In Phoenix, major streets are on about a 1 mile grid. The major streets (mostly) go through and take you wherever you want, they're very fast and optimized for heavier traffic.
The rest of the streets connect to people's homes, they're full of speed bumps and such and while some do go through, it's a slow and twisty road with no certainty unless you know that street (or peer at the GPS) so you'd never take those roads unless you actually wanted to go into that community.
I find that it strikes a pretty good balance between helping people get where they're going and making sure that people don't have tons of cars zooming right past the front door.
I noticed that about Phoenix the first time I went there. I flew in at night, and the regular grid of street lights was beautiful. This was over 30 years ago, and if I remember correctly there was only a single freeway.
In many places the terrain simply won't allow for a regular grid layout. From my home in Minnesota I can't really go straight north, because there are a number of lakes in the way. There are a couple of roads that manage to snake their way through, but it's all fully built up areas that keep their speed limits low and safe.
There's I-10 that cuts through Phoenix east-west, I-70 that is north-south, and then they have built three highway loops that circle the city. The 101 is for the north/west part of the city, the 202 is for the south/east part of the city, and then the 303 is for the north/west part (way out there...).
It was pretty nice when I lived there, because getting places using the highway was fast, and then the grid pattern for the rest of it made it incredibly easy to navigate.
Yeah, downtown Phoenix has a thing where alternating east/west streets are one-way, as well, but for the most part, it's easy to get around here and even rush hour isn't that bad compared to some places, but it was designed with heavy traffic in mind, rather than as with older cities where they grew organically.
People travel in great numbers over long distances almost entirely for jobs. People travel in great numbers over long distances because of an imbalance between their pay and local living expenses, like with San Francisco or Palo Alto.
The urban planning that would be necessary to slow down but not stop the rising tide would be one that makes property access closer to egalitarian ideals, so that the San Francisco or Palo Alto worker making $60k can also live there without driving far. Homeowners would rather experience more traffic / a battle with Waze than see property prices drop that much. The egalitarianish access to property is an even worse proposition for them by magnitudes.
