Easily believable. I used to live in a place in California that was maybe 200 feet away from a local shopping center / strip mall kind of thing; groceries, restaurants, laundromat, couple assorted stores. It would have been real convenient except going there directly would have required walking through a neighbors yard and jumping their fence; so instead the only path to get to this place (again, 200 feet away if I were a bird) was to get in the car and drive in the opposite direction to leave the neighborhood and then double back along the main road.

200 feet became about 3 miles, about half of which had no sidewalk for people on foot.

You can mitigate this by allowing commerical zoning at the perimeters of suburban areas. You could go further and strategically place commercial zoning at specifc corners within the suburban nighborhoods themselves.

Additionally many suburban neighborhoods are designed to prevent through traffic at the expense of blocking all traffic. However what can get around this are sidewalks and trails that cut through the neighborhood. In this way you could strategically link neighborhoods with nearby parks and trails so that one could create a meandering route to their destination while avoiding busy roads. We do this where I live in Colorado a bit.

I think that all suburban street layouts are designed by a secret society of men whose sole unifying principle is a fierce all-consuming hatred of pizza delivery drivers.

It’s only “traditional” since post-WW2 white flight

A bus/train cannot reasonably serve a cul-de-sac. The time needed to get down it and back is robbed from everyone who wants to go elsewhere. There is almost no destinations at the end - even if it has one (as it is in the case of many large office complexs or hospitals), not enough people are going there to be worth the time stolen from everyone else.

If you want good transit you need to be on the way to someplace else. That applies to both your start and destination.

Yeah anyone who's lived in one can tell you that. Blocks are easy to walk and you can put shops inside because they're convenient. This type of suburban neighborhoods just can't do the same. Even attempts to put shops and restaurants nearby wind up being good, but just no genuine substitute for the real thing of a walkable neighborhood.

To get to the grocer that is a half mile from my house I can walk along the neighborhood main road then along the extremely busy interstate feeder (no sidewalks ever) with cars moving 60+ mph.
Or

• walk to the one side street with a large cement drainage ditch
• walk into the ditch
• jump the 4' wall at the top of the incline
• go over and under through the tangle of small trees and vines for about 100'
• cross the field of chest high weeds and wildflowers
• cross 3 parking lots
• this is the only way through. Every other path is blocked by yards and 6-8' fencing.

Then
Both paths lead to a 5 lane car crossing over the interstate with two lights and no sidewalk. Each light crosses the aforementioned feeder roads. Then I can walk through the ditch to the parking lot for the grocer.

Ezpz, very safe, very america.

This was just as much about enriching oil oligarchs as Bush's forever war, etc.

They robbed us of walkable (bike-able) spaces, real suburbs and public transport for the masses.

I don’t believe this at all. It is 100% the distance between things. Where I live, if I get on a bicycle, it will take 30 minutes to reach the nearest grocery store. If I wanted to ride it to work, it would probably take me 6 hours each way.

By car its 5 minutes, and 30 minutes in the high way. Cars are the only way to get around, and public transport is practically non existent.

I have a hard time believing this can't be solved by free busses and free light rail.

So more kilometres of street equals larger distances and these larger distances have created U.S. car dependency? And I thought that shorter ways create car dependency. /s

Wow, a logical master work from Yale university 🤣😂 Are they going for the Ig Nobel???