Levin Nock who started his professional career in biomedical engineering has the right idea.  At his website, http://www.greenwayneighborhoods.net, he has posted a presentation he has made advocating greenways interlaced with cul-de-sacs (GIC).  He points out that “the SCALE of the transportation grid should fit each use.  Motorized vehicles move fast. A 5 or 10 minute car trip covers miles. People move slow. In 5 minutes walking, most people cover 1/4 mile—more on a bike, less walking slowly. For local errands of 5 or 10 minutes, there’s a difference in scale—miles with motorized power, fractions of a mile with people power. These 2 scales require DIFFERENT GRIDs.  Motorized vehicles move faster, so the connections for their grid can be farther apart. To drive around one little neighborhood, instead of through it, it’s no problem. It might add two minutes to the trip.”

Mr. Nock admits that this idea of GIC is not really new, just a slightly revised presentation.  This solution goes back to the time of the widespread use of the automobile in our cities and towns early in the 20th Century when the problem of pedestrian and bicycle safety was already apparent.  The pioneers of this old solution that puts the automobile in its appropriate place of subservience to human needs instead of dominance were planners and architects such as Raymond Unwin, Clarence Stein, and Ludwig Hilberseimer.  The first lesson Mr. Horsley and Mr. Snyder need to receive is one of our existing historical experience and wisdom.  We don’t need to “re-invent the wheel,” and some of the New Urbanist prescriptions such as for small residential blocks and a closely spaced street grid could not be more wrong-headed and foolish.  They have the opposite effect from what is claimed.  Public rights-of-way for pedestrians or bicycles do not necessarily have to be coupled with the right-of-way for motor vehicles.  In fact, these modes would all function much more safely and effectively separate from each other as much as possible.

To me, the long-term solution is getting engineering departments to require stronger foundations in aesthetics, design, and psychology.
As Robert Pirsig said in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” 

“We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.”
I think if you substitute “engineer” for “scientist,” the quote is still to a large extent valid.