I don't think this article is making the point veey clearly, but it is a very important point: roads are for long distance connections at speed, streets are for local traffic: reaching houses, shops, people. These stroads try to do both and fail at both because the goals are contradictory; you can't have high speed traffic with lots of side streets and crossing traffic, bikes and pedestrians. It will be too slow for…
But this isn't how the world works. It's not Simcity where you lay down neat grids of zones and the dutiful citizens follow your orders. People will want to take advantage of cheap(er) land alongside your "road" so that they can own a house while still having reasonable access to the "street". And boom now you have a stroad. Attempting to use zoning to stop that runs into the problem that by and large people don't wa…
They fail to provide a viable option because, as they point out, cities are complicated so universal prescriptions will fail. If no one in your place cares enough to come up with a local solution, then any intervention would have failed anyway, as we've seen for decades with aid work throughout the world.
Most of what they do is showing that what we have now is on a predictable, medium-term trajectory to insolvency by its fundamental financial unsound structure. Their 'ilk', so much as they have any, would be Urban3, who do GIS mapping of financial productivity within cities. So, 'navel gazing', I guess.