When engaged in urban exploration, there are a few patterns that come up after enough time. There are no fast and hard rules about how cities and towns are constructed. As I have said before, most stereotypes about communities and how their socioeconomic status affects their physical appearance fall apart under investigation. Be that as it may, there are some things that are useful, or at least fun to think about.
One of these is a simple sign of the socioeconomic status of a community: how curvy the roads are. Put simply, straight roads are usually in low status areas, and curvy roads are in high status areas. There are many caveats about this rule, the foremost being that I come from the United States of America, particularly the Western States, so this may be a regional matter. Also, the function is not directly proportional, I am not claiming that the very, very rich live in places swarming with hairpin turns. But suburban and residential areas do usually have windier roads.
There is a prosaic explanation for this. Expensive homes are often built around bodies of water or hills, areas that naturally don't present themselves to flat, even roads. This in a way leads to a begging of the question, because the reasons why bodies of water or elevations should present themselves as prime locations for real estate are not immediately obvious. However, I would also hazard that the prosaic explanation is the only one. From my own observations, I have noticed in a few places where developments, sometimes infills, have placed expensive homes in otherwise poorer neighborhoods, that the roads into those areas are set slightly crookedly. The other day, while visiting the newly built Wilsonville Transit Center, a transit center in a high-income suburb, I noticed that the sidewalk around it was noticably curved, as if to say "Don't worry, you can take the bus, it doesn't make you poor". I may have been biased in what I noticed, so I encourage people to examine this for themselves.
I believe that there is a non-prosaic, symbolic reason for curved roads. Quite a number of them, in fact, one of the more obvious being that straight roads are much easier to survey and patrol than curved roads. But for me, the foremost symbolic issue is whether the residents are supposed to accomodate themselves to the road, or whether the road is accomodating itself to the residents. In a low-status area, the instrumentality of production is foremost, and the world can intrude on people's lives as needs be. Roads are meant to transfer goods, people and commerce, and that is the foremost priority. In a high status area, on the other hand, people's needs and habits come first, and anyone who wants to use the area must accomodate themselves to that. The purpose of a curved road is that it is purposely crippled, announcing to those who are using the community that, as important as they may think their business is, they must slow down and put the preferences of the community first. It is a way for a high-status community to show that it is above instrumentality.
This is a somewhat ambitious theory developed out of nothing but my own, perhaps biased evidence, but I would encourage other people to look around them and see if it makes any sense.