Pet Peeve Time: Suburban neighborhoods these days typically only have a few entrances and exits... The effect of this is that unless you live in that neighborhood you won't enter it... This makes the streets quieter because you don't have any traffic passing through.. but it means that the major arteries have to have higher speeds... which I think isolates those neighborhoods.
You can see the Starbucks and grocery store from my cousin's house in some new suburbs they copy and paste around Texas, but it takes 30 minutes to walk to it because you have to snake back to the single entrance and then double back along the highway.
Unless you want to hop a fence and walk through a ditch, which I did, to get there in 3 minutes. And there's certainly no path along the highway to ride your bike.
So depressing especially once you've left the US and have seen how much better we could design our lives.
Quite neighborhoods from traffic is great. How does this isolate neighborhoods? Are you talking about business isolation? I think the article is about people spending more time at home.