For Anne Geraghty, it's no mystery at all. In Sacramento and elsewhere, decades of zoning have resulted in homogenous pods of housing, offices and shopping, all of which are separate from each other.
Residential streets are lined with sidewalks, but they inevitably lead to a wall of traffic.
At the end of the road is a busy highway, and that can be a pretty scary place. In Sacramento's ongoing debate over sprawl, many have argued that the region needs more planning. But for years, most of Sacramento's new suburbs have been extensively planned, and the end product is a segmented landscape, divided by multilane thoroughfares, where automobiles rule the road. The trend picked up steam after World War II, when developers started mass production of houses, and neighborhood associations multiplied. In turn, homeowners pushed for zoning to ward off other large-scale developments, such as apartment complexes and shopping centers.