Northern Virginia is pretty much all a disaster. There is zero urban planning. The streets are built randomly, not in a quaint way, which makes getting around impossible. The commercial areas are built as far as possible from residential ones, which makes running to the store for milk or going out to lunch a huge time sink. The traffic is horrible as a result, even though the area isn't really that densely populated.

Compare: Westchester County to Fairfax County, roughly similarly sized suburbs. Westchester has all these cute little downtowns with grid streets (ish) built around Metro North stations. Traffic is kept under control because a large fraction of people commute to the city by rail. Fairfax County sucks in comparison. No transit to speak of, awful traffic, etc. Its the result of urban planning that basically consists of (mark of a subdivision and let the developers do whatever they want).

Arlington is tolerable, but only because development sprung up around Metro lines. Ditto Alexandria, which at least has a centrally planned downtown core.

  The commercial areas are built as far as possible from residential ones

This is because of urban planning.

If you call that urban planning, then you can call Fairfax the worst example of "urban planning" I've ever heard of. It's a soul sucking mess of bland corporation towers, and distant developments of cookie-cutter cardboard houses squeezed onto tiny plots of land, with no way to escape to the outside air or to entertainment but by a 30 min drive on a traffic laiden freeway... No wonder their upper-class high-schools are chock full of heavy drugs, the poor kids can't escape.

So your exhibit A of how business and markets can make a mess of things is a county almost entirely dominated by government employers? It almost looks to me like when they have near total control over how an area evolves, they don't bother with much oversight or planning for it..

I've lived in Northern Virginia for most of my life, and have seen it go through a lot of growth. One thing to bear in mind is that, prior to World War II, Northern Virginia was almost all rural. Old Town Alexandria was pretty much the only city. All of the growth in Northern Virginia during and since World War II has been driven by the growth of the federal government, and much of the lousy urban planning has been because the federal government has been growing faster than any of the urban planners expected.

NOVA has horrendous traffic because of poor urban planning (e.g. too much sprawl), few successful small businesses (mostly just chains), a barely viable public transit system outside of Arlington County.

I was curious about that too. Having moved from Santa Barbara to Tuscaloosa to Arlington, Northern VA seems OK to me.

Yeah, I was curious about which areas he was referring to as well. Arlington and Alexandria are very well set up. My guess is he is talking about the sprawling surburbian hell-hole known as Fairfax and beyond.

Its not just the suburban aspect though. I was shocked to find that the suburbs in Chicago were a lot less "suburby" than Fairfax. Good commuter transit, walkable downtowns in many places. Grid streets all over.

My wife grew up in a town of 2000 people in Iowa. She hates Fairfax County for being so isolated. Her town was small and rural, but it had a walkable downtown with a little street grid. The town planners long ago made it that way in case it ever became a bustling megalopolis.