> It's a tract surrounded by soundwalls and has few exits from the development, whereas in normal developments you have intersections with all streets.
I'm not sure any development built after about 1975 in my midwestern metro area isn't like this, including the sound walls if they're next to an interstate or major highway.
My neighborhood, with... oh, I dunno 150houses? At least a dozen named-and-numbered streets present in it? It has two exits. Get this: one of those can only be entered if you're going a particular direction on the road it intersects, because there's an unbroken median curb there. So it's more like 1.5 entrances.
Our neighborhood before this one? Two exits (it's bigger than this neighborhood and still developing, so I expect it'll get a third pretty soon).
Our neighborhood before that? One exit. One. technically two, but the second was marked "dead end" (it wasn't, really, but that was probably still the right thing to label it) and took you on a weird barely-developed road with no other intersecting roads, which looped you back up to the same highway the the neighborhood's other route would have put you on, so even for people who lived right by the connection to that road, leaving the normal way was faster.
The general rule seems to be: no more than one exit on any major road bounding the neighborhood. This means neighborhoods that are right next to each other can be slow to travel between on foot or by bike, without cutting through yards.
> They are built in such a way the actual city neighborhood is disconnected from its surroundings and makes transit by anything other than car difficult -buses don't go in, and biking is fraught -all relatively close to the downtown area.
Some folks for whom keeping a working car around isn't a big deal, consider it a feature that their neighborhoods are hard to reach by a combination of public transit and foot. Crime rates go up and the homeless population shoots up, they say, when they add a bus stop next to your neighborhood. Time to sell before the market drops if you see them working on a new bus stop in walking distance of your house, they say. (seriously, this is straight from several people I know, not something I'm inventing or guessing at)
