But in reality, zoning no more causes development than a posted speed limit causes cars to drive fast. Like most government regulation, zoning just tidies up what would be the basic form anyway. The essential form of suburbia, which is housing, shopping, and offices clustered in individual pods, separated by acres of parking, is determined by its transportation system, the highway system. No amount of rewriting zoning codes will change this. Of course, city planners tend to focus on zoning because, unlike transportation, they have some influence on it.
Planners usually have little say over the work of state transportation departments.
A more sensible government hierarchy would place the state department of transportation underneath a state department of urban design. While planners worry about zoning, highway engineers use roads to solve traffic jams, instead of recognizing that they are creating the potential for more traffic jams. Our impulse to have the home in the garden, the pastoral setting of the classic suburbs, is destroying it. Astute commentators say that suburbia, in the original sense as a peaceful quiet realm near the city but close to nature, is dead. As soon as the suburban pattern became universal, the virtues it at first boasted began to disappear.