I’ve run across few items that encapsulate the hubris of planning than this exchange (the first serious, the second tongue in cheek) by two urban planners on a list serve. It was prompted by a Washington Post article discussing the increasing frequency of cluster mailboxes. Apparently, homeowners don’t like them: “many residents and developers say cluster boxes — traditionally reserved for apartments and townhouses, not single-family homes — are impersonal, inconvenient and downright ugly.” Some planners think this isn’t a very good reason to oppose them. Afterall, they are efficient (from the postal service’s perspective) and it forces lazy suburbanites to excercise by walking to their box: Planner 1: It’s depressing that people think they deserve mailboxes, especially when it’s clearly better in terms of efficiency and health to have clustered mailboxes. Planner 2 riposte: Next I suppose they’ll want to have their own computers right in their own houses instead of efficiently and healthily signing up for computer time at the library.