Basically, the problem boils down to suburban streets being too hospitable to vehicular traffic. Remove the center dividing line, remove street parking, and narrow the street down to 18 feet wide at most (this provides just enough room for two SUVs side-by-side). Allow redevelopment up to the new desired edge of the street to make it even more visually narrow. Nobody is going to commute through these kinds of streets.
And an alternative for the low-density suburban junk - replace the asphalt with gravel when it starts needing repairs. Seriously. It's both cheaper and discourages through traffic.
... at the expense of being impassable for road bikes, generating vast clouds of dust (fun for pedestrians), high noise levels (fun for the local residents), being a major pain to plow in the winter, and having the occasional rock spraying from under a tyre damaging paint or smashing someone's windshield.
And throws up a lot of dust and needs to be continuously patched and graded for potholes and washboarding. It can also get ripped to shreds by snowplows if the ground isn't hard frozen. (And even then a lot of material can be scraped off if the snowplow operator isn't good.)
Source: Have a gravel driveway and my family has a house on a fairly long private gravel road.
I remember watching a programme about how they introduced this on a busy city centre road and weirdly it increased traffic flow while also allowing more pedestrian traffic (presumably because people and cars can move simultaneously).
http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lig...
Writing based on the experience in e.g. Kathmandu's Thamel district, where the same tiny roadways are shared by all pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws and dual-way taxi and moped traffic alike. Traffic signs??
It's a totally different traffic culture to what you're used to in Europe, and it does work in its own way.
Thanks for the link; I'll have to check that out further. I think I've run across documentaries for cities that have similar ideas. I think new development planning should definitely take some of these ideas into account, but we also have to think about what we can do on the margin to ensure the livability of our cities.
>> that doesn't mean that all streets should be maximally employed to reduce that congestion.
>
>It does, actually, because all streets are connected and part of the same network...
Maybe I'm misrepresenting what you are saying, but generally I would think that you don't want maximal utilization of all the paths in a network. If there's a shock to the system (say a major artery is closed down due to some chemical spill) then you want alternate pathways to be available to absorb the unexpected load. Using suburban through-ways in such a case is fine. Having significant amounts of regular traffic going through them is not. Systems need slack and redundancy to be resilient.
Now, will non-residents still use residential through-ways to commute? Indeed, that is fine and can't be totally prevented anyway. But hopefully incentivizing people to use major arteries will apply pressure to improve public transit options (in order to make those arteries more efficient) and will help keep residential streets safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.
edit: fixed formatting
It does, actually, because all streets are connected and part of the same network. No matter what philosophy you subscribe to as to what the "goal" of suburban neighborhood planning is, the fact remains that since (almost) all streets are (eventually) connected, and thus the problem of lots of cars being able to drive on streets that you don't want lots of cars on is always going to be prevalent.
A better solution, IMHO, is to borrow an idea from the EPCOT[1] Concept that Walt Disney created...separating what it means to be a "street" into streets/walkways that only pedestrians may travel on, and streets that only cars may travel on. The way EPCOT would have been designed would have limited your ability to park your car very close to where things were congested. Instead, you'd park further away and take the free public transit or walk/bike where you want to go. Cars and supply trucks would always travel underground in a vast network of highways, leaving basically the entire surface of the city looking more like a massive park than a metropolis.
It would have been an incredible leap forward. Sadly, Disney died before his company turned it into "Epcot", just another Disney World theme park.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)