All the wasted space is part of the reason why car traffic, public transit, walkability, and road quality suck so bad here. Zoning laws are basically forcing us to build single family household suburbs. We need dense, mixed use cities that have work and shops closer to homes, with many options for public transit servicing every street. Instead, we’re paying to build and maintain roads to connect homes that are orders of magnitude less dense, meaning it’s more expense per land area and less income from its users as well. Suburbias needs to turn into downtowns, and we need to build bike lanes, trains, subways, streetcars, and bus lines instead of more car lanes.