American Dream

A new University of Toronto study using satellite imagery from 1976 and 1992 concludes that recent urban development is no more scattered than development in 1976. The authors also conclude that roads have no impact on development density:

"We looked at a lot of measures of road density -- miles of road per area, average distance to a road, distance to an interstate exit -- and we could find no relation between those measures and the scatteredness of development."