This is a reposting of an article I’ve made years ago. Enjoy!

What’s the most annoying thing about living in the suburbs? If you took a survey, I would bet that most people would point to traffic as the worst result of suburban life. It’s not hard to see why. Americans spend on average 38 hours a year in traffic. And it’s not just time wasted either, traffic has a annual cost of over $800 dollars in wasted gas, as well as all the pollution that that wasted gas created.

But why? How is this traffic created in the first place and how can it be stopped and reversed? Traffic is naturally created by the convergence of many people in limited space. Most metropolitan areas have a problem with traffic, but that does not mean it cannot be countered by a mix of smart planning and development. You see, as urban areas developed, urban planners (or lack thereof) started to make patterns of development that unwittingly encouraged the traffic that we see today.

These patterns are called “sprawl”, or the spreading out and overspecialization of an area that is often the result of economic or legislative pressures. One of the most common ways in which this manifests itself is by suburbs. With it’s row after row of almost identical houses, and it’s infinite cul-de-sacs, the suburbs have become the poster child of sprawl. It’s easy to see why. Developing cities in the way that we have done for decades (I.E. traditional suburbia), spreads people out, and encourages them to use personal vehicles to maintain their lifestyle. This reliance on vehicles means that the streets must be created to accommodate them to the exclusion of all other means of transit. Highways, arterial, and other road types etc are all created to meet the needs of vehicle travel. Naturally, everyone using vehicles all of the time means that streets are clogged constantly and traffic is created.

To make a long story short, sprawl like the suburbs is a major contributor to traffic, because it isolates people from places that they would like to go, and demands that they have a car to get by.

Truthfully, there are solutions to sprawl, but it will not be easy to change decades of development, immediately. One can only hope to see the end of sprawl by better planning.