The Grid vs. The Cul-de-sac

Emily Badger attacks cul-de-sacs:

There would be no such thing as noisy and menacing through traffic because no one else had any reason to drive through. The traditional street grid, with its busy intersections and jumble of apartments, shops and restaurants, was out.
“It was addressing real problems, but it went overboard,” Garrick says of the suburban model. “It took real problems and then made caricatures for solutions.”
The Federal Housing Authority embraced the cul-de-sac and published technical bulletins in the 1930s that painted the urban street grid as monotonous, unsafe, and characterless. Government pamphlets literally showed illustrations of the two neighborhood designs with the words “bad” and “good” printed alongside them.
The FHA had a hand in developing tens of millions of new properties and mortgages, and its idiosyncratic design preferences evolved into regulation. From the 1950s until the late 1980s, there were almost no new housing developments in the U.S. built on a simple grid.

I always preferred the grid, but my opinion doesn't carry much weight, as this blog indicates.  I enjoy looking at aerial photographs of towns in this area, where you can follow the history of development by lot size and street curviness.  Pretty much every subdivision we designed when I was working looked like the right hand picture.  I hated that.  As the article mentions, we designed for cars.  That will bite us in the ass in the future.