New housing developments

are supposedly springing up like toadstools in the hills behind me. 

I say "toadstools" rather than "mushrooms" because they are not where houses should be. Yes, they are probably "close enough" to get to work if you work in the CBD or the surrounding suburbs of the city but there are problems.

I live in a city which runs along the coast. It has been spreading north and south for years, long before I was born. Commuting tends to (a) take time and (b) involve a car. Public transport is not generally considered to be an option by many people. In the past few years some stations have been added to the rail link south and the one east was extended to the big hospital there. That is about as far as the one east will go. The one south could go much further. Some people believe it should but there is no desire by government to do anything about it. The absolutely ridiculous thing is that there was once a railway line there. It was removed, as was the one north, in order to accommodate cares. This state once ran on the car industry. The car industry has gone.

And in the hills behind me where the little toadstool houses are springing up there are inadequate roads which cannot handle the volume of traffic to which they are now being subjected. I would not want to try and negotiate the "freeway" at peak hours. I do not like the freeway at the best of times. It has a dangerous mix of heavy transport and cars. I am always amazed that there are not more accidents on it. Yes I know that those German autobahns allow even higher speeds but they are designed and built for it. This "freeway" was designed for the purpose of getting people into the hills behind me and then on to the highway leading east.  It was also designed to have roads leading from it into the settlements in the hills. Those settlements were not designed to have any form of heavy traffic through them. 

Brother Cat discovered this recently when he was attempting to locate the motel he and SIL were going to stay in. They coped of course but, as he put it, "A car towing a trailer is nothing compared with the monster which was behind us."

There are buses into the hills. They are not that frequent although some people do use them for commuting purposes. One of the problems is that they, like most transport, go into the CBD. You then need to change to something else to get to your destination. There is no stopping on the freeway to catch something going somewhere else. They might have done it with a train service but not with a bus.

Now the federal government is adding to the problems by withdrawing the promised funding for various links and bypasses. 
All that is going to add to the woes of commuters. If we had a serious fire up there the situation could be catastrophic.

I am wondering if we haven't outgrown our location. It no longer seems to fit. Like a teenager outgrowing clothing at a rapid pace we are outgrowing the transport system. The problem is that the government is withdrawing funding for the clothing. Does anyone see a problem here?