The land use bug struck me, not fatally, as I attempted to drive through Beaverton recently, not through the tidy grid around which Beaverton formed (the section along Hall and Watson for the first mile or so south of Farmington Road) but to get to a friend's house in the middle of the suburban spaghetti between Hall, Scholls Ferry, Murray, and Brockman/Greenway. (Similar principles rule west of Murray also.)
If you have tried in vain to visit a friend who lives in this modern Labyrinth, you might have concluded, as I have, that this mess represents a lack of planning. Quite the contrary: Beaverton planned it this way, requiring developers to build these intricate networks of streets to nowhere. The city code even sets out a system for naming the sneak dead-ends, mandating equine names (Rawhide, Trapper, Scout) in one area, geologic names (Opal, Talus, Tephra) in another, and bird names (Teal, Gull, Grebe) in another.
The city's purpose, as I understand it, was to discourage car traffic cutting through residential neighborhoods. The city has achieved that purpose. But what else has it achieved? It's forced developers to build neighborhoods that can't be served by mass transit and made it difficult or impossible for people to walk from their houses to schools, bus stops, and neighborhood shops. Compare these street layouts to those in Beaverton's subdivisions of 25 to 50 years ago: Ridgeview Heights (along Belaire Drive off of Hall Boulevard), Hyland Hills (along Hart Road between 130th and Murray), and The Royal Woodlands (off Royal Woodlands Drive west of Jamieson Road). They're all laid out with pleasant, gently-curved parallel streets, and yet these three areas have only one "cut-through" street among them, Hart Road.
If the government wants to encourage us to drive less, it's not enough to make driving inconvenient; it must also make transit and shank's mare convenient. Beaverton failed.