Should the lion be above the lawI see it all the time, and just confirmed it yesterday in a zone where parking spaces are tough to come by: A car squeezing in a corner gets a ticket. Two official...
Proved planners have forced developers to do it? I live in a rural area so I don't know about your specific location, but I can tell you about where I live.
I develop apts. Typically 16 to 30 per complex. Nothing huge. Developers have 3 concerns: marketability, price, and getting approvals. Generally, approvals drive design. We do what we have to do to get approvals. I've had planning boards get down to the level of picked siding and brick colors. Then it is a matter of building a marketable project at a cost one can afford.
Many apt complexes have only 1 entrance for 2 reasons. First, that is what the planners want. Traffic is the reason they generally give. The second reason is that if you have two entrances onto different streets, the neighbors get upset because they don't want the complex to become a shortcut.
As for emergency vehicles, once I saw an interesting compromise that may be common in growing urban areas (I don't know) but not in my area. For a larger apt complex (not mine), there was concern about emergency access. At the same time the neighbors didn't want a second entrance but understood the need for emergency access. So they installed a second driveway with a gate. The gate was activated by the sound of a siren. To get in, you drove your fire truck or police car up to the gate and turned on the siren -- it would then open. I think it was envisioned as a way of getting the trucks back out of the complex after they went in through the regular way. If they were going in and needed to get by quickly, they could just drive through it and it would break away.
