Nevsky Prospekt is rectilinear (to put it bluntly), because it is – a European prospekt; and a European prospekt is not merely a prospekt, but (as I noted above) a European prospekt, because.... well, anyway.... This is why Nevsky Prospekt is a rectilinear prospekt.
(Andrey Bely, op.cit. p.24)
 
Outside the Center in rush-hour the streets seem absurdly overdimensioned. The few cars you meet go careening from side to side of the vast expanses of asphalt, avoiding potholes, puddles and pedestrians. Even in a modern Western metropolis such streets would be spacious, and when you consider that most of them were built at a time when traffic was a lot scarcer even than today, Bely's quandary is understandable. They are certainly based on a Western model, but the very consistency with which it is followed through makes them all the more un-European. They seem to embody the megalomaniac dreams of some Oriental Despot in a Western idiom, leaving a strong impression of tension between form and content.
 

Not only are they unnecessary from a purely practical point of view. They perpetuate the very problems they purport to solve. Since the blocks they enclose are so large, the ungoverned domain of the dvorý comes to dominate the whole city, resisting the power of the prospékty and destroying the clear view they were designed to give. In the old parts of town you usually have to pass through a dark, smelly, exceedingly private-looking gateway in order to find the dvor at all. Once inside however, you may issue again from any number of alternative portals at the most unexpected places. Several times I have walked nearly the whole length of Vasílevsky Ostrov (several kilometers) from dvor to dvor, never emerging on the street except to cross it and disappear again into the next secretive passageway.  Serëzha, a native of this island, told me how in his childhood back in the fifties when Leningrad was a more dangerous city, the police used to lose track of local criminals in the fenceless maze.