Why did the suburbs abandon the street grid?

Question

If you look at Google maps, and you go farther out from the central city and into the exurbs you see even more abandonment of the grid system . Not that the middle and inner suburbs have a grid system, it's just their roads seem more connected.

Answer 1

I worked construction in Vegas. A carpenter. The contractors, working on housing projects were able to submit street plans for each individual site they built on. This usually consisted of about thirty homes in a "grid" with streets flowing different directions to slow traffic but, keep it going. If you have several contractors coming from different angles, you can imagine the mess your going to have.
The city realized this too late and couldn't even publish maps due to the haphazard way the streets were going. I would get lost from week to week as the streets progressed, with turns, circles and dead-ends.
Each contractor named the streets also, being Spanish in the area, the streets were named with pronunciations that a North American couldn't pronounce.
Someone finally realized what was going on, especially in the transportation industry and called a stop to it. They started renaming streets and made contractors make some sort of semblance out of the streets but, alas, to late. It's a jumbled mess and takes time to learn.

Answer 2

Frequently, developers in "the 'burbs' " will design in curved roads, t-sections, and dead ends. This slows or reduces traffic in the area, making it safer for children. Some places even have speed bumps, but the "old style" was just to make the areas unattractive for "cut throughs".

Answer 3

To slow traffic and prevent commuters from taking short cuts through sub-dividions.