Economy of scale when constructing. You can usually tell the age of a burb by how big its zones are. Some of the newest burbs have absolutely huge, staggering, sized zones.
I live in a burb thats a bit over fifty years old and there's no spot more than maybe 6 blocks from the arterial retail/commercial/restaurant strips? In some new burbs you can easily be over a mile from anything other than residential.
I will say that when I was a kid there was a lot more to do in big zones because obviously there's more basements and garages and back yards and just plain old more kids. I mean, there's only about 200 kids in my current subdivision so with a distribution of ages its quite likely that there's no one to hang out with in the neighborhood for my own kids, whereas that's never an issue in a bigger zone where there's always a friend in the same neighborhood to hang out with. Some modern zones are so big that entire elementary school districts live within the borders of single zone! Obviously those kids always have someone to hang out with in the neighborhood.
And of course the bigger the zone, the crazier the traffic on the roads between the zones, which sucks.
I live in a burb thats a bit over fifty years old and there's no spot more than maybe 6 blocks from the arterial retail/commercial/restaurant strips? In some new burbs you can easily be over a mile from anything other than residential.
I will say that when I was a kid there was a lot more to do in big zones because obviously there's more basements and garages and back yards and just plain old more kids. I mean, there's only about 200 kids in my current subdivision so with a distribution of ages its quite likely that there's no one to hang out with in the neighborhood for my own kids, whereas that's never an issue in a bigger zone where there's always a friend in the same neighborhood to hang out with. Some modern zones are so big that entire elementary school districts live within the borders of single zone! Obviously those kids always have someone to hang out with in the neighborhood.
And of course the bigger the zone, the crazier the traffic on the roads between the zones, which sucks.