I think this should be at the heart of housing design in the UK - houses are places to live
It is. Or was.
In the horrible past, roads - whether motorways or culs-de-sac - were built iaw the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges and Design Bulletin 32. It was ghastly - all about building wide radii of curvature, huge sightlines etc all with the aim of maximising speed and volume of motor traffic flow. Horrendous for housing, as you can imagine.
However, from the late 90s, people (including me) began to question the approach and eventually came up with the Manual for Streets to replace it circa 2006/7. This was ace - particularly when taken alongside documents such as Places, Streets and Movement and PPG3 (which, among other things, put a maximum limit on car parking spaces per dwelling and a minimum number of bike parking spaces per home, shop, school, office etc). After lots of work and lots of time as a voice in the wilderness, my views were sort of mainstream and I felt we were on the way towards the sunlit uplands.
But since 2009, I've had nothing to do with it. I'm not even sure if the docs are still policy or if the Lib/Tory govt have chucked 'em out along with bi-weekly bin collections