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Instead of buying everything from one corner grocery, the suburban-consumer has the option of traveling as far as 50 miles to get the products they need for their home.

The suburban retail-warehouse model, where the consumer does the “last miles” of transport (rather than having a truck move goods to lots of small retail boutiques in a dense urban grid), is extremely and obviously efficient. Going to the optimal place and transporting the optimal good integrates the consumer into the supply chain.

Many suburban homes are productive factories of food, entertainment, education. They are also “last mile” production facilities, tailoring furniture, producing restaurant grade food, using computer technology for education and communications. They are mini-office-factories. Suburban families are highly productive, and have the green space in which to live and work…much as an ideal high tech workplace has a campus.

Its also important to keep in mind that it allows us to solve problems before they occur. A letter in today’s paper said that we should wait until we have a million people in the Region. Can you imagine the traffic nightmare that we’d need to endure if we waited that long? The result would be calls for more roads and highways and increased pressure to continue growing out until southern Ontario is one big continuous urban area.

However “efficient” the long-distance urban trips on limited-access highways, these highways are really expensive infrastructure — both for the environment and financially.

There are many areas of the country where there is a rich highway network, that allows efficient sprawl, and conversely the highways can be free flowing and allow for distant living.

If you think about it, there is no reason that the highways necessarily aways fill up unless you presume an endless birth of humans. And the birth rate in the US, sans immigration, has been at or below replacement rate.

I look at a city like Portland, which has a rich exurban network of highways and where inside “the city” you can jump on an off a highway very readily. At the same time Portland is consistently rated as a number one bicycling city…and it keeps its bike routes off the beaten track. Reason? Because it doesn’t use its neighborhood streets as highways.

A rich network of highways where a person can travel no more than half a mile to access one is a beautiful thing. I would go so far to say that such a network is more valuable, more efficient and “Greener” than any “mass transit” system ever devised. Having cars be able to pull out of city streets and onto limited access highways for the majority of their trips means safer streets and a place where any low volume street can be a “bike path”; as oppose to the “vehicular cycling” design which you amply skewered in another article.

However, the downside is that one of my teeth started to hurt (which happens when I consume a lot of corn syrup products) and I missed the fun of using chopsticks. This was my “morning after” effect from having it “their way”.

Must one fight night and day to make things as an individual think they should be? In my case, yes.

And so I continue to fight for independent bike ways (not vehicular “bike lanes”) because I have it any other way.