Yeah I Talk To Folks, What Of It?

I was outside the library the other night getting my Pall Mall on, and I sat down next to this Indian guy name Api and started chatting him up. He was an interesting guy who's doing a master's in urban architecture and I've always found architecture pretty interesting. I asked him about urban sprawl and he lit me up with an idea I'd never really thought of before: The primary reason behind our current trend for cities to overgrow and become the ugly, inefficient monstrosities they do is a simple lack of engineering common sense.

Every time the roads become clogged and the time to travel between two points in a given densely populated region is decidedly too long, we increase the number of lanes and highways in that area. If you increase the number of lanes, all other things being constant, the time it takes to travel between the points decreases, and decreases for further areas as well (we can't just widen one small section of a highway). It then necessarily becomes an option for those living closer into the city to move further out and experience the same time delay. So by attempting to alleviate the problem of traffic congestion, we expand the radius of population able to work in a region. This will cause buildings to be built of course, but not high density urban buildings, rather the typical short, wide spaced suburban buildings we see so often. As time goes on, the congestion reaches these further points, and we continue on ad infinitum. The other reasons to build more dense urban centers and public transportation are obvious, but this one is often overlooked I think. The whole "only build up when you run out of space" mentality is flawed, a proactive approach would be the only way to solve the problem without a complete rededication of space, which is very costly. Government engineers are nuts.