How do you fix a stroad?
Has anyone ever put a picture of a stroad up as art/instagram etc like you see with downtown NYC, Paris, small european villages, shanghai, rural mountain towns, old downtowns in America etc?
Of course not. It is the McDonald’s of city planning. Cheap, ugly, bad for you but also shockingly expensive once the medical/infrastructure maintenance bill comes due. Its the overweight, white trash, lower back tattoo of aesthetics. WTF is wrong with us?!
Lets stop building ugly shit. Lets leave a legacy. Lets build things of substance and utility that inspires, encourages, and serves the people who use it.
The Not Just Bikes youtube channel was quite the rabbit hole. It has convinced me that I really hate North American car-centric cities. It's a shame there's basically no country in the anglosphere designed for pedestrians like most European countries.
It's interesting how more city planning articles are making their way to HN. I've just been to the Nobel week dialogues yesterday discussing the city of the future (https://www.nobelprize.org/events/nobel-week-dialogue/Gothen...).
For those who have not heard of them, the Nobel week dialogues are discussions, talks with some of the leading experts on a given topic together with Nobel prize winners who have often worked on the same topic since winning the prize. It's a free event, held in either Gothenburg or Stockholm. On the 9th of December every year. But the great thing is that since the pandemic they have started to live stream the event so everyone from around the world can join. I highly recommend everyone to check it out, it is not often that you can see 5 or more nobel prize winners in one place.
I love that this highlights an oft-missed truth about Urbanism and shifting our urban landscape: this is going to take a long time. It's going to take many decades, and it's going to require waiting for individual human beings to literally die before we get to start making the changes we want to make.
I mean, unless we can get someone really excited about this into federal office in which case it _might_ be possible to do what we did in the US with the interstate system but in reverse, but that'd require a pretty different political landscape than the one we're in now, I suspect.
"Stroad" seems to be a recently popularized by strongtowns. I'm curious if anyone has actually managed to measure this sort of thing? My suspicion is that it "stroads" are essentially to-wide streets, and it should be possible to find research indicating that streets should be narrower, because widening them causes people to drive too fast. I was only able to find the following, coverage, though:
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/05/27/compelling-evidence-t...
https://thecityfix.com/blog/bigger-isnt-always-better-narrow...
They both seem to fundamentally go back to a single conference paper, "Narrower Lanes, Safer Streets." I don't know those blogs, and a single conference paper is -- I mean the paper is probably good but, hard to build a case on just one paper.
What is up with this? Computer engineers produce reams and reams of papers. Where are the civ.Es hiding their secrets?
edit: changed slightly, original text seemed unintentionally dismissive.
For those that want context on stroads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM&t=1s
I have a house in Sunnyvale, California a few blocks from El Camino Real. It's the ultimate stroad, hundreds of miles long and lined with thriving businesses and I love it. It's getting really quite clean and quiet now a ridiculous proportion of traffic around here is Teslas.
My city just installed three roundabouts each about 500m from each. Three in a row on a four land (two each way) road. I'm all for roundabouts but it looks a mess. Some of the outer lanes end too without any sign to indicate that it ends. Stroads are designed by busybodies who are given too much money.
I used to be able to go over a small bridge that's over a small stream and turn left to get to my aunt's house. The bridge is now 10m higher has four lanes. Plus I have to drive 2km down the road go through two roundabouts come back the way I came just to get back to where I would have turned left in the old days.
I highly recommend the film "Together we cycle" for those that are interested in learning about the Netherlands' struggle with car dependency in the 20th century.
It's funny. As someone who has never been to the US stroads are what define the American urban landscape for me and what I want to experience. They feel really exotic. It's like being in an American movie or TV show.
As a fun note, I immediately recognized the location of this stroad pictured. I live relatively close to it. There's been a lot of new development there recently. They just redeveloped a large chunk of the area including launching a major Costco and an Amazon Fresh.
I would honestly say it's a pretty healthy travel thoroughfare. It gets backed up during rush hour, but even interstates do here, so that's not unusual.
It's pretty simple. Sacrifice a lane to become a street or parallelweg as we call them here. Put a solid barrier in between the street and road portions. Have access points to the road only indirectly on sidestreets. This is how we 'stroad' in the Netherlands. Of course if you design in this manner from the ground up the result is prettier but it should be perfectly adequate.
Roads without public transport are a nightmare - nowhere to park. Those stroads at least allow to park.
I feel like almost all roads I see in a dense Indian city like Mumbai is a stroad. I don't think a distinct classification of a road and street as defined by strong towns can be made in a city that has heavy occupancy and pre-existing development. Then looking at a state like Kerala that is so urbanised and heavily populated I have seen a lot of houses with gates opening up into a national highway. How can anyone fix that when there is no land to expand on or extend?
"you'll be fighting all these strip mall tenants and owners who are making a living mining the public investment in roadway capacity for their own gain."
The gall of these people. I, in contrast, ride public transportation down a publicly maintained street to a workplace where I earn a salary. No mining here.
> Slow traffic; prioritize human movement over auto mobility;
This will most probably bring extra gentrification plus damn the businesses that might need that extra road-traffic for recurring clients. Bicycle-ing in a downtown-ish area is mostly done by people like us (yuppies, more or less), the person who has to get tho his/her job at Walmart or at a logistics center at 5-6AM doesn't have time for this, and after his/her job is done most probably doesn't have the energy for taking a bike-ride just for pleasure. The same goes for walking.
All of Anchorage AK that isn't a freeway is a stroad it seems.
To me, a generation that is too busy to buy groceries in the store or buy goods at a physical store in general does not strike me as one to push for walkable cities.
Half the urbanites I know get gassed just walking for a coffee.
WTF is a “stroad”, and why would anyone care?
Why do you need to “fix” a stroad? Not everyone wants to live in a young bicyclist’s idealistic utopia. The reason people like high speed roads is that it saves time, and time matters. Biking and public transit are both slow compared to cars, and most people like the convenience cars offer. The point to point nature of driving, the faster travel speeds, the protection from weather, the capacity for people/cargo, and so on are a massive quality of life boost. Most people, particularly as they age into their late 20s/early 30s and start families, like having more space. It is useful for them to have the higher quality of life you get from a large home with a yard, but with fast access to areas with shops and restaurants. Having businesses and parking immediately accessible from high speed roads gives you that.
That is a pretty ridiculous term, imo.
First, it sounds horrible to say.
Second, what is a 'strong road'? Or a 'street road'? The intended definition says something about ideally moving cars as quickly as possible, and making roads and streets economically viable in terms of 'value capture'. I guess that's all well and good if you're a capitalist and primarily care about those things.
If, on the other hand, you care about making places where people actually want to live, and transport systems that allow human flourishing, you're not likely to gain an understanding of how that can be done by paying attention to only, or primarily, economics and what 'the market wants'.
Generally speaking, the last thing you should do if you want to fix roads and towns, America's in particular, but a lot of The West, is to make sure you never listen to anything a trained urban planner says. They literally helped destroy our world, and now they're trying to incrementalism away some of their crimes, but only if they control the 'value capture'.
Overall, it seems simpler to say that malls, not stroads are the problem.
Malls will never be pedestrian friendly. Mall will never be aesthetically pleasant. Roads going by malls are usually stroads and might be made somewhat better. But that's such a trivial question compared to the pox that is mall urban organization that I really don't care.
I find the premise questionable that stroads are bad. Give a stroad good sidewalks, crosswalks with signs that light up when you hit a button, and a bike path and everybody is well-served.
That or just let car people (majority) have these areas that are good for cars and let the anti car people have their crowded little streets with no parking elsewhere.
The Strong Towns people want to go back to 1950s midwestern America - small towns strung out along roads, with farms in between.
What were all those small towns for? They were built, mostly, as service centers for the surrounding farms. Today, only 1% of the workforce works on farms, and they can get their stuff from Amazon and Walmart. The need for most of those towns is gone. So they're decaying and disappearing.[1]
That's the problem. The Strong Towns vision no longer matches what people do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Uni...