>For many decades American guides to design residential areas have promoted cul-de-sacs (with false and/or unproven assertions), resulting in less foot traffic and less concern for foot traffic.
Late to the party I know, but the simple solution is to decouple the pedestrian network from the car network. Cars get cul-de-sacs, pedestrians and cyclists get a fully-connected network. This was proposed as far back as 1977 in A Pattern Language. An exerpt[1]:
"Cars are dangerous to pedestrians; yet activities occur just where cars and pedestrians meet.
"It is common planning practice to separate pedestrians and cars. This makes pedestrian areas more human and safer. However) this practice fails to take account of the fact that cars and pedestrians also need each other: and that, in fact, a great deal of urban life occurs at just the point where these two systems meet. Many of the greatest places in cities, Piccadilly Circus, Times Square, the Champs Elyse'es, are alive because they are at places where pedestrians and vehicles meet. New towns like Cumbernauld, in Scotland, where there is total separation between the two, seldom have the same sort of liveliness.
"The same thing is true at the local residential scale. A great deal of everyday social life occurs where cars and pedestrians meet. In Lima, for example, the car is used as an extension of the house: men, especially, often sit in parked cars, near their houses, drinking beer and talking. And in one way or another, something like this happens everywhere. Conversation and discussion grow naturally around the lots where people wash their cars. Vendors set themselves up where cars and pedestrians meet; they need all the traffic they can get. Children play in parking lots-perhaps because they sense that this is the main point of arrival and departure; and of course because they like the cars. Yet, at the same time, it is essential to keep pedestrians separate from vehicles: to protect children and old people; to preserve the tranquility of pedestrian life.
"To resolve the conflict, it is necessary to find an arrangement of pedestrian paths and roads, so that the two are separate, but meet frequently, with the points where they meet recognized as focal points. In general, this requires two orthogonal networks, one for roads, one for paths, each connected and continuous, crossing at frequent intervals (our observations suggest that most points on the path network should be within 150 feet of the nearest road), meeting, when they meet, at right angles.
"In practice, there are several possible ways of forming this relationship between the roads and paths..."
[1] http://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl052.htm