It's no small feat to try to turn back nearly a century of urban planning -- or lack of same.

That's what urban planners across North America are talking about, though, when they suggest that buildings should be closer to main thoroughfares, especially in urban commercial strips.

You've seen highway commercial development in every city or town of any size in North America.

From Bayfield St. in Barrie to 10th St. E. in Owen Sound to First St. in Collingwood, there are examples of it everywhere. Strip malls, fast food joints, car sales lots, big box stores, all set behind parking lots of varying sizes, each with one or two or more vehicle outlets to the public roads.

Given the growth happening here, you can expect to see more of those businesses wanting to locate here. If we want to avoid the typical suburban strip mall scene, we have to get planning and zoning policies in place now.

It's not a matter of stopping anyone doing business. You can't do that, anyway. What we can do is try to make them fit into the community.

All of this got started nearly 100 years ago. I was surprised to learn that shopping centres have been with us since the First World War. In fact, most sources put them on the map even earlier -- after all, they point out, shopping centres are really just a modern version of the bazaars and agoras that existed in ancient times.

The first known shopping centre in North America is said to have been developed in 1916 near Chicago. An architect named Arthur Aldis led a group of investors to build Market Square, described as "an integrated shopping complex of 28 stores, 12 office units, 30 apartments, gymnasium, clubhouse and landscaping". What's more, Market Square was developed with the automobile in mind -- it was located in Lake Forest, Illinois, then a wealthy community whose residents had the necessary disposable income to allow them to afford autos.

The idea, you may have noticed, caught on, although it was another six years before the concept went a step farther. A developer named J.C. Nichols created the Country Club Plaza near Kansas City, Missouri, in 1922. Nichols is credited as coining the term 'shopping centre' to describe commercial sites built specifically to attract the motoring public.

The idea didn't make its way to Canada until 1950, when the Park Royal Plaza opened in West Vancouver.

The shopping mall, historians say, was an answer to the needs of a growing upper-middle class that was moving out of the increasingly-congested  inner cities and into another new creation -- the suburb. The ability to drive to within a few steps of the stores rather than try to find parking in the downtown cores was attractive to the new surburbanites.

Like anything that makes money, of course, the whole thing got out of control. By the 1960s the highway commercial strip had become part and parcel of the phenomenon of urban sprawl. More cars meant more suburbs, more suburbs meant more potential customers, more potential customers meant more shopping centres. Et cetera.

The developers learned that having parking within sight of the drivers was important. People wanted -- nay, needed, it seems -- to see the empty parking spaces available to them in front of these commercial enterprises. It was not enticing to them to worry that they might interrupt their forward progress and search out-of-sight parking lots, behind the shops. Same shops, of course, and same number of parking spots, too, but there's a psychological barrier there, apparently.

We can note, of course, that since the stores were farther back from the road, their front windows weren't visible to passersby. Thus we had the creation of those towering, brightly-lit signs that line the roadside in commercial strips and promote the shops therein.

The real problem is that highway commercial strips, in the past, have developed in piecemeal fashion. Along came the first developer with the first proposal and it went through the planning process -- such as it was -- and eventually got approval and was built. Then came another, and another and another. Because of this, the experts tell us, most highway commercial strips were developed with little thought to the overall impacts.

For example, each individual development had to meet the necessary parking requirements for the number of spaces it would require. No one gave any thought to the possibility of shared parking lots, so massive areas of paved parking were created. And, in the vast majority of cases, customers making more than one stop have to exit one parking lot and mesh with the traffic on the passing roadway to get to the next stop. No one thought about linking these parking lots via off-road lanes.

The truth is that commercial-area developers are, themselves, falling out of love with traditional site plans for highway commercial projects. We're starting to see even fast-food joints moving closer to the roads, often with parking to the side. Seems we're not as in love as we once were with seeing vast parking areas.

And we are, little by little, becoming more interested in places we can reach on foot or bicycle, but we don't want to risk life and limb trying to get through parking lot traffic or crossing one mall entrance/exit after another.

You only have to look at the section of Arthur St. between Elma and Victoria, in Thornbury, to get a mini-example of that. The mish-mash of traffic there, at busy times, is sometimes dizzying. Pity the cyclist or pedestrian caught up in that as drivers, too busy watching each other, don't notice walkers or riders.

Whether the proposed change to The Blue Mountains zoning bylaw has hit the right numbers is a matter for debate. It suggests a setback range of one meter to six meters rather than the existing 15 metres.

As Councillor Bob Gamble noted at the Planning Council meeting Monday, snow clearing is an issue that needs thought. Anyone who walked along Arthur St. between Bruce and Elma, this past winter, can attest to the fact that the sidewalks were often blocked by snow piles dumped there when the highway plows went through after the sidewalk plow had made its daily pass.

If buildings were a metre back from the sidewalk, instead of the residential front yards in that stretch, now, there would be no place to throw that snow. But I'm not sure there's a real difference if you set the building farther back with a parking lot in front.

After all, they are supposed to supply a certain amount of parking and if they fill parking spaces with piles of snow they aren't meeting that requirement. Nor should business owners have to supply space for snow being plowed off the public roads.

Given that businesses want outdoor display space, particulary during the summer, putting buildings a little farther back would allow town officials to keep them off the public sidewalks which were, after all, built for the use of pedestrians and not as unpaid commercial space.

At any rate, this is, as town planners and Deputy Mayor Duncan McKinlay say, an issue that needs some deep thinking. The proposed changes would help us avoid the kind of highway commercial development that has become a smog-generating blight in so many other communities, but if we don't think it through we could create other problems.

McKinlay also pointed out that considerable thought needs to be given to the future of Highway 26. In reality, it has ceased to be a true provincial highway. Long stretches of it, through our area, are now reduced-speed zones. But are we committing future motorists to a never-ending congestion problem if it remains a two-lane road through Thornbury and Craigleith?

Lots of questions and we need to think about them now.