suburban area, small lots, actually within the Portland city limits. Truly suburban residential areas would be much worse. If anything, I think the residential parts of suburbs are worse than that commercial parts for a person on foot. At least in the commercial area, if you survive getting to the Barnes and Noble, you're set.

[Brian Miller]

I would agree with Matthew. The residential suburbs may well be "pretty" and "pleasant," but their very monolithic quality and low density autod dependence necessitate the kind of ugly sprawl that dominates the rest of the American cityscape.

I still argue you cannot have on the large scale a beautiful, attractive cityscape when the dominant form of development caters to people moving at 35 mph.