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.
> 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?
Yes, but in a different way than I believe your question implies. Edward Burtynsky produced an amazing series of photographs centered around the automobile and in his words, how it "represent[ed] not only freedom, but also something much more conflicted."
To be fair, Breezewood is in the middle of a mountain range. Alternative routes are much longer or involve going around the geography. As a result it gets A LOT of traffic going to/from DC-area, Philly, Pittsburgh.
It's a pity that the only businesses that can cluster around there are just dull chains and yet another bleak HMS-Host-operated rest stop.
If any of you are going through there and have time to get off the PA Turnpike for a while for a meal (or hotel stay), a nice choice would be Bedford PA. It's ~20 miles west of Breezewood. It's an cute old-timey mainstreet town that hasn't been ravaged by rustbelt depression. There are good restaurants there. The Omni Bedford Springs Resort is a nice hotel with a great spa.
Just trying to find some positive examples of American small towns. As a European, if I were to relocate to the US, where would I find strong town communities?
I know for example Ithaca, NY, might qualify. Other examples in the South, Midwest, etc?
Also stroads are not just an American problem. I have found horrible stroads in places where you would never expect them such as Oxford or Copenhagen.
As you say, there are plenty in the Northeastern United States. I think the primary historical factors that separates cohesive, walkable towns in the US from more stereotypical American development are the city having been established and built out prior to the 20th century (so there was some initial plan or development that predates cars), and the community either being wealthy enough or remote enough to avoid the pull of cookie-cutter post-war redevelopment. Of the places I’m familiar with, I’d call out Delaware and Montgomery County, PA, much of the Hudson Valley in New York (Hudson, Beacon, Newburgh, …). Outside of the northeast, there are remote locations (i.e. outside of commuting distance from a major city) in the southwest that have clearly defined and stroad-less cores. I’m thinking specifically of Taos County, NM and much of southwestern CO.
Ithaca is pushing into city territory (I think it has over 80k residents now), and if we’re going to count it, I’d also nominate small southeastern cities such as Savannah, Richmond, and St Augustine.
As someone who grew up in the Northeast, I feel like there aren't very many walkable towns unless you're essentially in the Boston or NYC suburbs. So many towns in upstate NY, MA, and PA had their main streets turned into major thoroughfares for cars... which made them completely unwalkable and miserable to live near, eventually killing the town. Most of my relatives who live near "cute" downtown strips can't even walk to them because their towns haven't bothered to build sidewalks even in the moderately dense parts of town.
> Of the places I’m familiar with, I’d call out Delaware and Montgomery County, PA
Maybe certain select towns within those areas, but most of the area within those counties is not "Strong". Particularly where I grew up in Montgomery County, there are potable water issues that the municipalities refuse to address because the costs are too high.
As a European, Ithaca does not look very walkable to me, even though it's a pretty small city. Fewer stroads is good, of course. But unless you live in Ithaca's very small city core — which is not dense — then you find yourself in typical American suburban sprawl, and Ithaca's only form of public transit is the city bus.
Zoning remains one of the biggest problems in American city planning. The lack of mixed zoning means you end up with a rigid segregation of urban areas, residential areas, and semi-industrial "big-box store stroad hell" areas. What's often missed in discussions about urban density is that in Europe, living in a residential area often means you still have access to amenities by walking, which is almost never true in the US.
This stroad seems completely alien to Dutch traffic, though. For a couple of decades now, Dutch traffic design has revolved around designating every street or road as one of three categories, two of which are two different types of Strong Town-style roads, and the third is a classic street, with slow traffic and all.
Not all Dutch streets fit this pattern perfectly, but even a century before Netherland came up with this explicit definition, we already had a good solution for a main thoroughfare with shops or homes: ventwegen. The main road still has as few access points as possible, but on both sides of it is a slow street for bikes and car-access to houses and shops. At main intersections you can switch from the main road to the ventweg, and this solution might actually be a good fit if you quickly want to fix these stroads without waiting for them to die a natural death.
I do know a few places that aren't entirely clear about whether they're a road or a street. None of them anywhere near as extreme as those American stroads, but Amsterdam definitely has a couple of important connecting roads (especially around the centrum ring; Stadhouderskade etc) that's explicitly intended as a main thoroughfare for cars to reach different parts of the city, but in some places still has bikes on the road, houses and shops, etc.
It's not pretending to be a highway or anything like that, and certainly in the more complex parts, it's just a single lane in each direction, but it's definitely intended to be one of the primary connector roads in the city center, and a valid route if you want to go from the west side of the city to the east side.
Most of the larger, older cities will have neighborhoods that are walkable, though the city as a whole might fail to meet expectations. New York, Boston, Washington DC and Baltimore come to mind. But, they tend to be very expensive places to live (at least in the nicer areas).
Small and medium sized college towns (<100,000 residents, maybe) usually fit the bill as well. But, have the downside of many seasonal tenants and the other things you'd expect with a heavily young-adult-oriented area. But, even in these, you sometimes find you need to drive to a strip mall for big grocery runs - America doesn't really do small neighborhood markets and the price of real estate often drives grocery stores to the outskirts of town.
You probably want to look for towns pushing their "historic" qualities, at least in the Northeast, and live in/near the historic area. I live in Carlisle, PA, which has the downtown (about 3x3 blocks) designated as a historic district. The high street is one lane each way, with a center turn lane and parallel parking. Lots of crosswalks. No strip malls/box stores until you get about a mile away from the square.
There's a fair amount of car traffic, because that high street (and the main cross street) are both designated highways, but there's always a lot of foot traffic. Wide sidewalks and no parking lots generally. The surrounding neighborhoods in most directions keep the walkable nature; mostly rowhomes (some converted to student apartments), a university, very few street-facing garages or sidewalk-crossing driveways.
There is this interesting website called walkscore.com which uses afaiu google maps data to find distances along roads and such from a selected point to basic amenities, then it calculates a score for driving, walking, and biking. It's a little difficult to find on that website but on some page there is a heatmap of precalculated walkability scores overlaying google maps. If you just scan around on that thing you may get an idea about the walkability of various US cities. That should be correlated with the stroadedness / strongtownedness of those cities
I really liked Bishop, CA. I only stayed like 2 days there, but it was an interesting town.
I've heard that some Colorado towns have the same style and are lovely to live in. I was supposed to have a 6 weeks stay around Louisiana/Texas last year and Colorado + Midwest was supposed to be this year, but plans changed, so i cannot confirm if this is true.
Assuming you're looking for quaint walkable towns (and not stressing over the fact that they're surrounded by miles of car-dependent suburbs and rural areas), you can find them anywhere and everywhere. Most small/medium sized towns on the east coast have a historic/old town that is like this, for example in Virginia state:
Culpeper, VA [0] (passenger railroad station right in downtown that connects to all the big cities on the east coast)
Warrenton, VA [1] (Ridiculously good downtown restaurant scene, whenever I go there there always seems to be some festival or market happening)
Staunton, VA [2] (Beautiful area surrounded by some of the largest tracts of public land in the eastern US)
Fredericksburg, VA [3] (tons of interesting history here)
Charlottesville, VA [4] (look at that pedestrian-only shopping street a block away!)
Ojai in California was nice, though quite small at 8k population. As a child comment suggested, mountains as a constraint might help there. The Wikipedia page notes: "Chain stores are prohibited by city ordinance to encourage local small business development and keep the town unique."
All of which are college towns to some degree. (Or at least have large universities.)
There are a fair number of smaller cities in the Northeast US with walkable cores. I worked in downtown Nashua for about eight years at one point though I didn't go in all the time. A number of those cores are even rather gentrified with nice restaurants, a park or two, newer housing, and so forth.
Here's the thing though. It's a fairly consistent pattern. The gentrified area is usually pretty small. Things are distinctly less nice when you get out of that area. And you probably need to get in a car to do anything beyond the most basic shopping.
Beyond the Northeast, somewhere like Raleigh NC is the same pattern.
I live in a mediaeval town. Outside of the mediaeval centre are rows of victorian terrace and town houses that grew up around a large railway junction, with warehouses, sidings etc right by the house. When I was young the railway yards had become small businesses, builders merchants, coal merchants, milk rounds, car repair garages etc. Over time they have mostly been turned into more housing and the businesses have moved to out of town 'industrial estates' or 'enterprise parks' where you need a car to get there. Many jobs have moved out there too, even professional service firms that used to fill the quaint offices of the mediaeval centre. The centre edges closer to being a museum every year, and the real commerce is spread out for car drivers around the boundary.
On one route out of town the left hand side of the road is an early-mid 20th century parkway, with a grass strip before the street with the houses on it. The other side was little developed due to being a military reservist base. In the last 10 years they have developed it with no regard whatsoever with reflecting the parkway, and the result? Stroadification
That was spicy. I like the message; the analogies are alienating for some people. I agree that we should be focusing on the long term costs of our decisions.
Don’t believe this Imperial Tartarian propaganda. The stroad is the best road. Our urban architecture is the best ever. No one wants that old stuff any more, make it concrete and glass boxes arranged around a big ol’ stroad.
It's literally the first time I heard Atlanta is a popular tourist destination, while pretty much anyone in the world is aware of cliche Paris and NYC skylines.
I think the appeal of NYC is the cost and luxury of vacationing there. Even the skyline views - they're nice but I don't think they hold up to mountains. However, I grew up extremely rural so I am biased towards what I know and people like what they like.
I don't think anyone goes on vacation in cities explicitly because they are more expensive - the appeal is that there's a lot of fun things you can do in cities.
A large part of tourism is being able to brag about where you went. The cost is just a side effect. You can see this more clearly in the hierarchy of non-urban tourist destinations.
Cities like NYC and Paris have high baseline cost of doing business there. If the stuff that did cater to tourists didn't also have broad mass market appeal or other usefulness at those high price points (e.g. a hotel can serve business travelers as well) it would be priced out replaced with other stuff
Based on the page in the OP, the SF Painted Ladies are about as opposite of a stroad as possible.... No strip malls, giant park across the street, houses all around, low speed limit, characteristic narrow SF street/road... How does that fit the graphic in the OPs link?
In what way are the painted ladies on a stroad? Steiner is a 2 lane street with parking and I think like a <25 mph speed limit. Most of it has bike lanes (although the particular piece in front of the ladies doesn't, or at least didn't until recently). It's very much a street, although it could be a better street.
Unlike you, most people struggle to make ends meet, are happy they have a job and can provide for their family. The upper-class "let's build architecture that inspires" screams "I have more money and time than I know what to do with".
It's like looking down at people who eat at McDonald's (I got your reference!) with comments like "these folks wouldn't know good food if their life depended on it!".
Sorry not everyone can be rich and have the same "refined" sense of taste that you do. But they're too stupid to know what's best for them, right?
How does someone saying that things could be built better come off as high level elitism? I’ve stayed in small European towns where they have the cultural amenities of an American city perhaps five to six times its population. Normal people can live good, healthy lives there. Normal people struggling to survive while driving everywhere with few healthy options in sight is a manufactured issue.
That is certainly true. But the problem with stroads isn't merely one of esthetics; they're expensive and inefficient, and they exist primarily because everything is designed around suburban car owners who want to do everything by car. They're completely inaccessible to anyone who can't afford a car. Stroads are themselves elitists because they exist for people who don't live there, don't care about the neighbourhood, about accessibility for others, or how much economic or environmental damage it does, as long as they're not inconvenienced by it.
Old city centers turned into massive thoroughfares destroy the communities that live there. Whole communities get sacrificed for affluent car owners from the suburbs. But this is not just harmful for poor people, it's also bad for the economy in general; they're inefficient, cost too much money to maintain, don't make enough money, so they require constant influx of subsidies, and this sort of development has lead to the bankruptcy of several US cities. It's not sustainable from any perspective.
When someone objects to comparisons of taste, they insist that everythinn has essentially the same merit. Which is often hypocritical as they'd be rather found dead than with a lower back tattoo themselves.
It’s not the same. Black Americans are still fighting for their right to not get shot at by police. White America is seething that Trump had his election “stolen” from him and is scheming to put him back in power in 2024.
If our options are trying to remain status quo or becoming “elite” (as if thats a thing) well then I am not picking status quo. We should build things that inspire is what I am saying and yes I used a visual imagery of the least inspiring most tragically basic thing (that someone willfully chooses to become and do) that came to mind.
You think equating poor civil design to "poor white trash" is doing your part to change it? The only way you could improve things is to post this kind of garbage on your elitist internet forums and smugly deride anyone who objects? That is what is elitist.
You can we we advocate for this position in a less snobbish way. It’s times like this I feel like a real idiot for expecting more from this site than the average Reddit trainwreck comment thread.
Guess what, you’re not that much better than everyone who disagrees with you.
You're on an elitist forum, you get what you pay for. Just because half the commenters here fancy themselves sharing the struggle of the working class does not mean they actually respect or care about the "trash".
We as a society, in many aspects, used to eat AND build better when we were poorer. It is a matter of desire and priority.
Also McDonalds is only cheaper if you’re in a food desert. Which areas that rely on stroads rarely are.
Also, notice how the building around stroads and most “modern” buildings get knocked down and rebuilt every 10 years? Seems like something only a rich society could afford to do.
I have not noticed widespread occurrences of 10-year old buildings being knocked down and rebuilt. Have you noticed this? Where?
A building takes more than a year to build typically; if they were being knocked down every 10 years, the entire city would look like nothing more than a construction site.
Ok, so factually we are more wealthy than we have ever been as a society across the entire wealth distribution and yet we have an obesity epidemic. An obesity epidemic is very much a rich country problem. Our terrible food has nothing to do with it being too expensive (Although listening to the FDA back when they advocated 10+ servings of grains a day probably didn't help).
Also expecting people to apologize for their social station is tacky as hell. You play the hand you're dealt to the best of your ability. Anyone who claims otherwise has an agenda. Why would your critique of spoken like someone who has never been poor have any merit whatsoever?
My biological grandfather is actually on the lowest decile of income in the US, i am quite sure he eat better than me and most of the people here. And most people in his community fare the same way.
Those evolved out of small towns. For some reason Strongtowns has no perspective on history. That “stroad” wasn’t one a decade earlier, it was a rural road through a small town.
Yeah, it’s be great if it were dense and walkable but guess what, we cant jump from farm land to NYC 5th Ave in one step.
It comes across as incredibly ignorant to be honest.
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.
The Netherlands may not be an English-first country, but something like 95% of the Dutch speak English, a higher percentage than in Canada(!). In central Amsterdam, the default language may as well be English.
It is also surprisingly easy for Americans to relocate here if they are in a tech career (keyword: highly-skilled migrant) or remote-working/entrepreneurial (keyword: Dutch-American Friendship Treaty). It's even possible to keep paying an income tax rate similar to that of the USA for the first 5 years. Might even be a lower total income tax rate if you're coming from a high-tax state like CA/OR/NY (keyword: 30% ruling).
Some advantages: safety (both in terms of infrastructure and crime); affordable high-quality universal healthcare; efficient government bureaucracy; fast and easy travel throughout the entire country and to France, Germany and the rest of Europe; relaxed attitudes toward dogs compared to the US (generally off-leash friendly and dogs can go into most shops & cafes)
Some disadvantages: higher cost-of-living and lower salaries compared to the US; narrower variety of consumer products (food, clothing, etc.) available than in the US/UK; many say it's difficult to make Dutch friends, especially if you don't speak Dutch (though on the flip side, this effect makes it exceedingly easy to make expat friends); terrain is mostly flat; weather sucks compared to California; many find the Dutch language difficult to learn in spite of (or because of?) its similarities to English
Canadian living in The Netherlands writing to very much agree with all of this. A few comments:
The "efficient government bureaucracy" is only /relatively/ efficient, but yeah, it's actually less of a hassle as an expat than the Canadian system was as a citizen. The best part is that almost everything can be done online through websites that do not suck, but when you interact with a human they are firm but fair and always pleasant (my sunny disposition may contribute to this). There are no parasitic companies like TurboTax (which should not even exist!). Even in the year I bought a house I could complete my taxes by clicking "next" a bunch of times, because all of the numbers were already there.
Speaking of taxes, I feel like I get what I pay for: great (and always improving!) infrastructure, no violence, pervasive poverty, and ever-growing tent cities. The cost of living is higher because the quality of life is higher. When I visited Seattle a couple of years ago I was astounded by the street-level dystopia.
The biggest difficulty in learning the Dutch language is that the Dutch instantly switch to English when they notice you're not a native speaker. :)
My son (12) has since yesterday started claiming that Netherland has the second highest percentage of English-speakers in the world. After the UK I guess? But apparently beating out several native English-speaking countries according to at least one measure.
No idea what that measure is; I have strong doubts, because as much as the Dutch do indeed have a very strong command of English as a second language, we're really not native speakers, and can be very confidently wrong about idiom or pronunciation, even if we may be better at grammar than many native speakers (your/you're; their/they're/there; could of; etc).
That said, we've got a rather extreme housing shortage at the moment, and just this week I read about foreign students who are homeless or living in tents because there's literally nothing else, so I don't think we can actually accommodate a large influx of North Americans seeking better infrastructure. Focusing on fixing your own country is probably better for everybody in the long run.
> we're really not native speakers, and can be very confidently wrong about idiom or pronunciation, even if we may be better at grammar than many native speakers
Trust me, you have no monopoly on being confidently wrong, I'm in the US and have spent significant time in the Netherlands, and it's my opinion that the Dutch have better English skills than most in the US, precisely because it is learned formally. Many people in the US absorb little from the study of English as a language during education.
The itty-bitty bits of America that have any kind of walkable community are incredibly expensive. It’s basically the equivalent of avoiding mediocre American factory food by doing all your shopping at Whole Foods. Why does it have to be a rare luxury to taste what the Europeans have in overflowing abundance?
Because what they have flowing in abundance is a loss in many other ways. Public transit is a generally a worse experience in all but the most urban of places, and even then there's often enough problems that make it significantly less desirable. Biking in the winter? Doable, but also pretty miserable in much of the world.
People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards. Car-centric cities are the price we pay for these things. Personally I think it's worth the trade-off, I would have spent the same money on my 2000sqft house as a <400sqft apartment, and having kids and a dog would have been entirely impractical.
You write like this was made as a conscious decision, based on city planning somehow. There is significant research that shows people are much happier in walkable communities. Moreover, the car centric solution is not scalable as cities grow. Almost 50% of the world population already live in cities worldwide. That number is estimated to grow to 75% over the next 30 years.
It is also interesting that you mention kids. Amongst the poorer and the elderly children are kids the main group to really suffer from the car centric design of cities. Essentially, you completely restrict their mobility, preventing them to move around on their own accord and instead making them relent on parents to drive them somewhere. I would not be surprised if this significantly contributes to the problems of children becoming less and less resilient and independent.
It's NIMBYism and zoning. People individually may want/demand apartments or townhomes or duplexes, but for various reasons it's common to outlaw all those things via local zoning regulations on most of the residential land in a city or town. Even in major cities, this is usually true (though of course there's some exceptions), that most of the land is reserved exclusively for detached single family homes on large lots.
In contrast, some countries like Germany or Japan don't have that type of zoning anywhere in the entire country. Of course, they still have many single family homes, you're just not required to live in one if you want to live on a particular street.
I don't want to get into the justifications for mandatory SFH zoning, but the results are pretty clear: it makes walking, biking and transit worse (and thus makes people less healthy and fatter); it results in economic segregation, as a working class family can't move to an affluent area by moving into a smaller home there, because smaller homes there are illegal; lastly, it means higher housing costs, because you can't put as much housing in a given area to meet demand (this also tends to increase commute times, as people go further out from the job center area to reduce costs).
It's not that suspicious. People who like their quality of life in their city and neighborhood don't want to lose that. This is perfectly normal and legitimate. Those who want higher density are usually either outsiders who want to live there but can't, or developers (or departing residents) who seek to make money by flipping a property for cheaply-built denser properties. If you increase density, you end up changing people's quality of life, and often for the worse. Density introduces other problems - different neighborhood feel, less intimacy, more traffic, more people crowding up parks, changing local politics, worse public safety, etc. It is because people are fond of a high quality life they enjoy that they're against such change. The other comment here using pejoratives like NIMBY to denigrate those who care about protecting their way of living is just drawing a convenient caricature.
Yeah, this comment is the mindset I'm talking about. Protecting "neighborhood character" by prioritizing cars over people, increasing property values at the expense of affordability, keeping out the poors, etc.
They put a lot of nice words on a lot of very bad results.
Meanwhile, very-dense-by-US-standards cities like Vienna and Munich often top the charts for quality of life. And I can attest to that myself: Munich felt very nice and comfortable to live in. It had far less crime than the US average, you were less likely to get hit by a car, people were much healthier, you had actual options to get around, etc. It was pleasant to be in the city in a way that is rare in the US.
Why are those bad results? Neighborhood character matters - what's wrong with people having a preference for low density, open air, fast access, uncrowded parks, and so forth? You are engaging in the same dishonest recasting of people's personal preferences by summoning a caricature about increasing property values or "keeping out the poors". No one I know who favors low density cares about those things - it is first and foremost about preserving the kind of life and community feel they get from a lower density neighborhood, that you simply cannot get in an impersonal dense city.
I would argue that neighborhood character is prioritizing people. It's prioritizing the ones who live there already, who have built their town into a desirable location, and want to protect what they have. It's about prioritizing a connection with others that you would lose with higher density. There's nothing wrong with that, and I would argue those are very good results.
> Meanwhile, very-dense-by-US-standards cities like Vienna and Munich often top the charts for quality of life.
Based on what opinion? Self-reported opinions of European residents? Why are those a useful measure? It may just be they simply don't know their lives could be better elsewhere or that they have a low bar for quality of life or that they simply hold a different set of preferences culturally. I've traveled and lived all over the world, and have spent a lot of time in both Vienna and Munich. They're fine, but to me they're not amazing and they don't strike me as having a great quality of life. I did appreciate high speed rail providing easy access to other cities and countries. But locally, I didn't feel life was happier or better - rather it felt like these were dull, boring cities that lacked the character of American towns that many people appreciate. To me they felt culturally repressed, with less of an entrepreneurial or lively spirit, and life felt a lot like living in a limited sandbox. That's not surprising, since the urbanist push to design lives within 15 minutes necessarily means living with a small set of hyper-local choices.
> you were less likely to get hit by a car, people were much healthier, you had actual options to get around
There is no rational basis for living in fear of getting hit by a car. It is just something that is exceedingly rare in America. Health is also orthogonal and dependent on so many other factors, including personal choice and priorities. Everyone can certainly choose to be healthy while living a car-centric lifestyle, if they wanted. As for options to get around - cars are the ultimate option, because they give you far more freedom to go where you want, when you want.
> I would argue that neighborhood character is prioritizing people. It's prioritizing the ones who live there already, who have built their town into a desirable location, and want to protect what they have.
No. It is prioritizing the loud ones over everyone else. Also, most people don't understand what makes a good city and have hardly seen anywhere else. They just want other people to pay for their unchanging city.
> There is no rational basis for living in fear of getting hit by a car.
This is so completely wrong. In the US, you have lifetime odds of death in a crash of 1 in 106. That is just for death--the odds of getting struck by a driver are MUCH MUCH higher. That could include permanent injury.
This is one of the most bizarro world comments I’ve ever read. The argument is internally consistent, but so completely opposite of my lived experiences. I nomad around extensively. I am in suburban Florida now and this character and freedom you’re talking about is incredibly absent. I was just in Vienna for a month and my opinion on the city is the opposite of yours in every way. This is a good reminder to me that different people can differ more in just some opinions, but can have absolutely irreconcilably opposing worldviews. I would steamroll your suburbs if I could and you would steamroll my walkable urban core. Cheers!
It’s because people want to live in a specific kind of community. Many Americans want a suburban life, with a cute house on a plot of land, with neighbors also with cute houses on plots of land. Low density, low numbers of cars clogging the local roads.
Introduce an apartment building and the aesthetic changes — lots more people around, more cars on the road, more congestion at the grocery store, less privacy in the yard. Or so the theory goes.
Not to mention cheaper housing nearby might lower your property value.
Yeah, this makes sense. People have economic and political power. It's easier to use the economic power to buy up all the land, but if you don't have that money, collectively you can use the political power to enforce beyond your boundaries. And all you need is 50%+1, with current turnout dropping that to 33%+1. Not bad altogether.
The aesthetic doesn't have to change as much as you think. It does change in the US, because apartment buildings here have largely garbage design. But there are other countries that do the blending better, like Germany.
The problem is not really necessarily that the car centric city exists, though it certainly has externalities related to health and the climate.
The problem is that only the car centric city exists. Nice walkable places are in extremely short supply and fetch a premium, and so there exist people who buy into the detached house, car centric lifestyle because it is the only thing available at their price point. It is illegal to build the traditional way in most of the country’s land. And making it simply legal to build does not mean that the people who like this lifestyle will be forced to densify.
This is the crux of the issue. I've said it before in HN, but urban density advocates need to focus more on why denser urban neighborhoods are good, rather than focusing on why car-centric suburbs are bad. New urbanists need the support of suburbanites whether they want to admit it or not, railing against people who like having space and privacy is less effective at winning allies than making a solid economic and social case for denser developments. Oftentimes urbanists actually explicitly say they want to "ban surburbs", which does nothing to help their cause or suggest that they are looking for a compromise that involves both dense developments and less dense developments.
For anyone interested in what _winter_ biking infrastructure could look like, some places in Finland have done a great job. Not for everyone, but popular nonetheless:
> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards. Car-centric cities are the price we pay for these things.
Maybe people don’t even like Personal transport that much, maybe they only use it because of the lack of suitable alternatives?
Maybe many people don’t have the „single family home whatever it takes“ attitude and would much prefer a suitable apartment in a somewhat dense walkable neighborhood? It’s no coincidence that the few relatively quiet very walkable neighborhoods often are the most desired places in a city, even here in German cities where the issue is nowhere near as extreme as it is in the US.
Also, car dependency is not just a city planning issue. Car dependency increases the risk of obesity and often results in overall bad health. And what about the kids? Children are totally dependent on their parents for anything transport related until they can drive themselves. Cycling doesn’t seem to be encouraged, let alone walking. Public transport maybe works for school, but rarely for leisure activities. How do you want to raise independent adults if they are totally dependent on you for something as basic as transportation?
I use public transit every day, I love it. I used to live in a city with a light rail system 2 blocks away. Even with that, I would still find it easier to drive and park downtown due to the delays, congestion, and slowness of the light rail line. Walk 5 minutes, wait 5 minutes, cram on, take 20 minute ride, walk 5 minutes VS 15 minute drive. Public transit needs to be either faster or cheaper than driving and it rarely is.
> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards.
Then why are even small houses in walkable neighbourhoods so expensive? Maybe not everyone wants to live like that, but there's clearly demand for that kind of living too. Let's build some for people who want it.
>Then why are even small houses in walkable neighbourhoods so expensive
Location
Location
Location
These small houses are pretty much all necessarily in urban areas and the prices reflects what overpaid doctors lawyers and techies are willing to pay for convenience. The not un-walkable suburbs that are roughly the same distance from the city centers suffer pretty much the same price increase for the same reason.
> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards
I feel it's more like people are conditioned ro like those things. The first time I visited America, I went to my friend's place. It was just homes with big backyards and nothing else. Coming from india, I was frankly disappointed. Staying in a city now and frankly it has much more charecter than those places
Which goes to prove that those stroads weren't built by some evil conspiracy, but ordered and enjoyed by a (sizeable?) part of the population. Which is why they are meant to stay in the States, and reviled outside.
but NYC and Amtrak aren't dramatically better than Toronto and Canadian rail issues that NotJustBikes constantly bashes as pathetically mediocre compared to the Netherlands.
The U.S. definitely has a range of insanely-awful to decent-enough with small now-premium-priced pockets of great bits (which are almost always pre-car neighborhoods that somehow were spared destruction).
Britain is in the anglosphere. We’re not exactly the Netherlands but we’re a whole heap ahead of the US, and getting (very slowly) better. Same goes for New Zealand.
I guess that's the main thing. I wouldn't particularly expect the US to make huge strides here, but e.g. in London the difference between now and years ago is night and day. The Netherlands didn't get to the present-day infrastructure overnight either. (Like London, my home town also improved a lot in the same period, even if it already was in a rather good place.)
Better? Since when? During my lifetime in Britain it has only got worse. It's so bad now I no longer cycle myself for fear of serious injury or death and don't recommend others do either. Cars have become bigger and there are far more of them. We even see monstrous American cars on our roads now. They've taken more and more of the roads and there's no stopping them. Police don't bother any more.. The roads are in worse shape than ever. Far more money is put into car infrastructure than anything else. I assume you live in London or some other city. Outside of there it's way worse.
I was explicitly talking about cities because that's the context of the subthread (and indeed the OP). London, Cambridge, Birmingham, Manchester etc. are installing protected cycle infrastructure that was basically unheard of 10 years ago. I do agree that rural roads are more hostile for cycling now, and your assumption as to where I live is wrong.
I can only speak for Manchester but people here have looked at the cycle infrastructure and taken it as a signal to ride around dressed all in black with no lights. I don't think the accident rate will go down.
>It's a shame there's basically no country in the anglosphere designed for pedestrians like most European countries.
Was also a bit confused why Britain and Ireland are not considered by the parent. Sure, they do not have as good cycling infrastructure as the Netherlands. But both of them are equally good at being pedestrian friendly - exactly what has been asked - and I'd say are even more pedestrian friendly than most European countries.
That's because people like their cars. You may not, but many people do. And I've traveled in many countries and it's not like cars are uniquely American.
There is a big difference between buying a car and doing literally every trip in a car because the only connection from the place you sleep to anywhere is six lane road with speeds exceeding 40mph.
Of course cars are convenient for some things. I live in a city where the majority of households has access to a car, but only a quarter of the trips (accounting for 40% of the traveled distance) are made by car. I still consider the city to be built very car-centric, but it's a wholly different world from what I experienced when visiting the US.
>There is a big difference between buying a car and doing literally every trip in a car because the only connection from the place you sleep to anywhere is six lane road with speeds exceeding 40mph.
This is a massive over-generalization that pretty much only applies to the suburbs that were built out in the 1950s and 1960s mostly in the southern half of the country. As those suburbs have densified over the decades (where allowed by law, so not the southwest) some of them have become pretty darn walk-able.
There is plenty of space for cars if you stack them. That's a rather successful model in Japanese cities. Free surface parking has an outsized negative impact on cities.
BTW, it's already kind of true that only the rich own cars, car ownership correlates very strongly with household income.
>BTW, it's already kind of true that only the rich own cars, car ownership correlates very strongly with household income.
Of course it correlates. Rich households can afford more cars per person and can indulge in specialized vehicles (e.g commuter car).
Rich families have a sedan for each commuting parent and maybe another less specialized car (e.g. minivan or 3-row SUV) that only sees weekend use. Poor families pile into a Saturn.
That the ability of the poor family to own and operate that Saturn confers a far greater standard of living jump than cars 2-N do for the rich family. It also has a much greater impact on the health of the broader economy.
To intentionally place monetary constraints on vehicle ownership would be unwise because you have to price out all the poor before you start making meaningful dents in the (relatively) wealthy professionals who commute across the inner suburbs and into urban environments.
I have a car, and was excited to get one when I moved out of NYC a couple years back.
But I hate using it for day-to-day tasks. For me, it's a machine that lets me take fun trips on the weekend, or go see family in their car-dependent towns and cities. If I want to go to a brewery, or stop by the post office, or shop for a few small items, or just go to a park, I would literally always rather do it on my bike or on foot. Driving around cities is miserable.
I have a car too. But when the opportunity exists, I will always prefer to go by bike. My kids ride bikes too, and my 7-year old son prefers to ride to his swimming lessons on his own bike. The car is only really for when we leave the city, or occasionally when we quickly need to go to the complete opposite end of the city and it's close to the motorway.
When given the choice between bad bike/walking infrastructure and cars, people prefer cars. But when you give them good infrastructure, many prefer bikes.
If I had a car, my yearly distance might have been similar. But that's because a car would give me most utility in areas that aren't handled by the "shared" car systems, i.e. longer trips outside of public transport system, especially with cargo that can't be reliably transported on a personal trip on train and the like.
And I'd probably still keep to taxis in the city, can't be arsed to drive :D
I find this is true nearly anywhere you go in the world, even in countries with excellent public transit (e.g. Korea, Japan, Taiwan). The moment people have the money to afford a car, they buy one. The only places I've seen that this is not the case are isolated, hyper-dense city states (Hong Kong and Singapore).
People might like their cars for the freedom of movement they provide - like being able to transport cargo without a headache; being able to go on a weekend trip with family; etc. But they certainly don't like their cars for having to spend 2 hours a day just to get to their workplace and back home.
They tolerate it.
That's why manuals are dying, that's why cars now HAVE to have things preventing distracted drivers from dying, that's why autopiloted car manufacturers are swimming in money thrown at them by everyone despite showing no results.
Should you ask why they tolerate it - the reason is very simple. The alternatives - cycling and public transport - have seen close to none of investments in the past decades all over the world. And therefore provide a horrible and humiliating experience to its users.
Also, the focus on cars allowed many cities and even countries to get lazy at planning and providing equal infrastructure to all districts. Having a smaller school in your neighbourhood is better for the kids - they could go there by themselves with friends and not spend much time doing nothing in traffic everyday. But because everyone has cars government will do the cheaper thing and build a bigger school that isn't convenient to anyone.
People shouldn't have to drive everyday.
All neighbourhoods should have adequate commercial and infrastructural exposure on the spot. No driving to school, groceries or GP. And when you have to commute, alternatives to driving should provide a better experience. Then many people would opt not to drive even if commute is needed, and therefore people like me - who like to drive - would have the roads free of traffic jams and distracted drivers, and be able to actually enjoy the experience.
Cars are nice, but I don't think people like being forced to drive because the other options all suck shit.
People like being able to walk and bike places too, IF the walk and bike options are actually decent (in terms of safety/comfort and distance).
And people certainly don't like getting fat, and yet there's a strong link between car-dominant infrastructure and weight. Surprise surprise, getting exercise as part of your transportation is a lot more reliable than getting exercise as leisure.
Is this a chicken and egg thing though? Do people like their cars because the world they live in requires cars, and thus they become part of their identity?
The question is not whether people have cars (they do) or whether they like them or not (some do and some don't). The question is whether the infrastructure forces people to use a car for every single errand. Much less road space is needed if cars are not required for everything. And if one actually likes cars one is more likely to enjoy driving through the mountains than going grocery shopping by car.
of course they do, that's the whole issue. in many situations it is better for the whole if people don't get everything they want. that's where regulation should come in. "people like it" is shortsighted thinking, prone to local optima, and should not be the sole criterion for policy decisions
That's its job. It's there to outrage you, but the reality is it doesn't teach you to do much else. The reality is, low density living in countries like the US rely on this structure.
The same way most of South Korea, including low density zones is built using large apartment blocks... because that's just what works for the country and there's no such thing as being a jack of all trades.
I've disliked the apples to oranges and emotional bias present in those videos since the start. But people eat it up. Shame.
NJB is not an "outrage" channel, that is utterly absurd. It's an information channel that mostly shows you how things work in the Netherlands and makes the case that it's a better way than the idiotic car-centric north American way.
If you're outraged after watching his videos, it's not his fault, it's the fault of your city planners.
I’m mostly outraged that the YouTube algorithm keeps showing me his crap just because I like cities skylines. His content is trash and despite consistently disliking it YouTube just won’t learn.
Dislikes have little effect on whether a channel is recommended, only individual videos and the related videos to that specific one. Also to dislike a video you need to click it in the first place, which tells YouTube you potentially like content of this sort but the individual videos aren't up to your expectations so it's going to keep trying.
As another poster said there is a way to get YouTube to stop recommending the channel to you. Use that instead.
Sidenote: i think it's hilarious that it's consistently the car lovers that think NJB is trash. Loving cars immediately must mean that his high quality, well researched content is "trash". Not something you personally dislike, not something you disagree with, no no, the worst trash in the world.
I guess disliking that channel is a useful shibboleth to spot the guy driving an SUV.
> Loving cars immediately must mean that his high quality, well researched content is "trash".
Why is it surprising that people who love cars don't like a channel that basically says you're a bad person if you don't think cars should be abolished?
Car-centric designs for cities makes living in cities worse, _even for people who like cars_.
The thesis of Strong Towns isn't that we should ban cars, it's that we should stop _subsidizing_ something that we know is bad for us (in economic terms, health terms, quality-of-life terms, and in ecological terms)
It's worth noting that although Dutch infrastructure puts a lot of effort into different modes of transport, especially bikes, it's also excellent for cars. Dutch car drivers often complain about poor road quality in neighbouring countries like Germany and Belgium. There's also a lot of innovation here on smoothing traffic flow, removing traffic lights where possible, and many other things that I'm sure car drivers love.
And if you care about well-maintained roads, it helps if your roads are actually maintainable, and for that, it helps if they're efficient and well-designed. I've read a lot about the poor state of infrastructure in the US, and agree with calls to invest more in infrastructure, but it's been Strong Towns, NJB and similar channels that made me realise why US infrastructure is struggling: it's inefficiently designed, making it way too expensive to maintain. The entire past 70 years of US suburban development is apparently build on massive amounts of debt, which has sent several cities into bankruptcy. If you don't want your cities to go bankrupt, you need more efficient infrastructure. And stroads are clearly not that.
But nobody said that cars should be abolished. The arguments are that cities can (and should) be build for more than just cars. If you're saying content that advocates for more bike/walk centric cities feels like it's calling for the abolishing of cars to someone who likes cars, imagine what this sounds like to someone who likes bikes/walking you are essentially saying I'm not willing to give an inch to you because it's only my way. That's pretty much how you create polarisation.
Have you ever watched anything more than one NJB video?
He repeatedly bashes city centric planning and is a huge advocate for alternatives modes of transport. But to my knowledge he never even implied such a thing. In fact he even shared some videos around driving in the Netherlands and how he still used cars in some circumstances
You can click the three dots beside such videos then select "Don't recommend channel", you won't see these videos in your "Home" section of YouTube. There are a few gurning-in-the-thumbnail types that I've stopped seeing altogether after doing this.
If your issue is that you play a video then just keep watching whatever YT shows you next and it's sometimes this person, then I'm not sure if this solves that problem since I don't do this personally
I've come to understand that there are things that have three or so factors, and you will never get rid of them.
1. Views. Usually boosted by getting bandwagoned on a place like Reddit. High viewed videos pop up everywhere, irrelevant or not.
2. Feel good factor, which sprouts from feeling like you learnt something new or can change the world now.
3. Emotional mob mentality. People refuse to believe things are the way they are for anything other than "bad design" or "someone did it wrong". Capitalising on this, is factor three.
Some videos fill these 3 boxes and they just show up time and time again, EVERYWHERE. It's the algorithm of the internet, and YouTube loves to lead it.
I wish there were a way to "block" youtube channels. I feel similarly about this specific content source, but there are a bunch of others who are far worse on other topics.
>It's an information channel that mostly shows you how things work in the Netherlands and makes the case that it's a better way than the idiotic car-centric north American way.
Yes. Comparing apples to oranges. What an outrage! My apples have less vitamin C! How dare they.
>If you're outraged after watching his videos
I'm not. But the majority who do watch the video are. It's his fault. The same way people are outraged at many things unjustly after watching a video filled with bias.
Are people outraged by what he says, or by the reality he exposes? Should that reality then remain hidden to keep people complacent?
I think it's reality that's outrageous, and it's people like NJB and Strong Towns that are pointing out it could be better, they are pointing out how to make it better. People are outraged because they realise how bad their infrastructure is, and how much better it could be. That's a positive, constructive type of outrage. It's not just fomenting anger for its own sake (as indeed happens way too often in other media).
If someone told you that it can't be better, and it was the truth, you'd get pretty outraged at them when another person claimed that it was all just bad design and that they didn't want you to have the better thing.
It's pretty obvious when you have no emotion to channel.
Comparing apples to oranges is an easy way to get anyone upset. After all, who wouldn't want both?
So you're saying it's an outrage channel based on what evidence? You say that the car centric cities of North America are like they are by thoughtful design and that NJB creates outrage by depicting this design as verfiably inferior while in reality it is just "what works for the country". So can you elaborate what is better (and works better) about the design of a car centric "stroad" City compared to a walkable city?
If it's an outrage channel how come I'm not outraged after watching all of his content?
What i am is pleased to have learned a lot about dutch urban design. If anything outrages me, it's how you keep insisting this channel "compares" anything when all it does is showcases dutch cities, and once in a while complains about specific issues in his hometown of London ON.
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.
I used to agree that these things take a long time, but since the pandemic my local council in Ireland has acted very quickly to build excellent bike infrastructure and curtail car access to village spaces [1]. Many roads got changed to one-way, to make way for segregated bike lanes. Pre-pandemic, there was dallying for years over building this stuff, but now its there, and the world hasn't imploded for motorists, and local businesses and residents are 99% very happy.
Of course when local government doesn't have the will it won't happen, but if they do, it can happen very quickly.
Yes, the pandemic has accelerated this, but everyone involved needs to be open for the possibility from the beginning. Here in Germany when someone proposes something like this there is a storm of protest from small businesses: "what we are already on the brink of bankruptcy with everyone ordering stuff online or going to supermarkets with huge parking lots and now you want to cut us off from our customers do you want to kill us off completely?!?!" (because everyone knows real customers come in cars, pedestrians and cyclists obviously don't have the money to afford a car, so they can't afford anything else either).
I've written about this on a similar post previously. The town I grew up in in Germany (Lüneburg for those familiar with Germany), turned some of the central city into a pedastrian mall about 30-40 years ago. I still remember the local newspaper being full of angry letters from local businesses complaining that this would be the death of the city centre, everyone would go shopping at the big malls on the outside of town which will soon pop up etc.. In reality the exact opposite happened the city centre is packed with people, the city is immensely popular with tourists who come from all over and many of the big "shopping centres " outside of town disappeared.
At the moment there are discussions on expending the pedestrian zones further and the same arguments are being made by businesses, it is as if nobody learned anything.
I've heard similar stories about Paris and other places. Business often resist changing their street to a pedestrian area, and every time it turns out that it will actually boost their business.
I think a true shift towards Urbanism in our cities may be only possible if there's a whole lot of money in it for somebody with political leverage. But who? I'm not sure. Real estate developers? They're already making money hand over fist building our cities in the shitty car-centric way. When the US made its shift to car-centricity with the interstate highway system, there was a ton of money in it for oil companies, and car companies. Who "wins" when we shift our building patterns towards Urbanism? Aside from everyone who gets to live there, of course. I feel like big political changes like this don't happen unless someone who stands to gain is busy lobbying to make it happen. And I don't know what, if any, entity stands to gain a lot from building pedestrian-friendly, dense, beautiful cities.
One of strong road’s arguments is that denser neighborhoods bring in much more tax revenue compared to strip malls and stroads. Take a classic, large mall. You could instead house hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the same space, as well as scores of small businesses. The tax revenue there would be much higher than if most of the space is a parking lot that, on average, is rarely fully utilized.
The main point of their argument is that strip malls and stroads and suburbia is unsustainable because it can’t generate enough tax revenue to support its infrastructure.
I think this means that entities do stand to gain from better planning, but it’s over the long term. You can’t build it in a year and expect it to be immediately full, but you can expect it to survive the long term (unlike the mall).
This is a good argument but I wonder how unaffordable sprawl is. Is it true across the board? Are there some that have done it better than others? I find it a bit of a stretch to say they are all unsustainable but maybe they're right I don't know.
It depends on the affluence of residents whether they can afford the much higher taxes required to maintain the infrastructure for urban sprawl (as well as its externalities), but it's always more expensive.
>Who "wins" when we shift our building patterns towards Urbanism? Aside from everyone who gets to live there, of course. I feel like big political changes like this don't happen unless someone who stands to gain is busy lobbying to make it happen. And I don't know what, if any, entity stands to gain a lot from building pedestrian-friendly, dense, beautiful cities.
You may be interested in a policy the UK government is considering:
The idea is to let small groups of residents (a single street) vote to loosen planning restrictions in specific ways, allowing for incremental intensification of suburbs.
"The housing crisis is often presented as a zero-sum conflict. More houses
must be built to avoid rising homelessness, falling home ownership, and
wider economic stagnation. But they can only be built by forcing them
through against the will of local people, either by imposing high-rise on
our historic centres, or by concreting over our countryside with more
suburban housing estates. On this analysis, the interests of those who
already own homes are fundamentally opposed to the interests of those
who do not, and policy is simply a matter of choosing which interest
group will triumph over the other.
This analysis is profoundly mistaken. The appearance of opposed
interests is the result of a defective system, which excludes existing
communities from the benefits of development while imposing on them
its adverse effects. If existing communities are allowed to control the form
of development and to share in the benefits that it brings, they can become
enthusiastic supporters."
I like it. I do hope it is possible for communities to become enthusiastic supporters.
The more I read of this proposal the more I like it. It feels realistic. I feel like it properly addresses the reasons people oppose development and offers a practical way out of the bind.
I know right? Reading it is like a pleasant balm. Sensible and humane, especially compared to a lot of the other stuff the UK government gets up to nowadays. I really hope it gets through Second Reading in 2022.
They can go live in the country. That’s part of what’s good about Urbanism - it lets the city become a real city, and it reduces or reverses sprawl, which leaves more of the rural areas undeveloped. The city should be city, and the country country. It’s the in-between stuff that’s problematic.
Things move slowly and gradually until they suddenly don't. Much of the infrastructure presently dominant in the US dates to 1960/1970, and depending on where specifically you were in the country before then, things changed in a pretty major way with the birth of the Interstate Highway System (1960s), urban flight and suburban development (1950s), WWII (1940s), the Great Depression (1930s), and the first really big mechanisation and electrification drive (1910s--1920s).
Starting somewhere around 1960--1970, things levelled off. No major wars, no major economic disruptions, and for the most part no major new landscape-transforming technological inventions. (For those looking to criticise, note the key word major, which is not a synonym for any.)
I'd argue that things began shifting by 2001 with 9/11, the 2007--8 global financial crisis, the 2016 election, mobile + social + algorithmic Internet hitting critical mass, and since late 2019, the COVID-19 global pandemic, now entering its third year. Climate change impacts are also likely to be felt increasingly, with Blade Runner skies over much of the West Coast of the US being one interesting sign that the future has arrived.
Transformational change is a bit like going broke: it happens slowly at first, then suddenly.
It's not just (or maybe even primarily) about money. As is indicated in the first part of the OP, changing things means changing things that a lot of people are fine with, affecting many businesses, causing a lot of disruption, etc.
I'd be fine with more walkable areas but it's not just about spending money.
IMO this is a question of ignorance. Most Americans simply don't understand that there are (far superior) alternatives to car-dependent suburbia. It's just not on their radar.
Hopefully channels like "Not Just Bikes" and our own social dissemination of the walk/bike/transit oriented urban development model will allow more Americans to understand what they're missing.
Once enough people in a given urban area realize what they could have, perhaps the political will to improve will materialize.
I don't much care for suburbs and like cities only in moderation. I prefer the country within striking distance of a large city. I'm perfectly aware of what an urban environment is like--I've lived in both Cambridge and NYC--and while there are things I like about it (I'm staying in one this week) it's not something I want full-time.
Seeing as those are both American cities, it's not surprising you don't like it. Even our best cities are pretty disappointing when compared to what Europe and Asia have to offer.
They're everywhere now even the bridges, the ebike messengers own the streets and slowed down the cars, Lyft bought citibike stop you don't need another app, so it's now a joy to bike NYC, even as a tourist. Really.
The present world changes fast, when it changes. When someones says "this will take decades", I usually interpret that as "this isn't happening, there's nothing making it happen, only people talking".
The US is pretty fucked, but if at the non federal level some government can start issuing a fuck ton of bonds and do interesting things, we can see more change.
A basic horseshit politics in the US is to act like nothing is possible without controlling government (super-majorities if needed) at all levels.
We must work around that, because it will not happen reliably. Might need states to start seceding too.
The neat idea is that the extra work from rapid change makes a society richer, not poorer. (There is old "oil spills increases GDP" memes on this front.)
The flip side is
> Today’s neoliberal macroeconomic model depends on limiting economic growth as a way of managing distributional conflicts.
I.e. the stagnation serves a purpose of making labor not too needed and thus pliant. (We get a little tighter labor markets now, and good things because of it.)
The upshot is that if you can score some "against the odds" political victories doing more rapid denser develop development, you will get not only the increased "real" efficiency from better land utilization (and all the other good health, beauty, etc.) benefits, but also extra growth from the expenditures needed to retool things.
Build subway, build a bunch of public housing, increase area population by a few million. This stuff is less ridiculous than it sounds.
"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:
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.
It's definitely a word coined by Strong Towns. But, a "new" made up word? I guess it depends on your scale of "new."
The oldest reference to "Stroad" on strongtowns.org I've found is this[1] from January 2, 2012.
That makes the term nearly 10 years old. That being said, this term has been getting much more popular over the last couple years, especially due to Not Just Bikes.
the argument is that streets and roads serve fundamentally different purposes and thus have different design goals, and stroads do both and thus fail at both. Roads are for transit, getting cars a long distance between interest points, and streets are for navigating within a point of interest like a neighbourhood. Roads want to optimise for higher cruising speed and streets are to optimise for parking, mixed-use with pedestrians and cyclists, etc. You can't combine these things - it's not a measurement divide but a categorical one.
Traffic engineer here. Generally there is a hierarchy of roads called functional class. It goes local street - collector - minor arterial - major arterial - freeway. From local to freeway the speeds increase and the land access decreases. Good urban design should connect only roads one "step" apart, that is local roads should only connect to collectors and so forth. Reality is clearly different.
I would imagine everyone can think of a local road that is more convenient than another route therefore attracting high traffic volumes. These roads become problematic without improving the proper route. The other side of the coin is an arterial that is built but too many accesses are allowed to connect to it. In my home town this has happened when the city council caved to developers and allowed residential construction on a major arterial because nobody wanted to build commercial developments at the time. Jump ahead 10 years and there is now a strange neighborhood with driveways directly on the busiest street in town.
Changing roads is very tricky due to the funding sources. Usually local roads are only eligible for local funding where as arterials are eligible for federal funding. There are exceptions and it is much more nuanced than can be explained in one paragraph.
> Generally there is a hierarchy of roads called functional class. It goes local street - collector - minor arterial - major arterial - freeway.
This heirarchy seems to miss the importance distinction that Strong Towns makes between a "street" and a "road", in that "streets" are places where human life takes place, and "roads" are how vehicles move rapidly from place to place. It has only category with the word "street" literally present, and then moves immediately to other things whose relationship to the street/road distinction is unclear. This is a problem because streets include those that are purely residental as well as those with retail etc.
You are correct. The old way of thinking about roads/streets (synonyms in this case) is a place to move cars. The people centric view on transportation is new enough that there isn't much traction among the old guard at state DOTs. Changing something like functional class and what it means is very hard due to decades of history. As the saying goes, old dogs can't learn new tricks. This is especially true for government agencies. I have worked with cities that have a strong desire to make their transportation network people centric but the state won't help pay for it because the concepts don't move enough cars and to them, that is all that matters.
Exactly. Ideally, only the street should have real street functionality (houses and shops directly accessible from the street). Maybe the collector too; it's meant to have many streets connecting to it, so access to car parks for shops makes a lot of sense there too. But anything arterial should just be about getting people from one end to the other as smoothly as possible.
There's one more category that's often ignored in this list: the rural road. There, the functions can mix without any problems, but only because of its very low density and low use; very little traffic means you can still cross the road easily, and have time to turn into drive ways and things like that without hindering anyone.
I'll actually defend the stroad, they work fine so long as you don't allow parking, and you limit the driveways to 2-3 per "block" - anything more than that and they cease to function as an street or a road. Often the stroad is just a section with a bunch of businesses on an otherwise well designed arterial road.
The pictures they post of supposed stroads look like normal arterials to me.
The problem with 3 driveways per block is you've just made a really low density set of stores. This means that you massively increase the average distance someone has to travel to get to the store they want. One of the main reasons to separate streets and roads is that it encourages tightly packed small shops which (especially when combined with mixed zoning) create low average travel distances. Lower travel distances mean fewer cars on the road (cause more stuff is in walking/biking distance) and therefore lower traffic.
> The pictures they post of supposed stroads look like normal arterials to me.
That's because in America, most arterials are stroads. We've gotten used to bad infrastructure.
And yeah it works on some level, sure. American businesses still manage to function, people still manage to do things. But there are a number of major downsides still.
Where I live there's a diamond interchange between two state highways controlled only by stop-signs at the end of the off-ramps towards the smaller of the two.
Near that interchange there is a neighborhood. For whatever reason, both sides of the neighborhood have traffic lights, so when traffic is heavy, if you want to go from the larger to smaller highway (particularly if you want to turn left!), it's far more expedient to cut through the neighborhood.
>Changing roads is very tricky due to the funding sources. Usually local roads are only eligible for local funding where as arterials are eligible for federal funding. There are exceptions and it is much more nuanced than can be explained in one paragraph.
Don't get me started on all the perfectly functional things they screw up because some jerk central planner in DC wrote a spec based on national averages.
I get the idea, and I'm in favor of removing stroads. I think it would be more compelling if it was backed up by some data. Finding actual data on stroads is basically impossible because it is not a term-of-art as far as I can tell.
Try the terms "road diet" and "traffic calming", they will yeild more results. While not exactly the same concept, they are terms that have been in use within the industry for much longer.
Just yesterday was thinking about how much pavement is between me and my neighbors across the street. Standard suburbia single family home area, and I think we could have a car on each side of the street and still pass two cars through side by side, though thankfully cars never need to slow down out of fear of hitting things - one side is no parking. It's a ton of infrastructure and maintenance cost that is never fully utilized. Even at the peak of demand (Christmas or Thanksgiving probably) we're not all hosting at the same time, and most likely two very nearby neighbors will be traveling (not taking up street space, and probably fine with you parking in their driveway if you ask permission).
On top of the massive street, everyone has driveways that can hold 2-3 vehicles and typically 2 sometimes 3 garage stalls (though many are filled with "stuff", an entirely separate issue).
But this comes after the traffic and environmental and planning studies, so it's more of a "how" to build, after you've at least gone through some preliminary design and figured out "what" to build.
And yes, there is literally a table (for highways at least) that gives values for lane width vs the "natural speed" that drivers gravitate to.
> "Stroad" seems to be a new made-up word by strongtowns
Thank you! I clicked the link and then scrolled through several top-level comments thinking that either this was some sort of internet joke that I wasn't previously aware of or I somehow managed to not learn word that everyone else has always known.
It looks like they came up with it in 2013 actually, I've only recently bumped into it (and suddenly, multiple times). I think it might be in the process of becoming a thing for... I dunno, there's a particular group of people online who get really into very specific policy things and kind of meme about them, but also kind of try and make solid arguments for them.
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.
Take it from someone who grew up in Santa Clara: El Camino Real fucking sucks.
Now, many businesses along El Camino Real are great, don't get me wrong. But the road itself is miserable. When we lived in Sunnyvale there was a bigass Korean market literally across the street from us; we'd only drive there, despite it being, again, directly across the street, because that's how painful and dangerous-feeling it was to cross by foot.
This is not a problem we ever had while living in Munich.
> we'd only drive there, despite it being, again, directly across the street
That is just bizarre.
And it's important to understand how inefficient this is to need a car to cross the street; you need parking space on this side, parking space on the other side, you need to get on and off the stroad, causing wear, interfering with and slowing down the other traffic, which is mostly through traffic that's not interested at all in your house or that Korean market. It's unbelievably inefficient.
It's much more efficient if through traffic is separated from local traffic, if you can walk to the store, if stores are close to each other with one central parking space from which you can easily reach them all, and if people only use cars for trips that intrinsically require a car.
If not that particular market, there's similar ones along either direction of the stroad. The whole area is designed for cars, it's not walkable. Yes it's inefficient, but totally understandable why OP drives to cross a street.
Correct. Also, when I lived there, they didn’t have those lights. There was a crosswalk, but crossing vs 3 lanes of traffic each direction with no pedestrian island felt like playing chicken with every driver at once. Did it a couple times to try and make walking work, but it was clearly dangerous.
>And it's important to understand how inefficient this is to need a car to cross the street; you need parking space on this side, parking space on the other side, you need to get on and off the stroad, causing wear, interfering with and slowing down the other traffic, which is mostly through traffic that's not interested at all in your house or that Korean market. It's unbelievably inefficient.
But is this inefficiency and resultant drag on prosperity balanced out by making the market more efficient to access for people up and down the road?
If he had to cross the tracks to get to the market you could basically come up with the same list of gripes. Naive analysis like that is not useful.
But is it actually more efficient for others to access that market? The market needs a massive parking lot to accommodate those cars, which means they need a lot of ground. That too is inefficient. I've seen a comparison of two commercial blocks close together; one was old, had a row of old shops along the street and hadn't really been changed much since the 1920s or so. The other was new, modern, had a parking lot serving a single fast-food restaurant. But that meant it had only a single restaurant, and that single restaurant just didn't make anywhere near as much money as that row of old shops.
Elsewhere in this discussion someone pointed out that shops owners often resist attempts to turn their street into a pedestrian-only area, because they fear it will drive away their customers, but every time it turns out to be a boost to those shops. Turns out the car isn't actually that important. You can save a lot of wasted space and money by making shops more accessible to other forms of traffic.
> But is it actually more efficient for others to access that market? The market needs a massive parking lot to accommodate those cars....
See my point about the train. Sure people who could formerly just walk across the street or tracks lose but those pieces of infrastructure make the destination far more accessible. You turn one person's 1min trip into a 15min trip but you also turn hours long trips into 15-25min trips. Obviously rail is higher density (and much higher cost) but it's farcical to pretend like the road has no net benefit when clearly it allows more access to the attractive destination (market in this case) even if a few people's access is degraded.
>Elsewhere in this discussion someone pointed out that shops owners often resist attempts to turn their street into a pedestrian-only area, because they fear it will drive away their customers, but every time it turns out to be a boost to those shops.
Perhaps because the changes only ever get implemented where they actually make sense.
Where I live people raised the walk-ability issue twice in recent memory. It got implemented where it obviously made sense (near downtown) and didn't where it didn't (a strip mall area farther away).
> I've seen a comparison of two commercial blocks close together; one was old, had a row of old shops along the street and hadn't really been changed much since the 1920s or so. The other was new, modern, had a parking lot serving a single fast-food restaurant. But that meant it had only a single restaurant, and that single restaurant just didn't make anywhere near as much money as that row of old shops.
This means nothing without knowing the underlying economic circumstances, Buffalo NY vs NYC and all that.
Of course the road has a benefit, as does the train. But this gets to the central issue: the train doesn't stop at every shop; it stops only at the station. It gets you very efficiently to the station, and from there you walk to the shop, and there are generally multiple shops at easy walking distance near that station.
The road could do that too, but instead, it stops independently at every shop, while simultaneously also trying to be the thoroughfare that gets people from far away. And it's that combination that makes it a lot more complicated and more dangerous. And inefficient.
Centralise the stops, and put the stops closer together so you can walk there.
> But is this inefficiency and resultant drag on prosperity balanced out by making the market more efficient to access for people up and down the road?
Nobody's saying we shouldn't have fast roads that are good for cars, just that they shouldn't be the same thing as where people go to shop. Stroads are the compromise of essentially putting businesses along the freeway.
> If he had to cross the tracks to get to the market you could basically come up with the same list of gripes.
No, this is incorrect.
There was actually a housing development I was interested in in Munich with exactly the setup you're talking about: the apartment buildings were on one side of the tracks and directly adjacent to said tracks and the train station, with two grocery stores on the other side. I would go there with my son occasionally to shop, and he and I would both easily cross under said tracks, because there was an underpass, and it's MUCH easier and cheaper to build a ped/bike underpass for two lanes of tracks than a 6+ car lane road.
> But is this inefficiency and resultant drag on prosperity balanced out by making the market more efficient to access for people up and down the road?
If the current configuration really is the most efficient, why does the government feel the need to mandate it (through parking minimums)? Wouldn't private interests build it anyway?
I think big parking lots can be justified sometimes. But what we now is not "build big parking lots when efficient", it's "build big parking lots everywhere, even when it's not needed".
I cross El Camino Real on foot all the time. Yes my nearest section has has 3 lanes in each direction, but it has marked pedestrian crossings with traffic lights and drivers obey the lights. However, I admit, I frequently drive to things in my neighborhood because things are far apart and when you chain a few local errands together it is much faster to drive. Every business has parking nearby so driving is easy.
I used to travel regularly to my company’s satellite office in Sunnyvale. My hotel was less than a mile away, so I walked the 20 minutes instead of opting for a rental car. Because that’s what I do in Seattle.
I’m certain that I was the only pedestrian around for miles.
Oh god I lived a block from El Camino Real in Santa Clara and I hated it. I really felt like I was surrounded on all sides by concrete (I would say this to people at the time). I grew up in a forest and being so close to so many cars was not for me. Different strokes for different folks though I’m glad you enjoy it! But your experience is so different from mine I thought I would share.
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.
Drive over the meridian, gouge the greenway, and leave tire streaks repeatedly. Then have a friend take pictures and start bugging your local politicians about the lack of consistent access. Have them make the point that paying to continually clean up after people will cost more than putting in a comfortable number of access openings. They'll be able to fix it and look like they're saving the city money at the same time, everybody wins.
The problem with that is that the bad changes were likely made in part because "people are stupid and we need to save them from themselves" and giving them the bird like you suggest may make them double down.
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.
Are you thinking of actual stroads or rather simply the large american roads?
US roads definitely have a cool factor to them but American stroads are awful and really not something you want to experience.
I remember taking a two hour walk in Irvine a decade ago. Walking in a straight line, palm trees in the middle of the stroad to separate the ten lanes, walking, walking... Nothing changing around me other than the names of the shops.
I didn't fully understand what made me feel so uneasy and what made the whole thing so surreal. I realized years later what i had experienced then.
It was not a good experience. I had little room to walk, almost died three times. I eventually hitchhiked and was picked up by a car, the woman who picked me up had two kids in the back and as soon as I hopped in the front seat, closed the door and said thank you, she said "and don't you try anything, I have a gun".
The whole trip left me with a horrible taste in my mouth that can only be rivaled by marmite.
It's actual stroads that stand out to Europeans. The excessively-wide, long, straight roads with an enormous lit-up business sign every 200-500m. "Motel 6", "Firestone", "Tire Center", then an American flag as big as a house[1].
In TV and films, they're not clogged with traffic, and they don't show it takes 10 minutes of driving to visit 3 shops.
No, you really don't want to experience them. Transiting them by any means is an exercise in frustration. Cars and trucks clog the asphalt. Sidewalks are few and not interconnected. Two shops might be next to each other, but you have to drive between them because walking is like Frogger brought to life. So you waste your day sitting at red lights, being honked at, and wishing you were anywhere else.
No, the parent comment should experience them in the way I love dystopian fiction, at arms length. They should also make sure it never makes it to their corner of reality.
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.
To be honest 40C is quite doable, as long as you have shade (trees) water features (lakes/rivers) and a distance of a couple of km - I’ve cycled like that for fun, not just to get to a destination.
Now I would never do that on such an asphalt desert of course, a car is way more comfortable, the question remains why would you turn a lush greenery (as I’d imagine a texan climate could be) into something you’re only comfortable crossing in heavy and expensive survival gear. Especially if living in that gear leads to all the allergies you’ve mentioned.
Where I live if I wanted to cycle the worst would be snow followed by cycles of thawing and freezing, which leaves the routes a miserable mess, so I have to fire up my trusty corolla, but apart from that (20% of the time) I prefer biking for sure.
And I live in the shithole of the european union, the poorest of the member states, and am constantly amazed how much better the city planning is here, even with all of its flaws.
For example a UK colleague when visiting sent a picture how he got lost in a wilderness forest, on his way on foot from the downtown hotel to the office, since the capital itself is littered with small pockets of lush (and I mean really lush) greenery.
I can’t imagine what great things could be accomplished if you had the resources of a place like texas… You could make your city be so great, people go there as a tourist just to enjoy being there, and not for the novelty.
So as a suburban area, it is generally not optimized for biking as a mode of transportation. Suburbs absolutely cater to cars, and this road is no exception. There are significant and wide-reaching bike trails across the surrounding county, but if you're going to and from work in the area, you have a car, almost exclusively.
The very nature of the fact that very little of the surrounding area caters to pedestrian traffic, the road would do a bad job if it was optimized for that.
That's the case for most suburban areas in the US. In places like Germany it's still not great, but there are many more provisions for other modes of travel especially as a pedestrian and they're not unused.
The Netherlands has great bike paths in their suburban areas.
Yes, downtown Naperville is the closest condensed shopping area. And it's extremely walkable, by design, with three major parking garages well-placed to ideally allow you to park your car on the edge of the downtown area and then walk to where you want to go. There's still car traffic, but due to the amount of pedestrians and narrow streets, drivers in the area will almost always route around it.
Meanwhile, Ogden Avenue is one of the main through-roads in the area. Usually a road you'd drive up to to avoid going through downtown Naperville, in fact.
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 should not have destinations on them, they should be a connection between two destinations. Streets are an example of a destination, with businesses, homes, etc. Streets can have parking nearby.
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?
It sounds exactly like Ho Chi Minh City here in Vietnam. The solution isn't hard -- the government uses imminent domain, takes a few metres of land on each side, and compensates existing owners.
Not trying to nitpick, but just a heads-up that the term is " eminent domain" (I know it's a pet-peeve when people don't correct me if I'm saying something wrong, but feel free to ignore me if you don't care).
I don't know how it would be fixed, but in the west it would simply be forbidden to build a house driveway onto a highway.
If the road is being upgraded into a highway, they would alter the driveway so it no longer connects to the highway: a service/access/frontage road, or some other route.
"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.
Idk man, how do you think people survived prior to 1945? We do not have to go far back into human history to see the alternative to car centric development. Were pre war cities and towns gentrified and devoid of commerce? Did everyone have no time for anything but walking? It’s always striking to me the extent to which people will take a 75 year old radical experiment (car centric suburban development) as the normal and the natural mode of civilization, and consider any deviation from that mode completely impractical. I guess people were entirely impractical for 8000 years or so?
People had cars before 1945. My grandparents were born in the 20's, their parents had cars by then.
They were farmers. Before cars, farmers had horse drawn wagons. Do you think they walked home with their groceries from the store ten miles away? Carried 160 acres of corn into town on their backs? Horses were noisy, expensive and polluting. Progressives back then whined incessantly about those, too. Some things never change.
Work horses shit about 30 pounds a day. Large cities would have had tens of thousands of horses. Hundreds of tons a day of shit on the streets. It was almost as bad as San Francisco.
Sure conveyances existed prior to 1945. What did not exist prior to 1945 was cities and towns designed such that the only effective means to get around was a car. Yes, I grant that the car is a useful invention for the rural farmer. It is not a useful invention for someone living in a town or city because it does not scale to a population the size of a town or city; the only reason a car may appear useful is that post war towns and cities are so badly designed that a car is the least worst option. The beauty of a well designed town or city is that everything you need for daily life is within a five minute walk of your home, a walk in which you often bump into friends and neighbors; work is a couple mass transit stops away at most, and a traffic filled commute is not eating hours of each day. A car cannot improve upon this mode of life; it can improve the life of a farmer, but it only detracts from the life of a town or city dweller. Unfortunately, people can’t imagine an alternative to the “convenience” and “freedom” of being stuck in traffic, fighting for parking, and paying for gas.
Redesigning infrastructure always produces winners and losers. Slowing down traffic will always make someone’s commute longer. Unfortunately, making these decisions is hard but necessary, because the trade offs are worth it.
Gentrification is when a place becomes more desirable to live. It’s caused by people enjoying themselves. Gentrification is wealth creation. If housing prices rise too much, you can build more housing. It’s something to be desired, not avoided.
> Gentrification is when a place becomes more desirable to live.
Yes, but the real problem here is that this term is also used to discuss an overlapping but different thing: the poor and otherwise vulnerable parts of society being displaced by raising rent. There should be two words to describe these things to ensure we don't talk past each other.
Anyway, the displacement issue is a problem solved by ensuring affordable housing through various means, not by ensuring the housing stays affordable due the location being a terrible place to live (as you already mentioned, I'm just putting it in the other "gentrification" context).
Redesigning always happens in little pockets though. And it often takes years due to how broken infrastructure planning is. So the first people to take advantage of it are the rich. And so shit without cars gets the stereotype of being only for the rich. And the cycle continues.
I've accepted it's just never going to change in the US. There's too many opposing forces all at odds with each other. Really makes you fucking mad how much the "Greatest Generation", in addition to their cancer boomer children, really fucked this country.
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.
This has always been the drama of urbanism. Only a minority is pushing for it, while the rest furiously resist thanks to years of car-centric propaganda (and vested interests).
To me, I think if this generation had to choose between same day delivery and walkable neighborhoods they're going for the former. Maybe that's a false dichotomy
This generation is a lot of people, and who is to say they can't have both? Same day delivery becomes easier in densely populated areas, and densely populated areas tend to be more walkable.
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.
Point is that stroads don't give you that fast travel, because of all the traffic that needs getting in and off.
The alternative of having a dedicated through-travel road with streets on the sides to access actual destinations does allow both fast travel and easy access to destinations.
You should check out the NJB you tube links. Stroads aren't fast for car travel. If you want a fast road, design for that. Stroad design gives you the worst of both worlds: slow and terrible for anything other than driving/parking.
I've seen these videos (they've been repeatedly brought up in other similar discussions), and I just am not convinced. It doesn't match my reality across several cities and states, where "stroads" seem totally fine and functional.
> 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
*Cities build streets primarily around cars*
You: Look! Cars are more convenient!!
This isn't some iron law of the universe, that cars are faster even for basic errands happens because we choose to make it that way. When I was living on the outskirts of Munich, many short trips to grocery stores and the like would take a similar amount of time for biking and driving, because they design their streets and roads for cars AND bikes AND walking, not mainly just cars like in the US.
I keep hearing this line about how cars are faster because cities 'choose' to make it that way. This isn't a convincing argument to me. Cars are fundamentally a faster mode of transportation. Just like walking cannot realize a maximum speed similar to bicycles, neither walking nor biking can realize a maximum speed similar to cars (at least safely). Driving is faster, first and foremost, because cars are faster and not because cities are making other modes slower. The faster travel times that cars unlock is a massive boost to quality of life that many, many people enjoy and take advantage of. That inherent value is why people are willing to pay taxes to fund roads for cars, and why cities have developed road infrastructure. It's not some kind of conspiracy theory to bring down bikes - the reality is that bikes are simply slower and there isn't some deeper level of insight beyond that.
High speed trains and planes both have a higher top speed than cars. Does that mean trains and planes are by default a faster way to get around for all trips?
No, of course not. How infrastructure is built around them matters just as much. Obviously there are trips in which they are indeed faster than cars, but plenty too where they’re impractical, or slower.
Cars have a higher top speed than bikes, sure, but they also demand far more space. Given equal space between cars and bikes, bikes will often end up fastest for trips under a mile or two — simply because drivers are more likely to get stuck in traffic. Especially since it’s easy to have walk bike cut-throughs.
Which, I know, you’ll object to as unfair, but it’s unfair in the sense that walking and biking being banned on the freeway is unfair: it’s actually just what’s suited to the transportation mode. A walk/bike cut through is a cheap, easy thing to slot in, much more so than the car equivalent.
Car speed relies on being given far more total space and money than other modes. Remove those advantages, and car utility would sink, while the utility of walking and biking would rise dramatically. Especially if zoning was loosened to allow — not force the way things are forced to the car’s advantage now, but simply allowed — higher density and mixed use areas.
Or consider an indoor mall vs a strip mall. One uses cars more heavily, one uses walking. Which one is more efficient to visit and browse stores?
The thing about car dominant spaces is that they force things to spread out, which reduces efficiency. That efficiency reduction is then ‘solved’ with the same thing that caused it: with cars. Which works out okay for cars, but everything else works horribly in that context, which is why US cities usually have extreme car dominance, with other options being hilariously ineffective. And some people cheer on this lack of choices, even as their waistlines expand and government budgets explode.
> The thing about car dominant spaces is that they force things to spread out, which reduces efficiency.
In an already built city (or neighborhood), removing space for cars isn't going to snuggle the existing buildings together. It will rarely permit another building to be built between existing buildings where that's not possible today.
Now we have a set of existing conditions. Including a set of conditioned people, many of whom have arranged their life in light of those conditions.
I think where a lot of proponents of density go wrong is they ignore telling the story of how the transition will work (meaning “not suck”). It’s the urban planning equivalent of skipping step two and just writing down “3. Profit”
“It could all be better once we’ve completed these massive changes.” I agree that’s possible, but while a lot of people have existing conditions that they understand and are basically comfortable with (or even comforted by), I think proponents still have some convincing to do that “their way will be better” and a whole lot of convincing on “and here’s what that would look like in 2023, 2028, 2033, and 2038”.
“First we take away the parking and make these particular roads slower.” “Ok, then what?” “Then it’s ‘better’.”
Sure, it’s hard to get from A to B. But you can have plenty of incremental improvement along the way.
> “First we take away the parking and make these particular roads slower.” “Ok, then what?” “Then it’s ‘better’.”
Vancouver added a ton of protected bike lanes over a handful of years and doubled their bike mode share. It obviously made a big difference in how nice it was to bike there.
You generally don’t remove parking for nothing, you replace it with something else, like a bike or bus lane. Ideally, you have a coordinated plan, so that you don’t end up with one-off infra improvements that have little impact on the network as a whole.
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'.
I like stroads, there is a place for them. I like streets, and I like roads and highways too, I drive everywhere because my workplace is 10 miles from my house.
While a walkable neighborhood sounds great, I still gotta drive to work - and even with hub and spoke transit, it's a 15 min car ride or and hour and a half by transit. (I'm lucky, a transit line down a freeway could leave me as little as 45 min from the office)
We keep talking about these neighborhoods without considering that. They're for other people to live in.
I'd live closer to work, but then I'd spend an extra N dollars a month, and no residential neighborhood will have an office for 300 in it, and I'll still want a car.
I think we need dense place for those who like living there, and suburban ones for those who don't - plus stuff in between. I'm in the "those who don't" category. I hope to own a single family home on a quiet street someday.
> I think we need dense place for those who like living there, and suburban ones for those who don't - plus stuff in between.
We agree. And this is a key point made by Not Just Bikes / StrongTowns - when you have exclusively Stroad infrastructure and Single Family Homes, even those who prefer to drive and live in those homes are worse off.
You need single family homes. You need bike lanes. You need multi-family homes. You need mid-rises. You need mixed-development. You need transit. We need all kinds.
Nothing is stopping anyone from building denser infrastructure, I'm in favor of lifting the often absurd parking requirements seen. But I don't wanna see a world where density is required, because I don't want to live in a dense area.
>Nothing is stopping anyone from building denser infrastructure, I'm in favor of lifting the often absurd parking requirements seen.
That's the thing though - single-family zoning, parking minimums and highway-like standards for streets are very much stopping density from being built. What little density is attempted to be built gets killed by NIMBYism.
Japan's zoning system does a decent job of mediating between the two. Here's[0] a good summary of their system. For your case, category 1 would fit perfectly. When category 1 is 20% of the land, that's fine. When it's 80%, like it is in most of the USA and Canada, that's why we're seeing backlash from the likes of StrongTowns/NJB.
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.
A big, climate controlled, pedestrian-only space packed full of different kinds of shops isn't pedestrian-friendly? Give me a break. On the subjective side I think a lot of them look pretty nice.
I think they are talking about the outdoor style malls you with huge parking lots that most people will drive from one store to the other, rather than walking.
Australia has both, we have the multi level island malls surrounded by mega roads, and then inner CBD retails streets which are surrounded by high density residential and office space which are actually great for pedestrian access as you can easily get from your current location to the area.
There are (or were) malls in central business districts, say in downtown San Francisco or Chicago. These often have flagship stores, and frequently serve business travellers and tourists (in-country and international).
There are definitely more outlying malls away from downtowns.
Both have been suffering badly for years, and more so during the COVID pandemic.
Seattle used to have a decent downtown mall area but I think a combination of high rents, low traffic, general lawlessness and Covid has kind of destroyed that.
Where I was really impressed in Europe is when malls or store complexes were on major subway hubs and stations. People could do their shopping on the way home without ever having to drive.
You'll find the shopping / transit mix in San Francisco (Westfield San Francisco Centre and neighbouring shopping via Muni Metro), New York (5th avenue generally via the subway), and Chicago (Miracle Mile via the El). Few other US cities can claim downtowns with high rates of transit service, though a few exist and even those with poor transit tend to have the best options near city-centres, along with shopping.
Inner-city malls are awesome for this— think the Toronto Eaton Centre which literally has a subway station at each end of it!
But yeah suburban malls which are surrounded by an ocean of parking? Terrible.
And not a lot of downtown malls / department stores have made it through the past three decades. High cost of space and low value add vs online shopping are a tough combination to be up against.
I guess, this is some of a hen and egg problem, as the argument is mostly about density and the economics thereof. (As the cost of extensive, car-centric infrastructure rises, the income generated per area drops and the reinvestment necessary to maintain this infrastructure approaches the median income of the inhabitants.)
Once, you are going the way of extensive infrastructure, malls may be actually some of a remedy to the problem, since they concentrate the necessary infrastructure, instead of each business occupying and maintaining a vast parking lot of their own, including all the infrastructure for access by car. (On a side note, malls were once inspired by some structural aspects of Vienna, where businesses of a kind tended to aggregate in certain areas – also an argument to density.) On the other hand, as you are aggregating your businesses in a major attractor, you're also depriving your townscape of landmarks and any reasons for the population to go and aggregate there, leading to an inevitable depletion (in terms of semantics, economics, and structural density) of centers and to even more suburban structure. Also, malls are mostly single-use areas, where you put all your business aspects of your town in a dedicated, single basket, by this decoupling and separating major aspects of life in a spacial expression. Worse may be what seems to come after malls: big businesses only, each sitting in a vast space of their own, lined up along stroads, single-use areas hundreds of feet apart, generating even less income per area, while requiring even more infrastructure to connect.
Stroads are everywhere though and make up so much of America's car infrastructure? Even if malls are a blight, their impact is much much smaller than the stroad. They're not a piece of civic infrastructure that fundamentally shapes the layout of, and interaction with, society.
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.
You're talking about a road. Stroads are not good for cars. Because stroads have crosswalks, and people's driveways opening directly onto them, and many other things, traffic flow and "attentional efficiency" are both far worse than what you'd get from a real separated road with onramps/offramps.
Roads are great. Streets are great. Good city planning involves plenty of both. Just like your body needs both arteries and capillaries. Stroads don't solve either problem as well as just having both does, and they introduce tons of problems besides.
I imagine you'd change your tune if you had to choose between driving on roads vs. stroads professionally, as a truck driver, cab driver, etc.
Roads — separated thoroughfares exclusively for cars, engineered to remove anything that would require stopping — minimize travel time, gas costs, and accidents. Stroads do none of those things.
There's a reason that every Uber driver who has the opportunity will take you onto the nearest real road (e.g. a highway) as soon as they can, and stay on it for as much of the trip as they can: given the same destination, driving on a road is both less work for them, while also having a higher profit margin!
Roads are for professional drivers. Streets are for people. Stroads are, perhaps, optimized for Sunday drivers. But why should anyone optimize anything for Sunday drivers?
Truckers can't be big fans of narrower streets either. It seems to me more like a stroad just takes a street and makes it more convenient to through traffic with a bit of compromise to ease of crossing but not even particularly much detriment to walking on a single side.
The crosswalks are further apart - it takes minutes to reach them. (Crossing without a crosswalk is only an option for able-bodied fearless people.) Once you get there, the light cycles are slower. Many intersections do not even give a walk signal unless you arrive in time to press the "beg button" before the green light starts. If you're a second late, you must wait another whole cycle.
When you finally cross, you must vigilantly keep watch in as many as 3 directions for drivers making turns. You can never let your guard down - the drivers are not paying attention to people on foot. You must be ready to jump out of the way at any moment.
Crossing these streets is a hellish experience. It is obvious that you are not supposed to be there. Your presence is considered a nuisance.
Yes, and this is a bad thing. The point of streets is to disincentivize through traffic, so that people can actually enjoy being outside in their neighbourhoods without worrying about getting hit by a motorist.
Well-designed cities don't rely on 18-wheelers being able to pass through their suburbs. In fact, they design to prevent that. Instead, an arterial road network allows overland shipping traffic to arrive and terminate at industrial hubs and big-box stores within cities; whereupon cargo is then transshipped onto "street-sized" delivery vehicles for last-mile delivery to homes and retail shops.
Logistics architectures designed before the advent of stroads still work this way, even in stroaded cities. For example, USPS: big trucks between hubs; little slow-moving trucks for the last mile.
> a bit of compromise to ease of crossing
Perhaps "a bit" if you're imagining the goal of a pedestrian is to commute. It's not too bad to cross a stroad once a day to get to and from a train station, sure.
But many of the worst stroads, exist in place of streets in what could and should be outdoor shopping malls, transforming them instead into strip malls. "A bunch of businesses on either side of a busy road" does not invite browsing. If the goal of the businesses in that area was to congregate together to achieve the sort of back-and-forth "let's go to X while we're here" foot traffic that a popular mall receives, then the "elevation" of a street into a stroad basically ruins the whole premise.
And, of course, there's the stroads in residential areas, where in cities where these were laid out as streets, children would literally be allowed to play in the street — not crossing, but using the street itself as a place to be present in — because traffic was going at a reasonable speed to react in time to stop if they saw children playing. Today, that safe speed is reserved for "school zones." Why should the area around a school be safer for children to be present in than the area immediately outside your home?
> not even particularly much detriment to walking on a single side.
...if you trust drivers. Stroads put sidewalks in the middle of what, on a road, would be the ditch area for cars to roll to a stop on when they're out of control. On a stroad, the cars aren't going much slower (for a few minutes, between stoplights), so cars still need that ditch area. But on a stroad, that ditch area has people walking in it. Bad idea, no?
...and if there aren't features like overpasses as part of the stroad, where all pretense of pedestrian access — especially accessible pedestrian access — is usually forgotten.
...and if it's doesn't snow where you live. Stroad sidewalks are rarely de-iced the way the stroads themselves are. In fact they're often iced — snowblowers taking ice and snow and blowing it off the stroad and onto its vestigial sidewalks.
(And don't get me started on non-separated stroad "bike lanes." Often sharing the same space as parking cars, cars turning into cross-streets, or worst, the suddenly open doors of parked cars.)
When was the last time you saw a delivery to any restaurant or grocery store? They're almost all from 18 wheelers. Furniture store? 18 wheeler. Appliance, electronics...all still 18 wheelers.
> cargo is then transshipped onto "street-sized" delivery vehicles for last-mile delivery to homes and retail shops.
No, it's really not. Not in large US cities, at least.
I think the main problem is that stroads do not handle surge traffic well at all. They tend to end up sending blocks of cars 100-400 yards forward at a time, in intervals of 30 seconds to 2 minutes. With extra deadlocks happening when left turn lanes fill / jackasses block lanes when trying to sneak through lights. Highways at least can take measures to mitigate surges with feeder lanes, surge pricing, carpool lanes, etc.
> Roads are great. Streets are great. Good city planning involves plenty of both. Just like your body needs both arteries and capillaries. Stroads don't solve either problem as well as just having both does, and they introduce tons of problems besides.
But it's not like the human body just has the aorta and a bunch of capillaries. It has arteries of every size in between too.
> That or just let car people (majority) have these areas that are good for cars and
The idea is that a well planned city/suburb will turn car people into people that also enjoy safely not using a car some of the time.
> let the anti car people have their crowded little streets with no parking elsewhere.
Bleh. Such an us vs them mentality. I'm suspicious of cars because I have literally gotten hit by them while cycling (edit: multiple times, thank you very much). I'm not "anti car."
Try getting hit by 2 tons of metal and see how that makes you feel about safe infrastructure.
Doesn't the "us vs. them" mentality come from the fact that most of Strong Towns' ideas will make life worse for everyone who needs to drive, without giving most of them an alternative to driving?
> Strong Towns' ideas will make life worse for anyone who drives into the city, with basically no advantages for them, and without creating a viable alternative to driving for most of them?
TLDW: A city that is less reliant on cars actually reduces congestion and makes it more pleasant to drive in a city.
Fewer cars on the road means less competition.
Bike lanes have more capacity to move people.
Well designed intersections and bike lanes mean that you aren't competing against cyclists and pedestrians for road space you're coexisting along just fine.
The whole point is to provide better alternatives to driving such that most people don't need to drive. Having better alternatives to driving also makes driving better as you get less congestion, licensing standards can be raised, there's more money for road maintenance, well designed roads are simply better to drive on, etc.
Urbanists are extremely critical of the type of zoning that plonks suburbs in the middle of nowhere away from cities too. "R1 Zone" is practically a swear word.
Mixed-use zoning is much more effective. We do this in Europe, it's pretty nice being able to cycle to work and walk to the shops (not that I cycle to work personally, but almost all my jobs have been within cycling range).
But those suburbs already exist. What should we do for all of the people who already live in them? (And keep in mind that there's usually a good reason that people chose to not just live in an inner city in the first place.)
Strong Town's argument is that some of these suburbs will be successful in encouraging mixed-use development and in doing so will expand their tax bases. But most of the others will fail and decline.
ST are quite explicit that they mostly don't think that retrofitting suburbs should be a focus, because they believe that most of these will go bankrupt anyway, given a sufficient amount of time (because of too much infrastructure liability compared to the tax base), and indeed this is starting to happen all across the US.
Hence their focus on areas with a solid core already, that should then be strengthened and encouraged to expand organically from there.
But that's just it. If someone likes suburban living, and your family home is in a suburb, how do you think they'd feel about something like "suburbs are probably all going to fail anyway, so let's do a bunch of things that will definitely and quickly make them fail, and then await the glorious day when your house gets torn down and replaced by apartments, and your neighborhood becomes a replica of the inner city"?
Even if they're not directly changing the suburbs with this proposal, the changes they want made to the city will make life worse for people who go there from the suburbs.
Sure, I'll acknowledge that that could fix this problem. My complaint then becomes that they want to make everywhere hostile to drivers before commuter light rail gets built, when there's a chance that it never will.
I mean, if you're in a growing city and you do nothing, things will eventually get shitty for suburban commuters. At that point, you might have a choice between expanding the road system or building the rail.
Bus systems can work well to move commuters to rail-based mass-transit that bring them into the city. If the suburbs sprawl too far out, you can also plop down park-and-rides at the terminal stations of the mass transit system.
Why do you specifically need to drive and park at the exact location you're going to, especially when the land cost of the storage place of your empty car is prohibitively expensive (as they tend to be in urban CBDs)?
I have no need to park my car at any particular place. I do have a need to have the commuting experience be safe, reasonably convenient/predictable, and time-efficient.
I live in Cambridge on the Boston subway system. It’s probably (barely) in the top 5 in the US and it sucks compared to European cities I’ve visited or lived in.
Most of strong towns's ideas come down to making it legal to build with anything except stroads. Give people options instead of forcing it on everyone except the most wealthy who can afford a house in the pre-car cities.
Car culture apology bullshit. Why aren't there safe places for bikes and peds on those roads too? Why should cars have all the space to the point where it is practically suicidal to be outside a car?
They’re called sidewalks (for pedestrians). Bike paths are also a thing.
We’ve built our society around cars, and it’s enabled a much higher quality of life. Mass transit sucks. I’ve been to pretty much every tier-I city on the planet and the ones that really pushed transit (Hong Kong comes to mind) were by far the worst.
In the US roads and interstates were built for cars. We love being able to leave when we want, not worry about the weather, and have large homes far (in miles, not time… thanks again cars) from city centers.
Bikes do not belong on high speed automotive networks, it slows everyone else down and is extremely dangerous for the cyclist.
> Mass transit sucks. I’ve been to pretty much every tier-I city on the planet and the ones that really pushed transit (Hong Kong comes to mind) were by far the worst.
Strange. I've also been to some "tier-I" cities myself and liked the ones that really pushed transit the most (Tokyo comes to mind).
Except streets and roads are designed to solve different problems:
> Streets: The function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth. On a street, we're attempting to grow the complex ecosystem that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobiles) are the indicator species of success. Successful streets are environments where humans, and human interaction, flourish.
> Roads: In contrast, the function of a road is to connect productive places. You can think of a road as a refinement of the railroad — a road on rails — where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two.
> Stroads: Stroads are a mash-up of these two types of paths. We like to call them "the futon of transportation" because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street.
A high-speed, high-volume thoroughfare with minimal obstructions to flow will have its per-hour capacity decimated by having to stop every couple of hundred meters by traffic lights and crosswalks. On the pedestrian side, who wants to cross an area where cars travel 60 kph (or higher): what happens if they don't stop?
This video from the Not Just Bikes channel shows the stark difference between a street and a road (using examples in the Netherlands) and stroads:
If you make a place easier to get to primarily by car, then you need lots of parking—which makes walking a chore because of colossal amount of space needed for spaces. Do a satellite view of the mall closest mall to you: how much square footage is for retail and how much is for parking. Sometimes parking lots are 3x (or more) of the area of the actual store(s).
If you make a place easier to get to primarily by foot (or pedalling), then there's a lot fewer parking spaces—because why 'waste' the space on that form of transportation. (Outside of delivery trucks/vans.)
I've seen the video, it just didn't resonate much. I drive those areas often enough without issue. I've walked through them too. They feel like an acceptable compromise for the most part but they could do with protected bike lanes and flashing crossings like I mentioned.
You're telling me that a stroad where, along a 1km/1mi stretch of mostly strip malls, of which >70% of the surface is parking spaces, is comparable to a street such as:
That cycling and walking on a highway-like path is comparable, at all, to a pre-WW2 street?
Have you ever tried living life without a car—without even being driven by someone like you parents when you were younger—in an area where stroads are the basic building block of transportation?
This is such a limited perspective. I've been in 200+ different towns over the past few years in the US with my RV. Using either our car (if we brought it with), walking, bikes, or scooters. It's amazing how horrible some rural places are for pedestrian or bike/scooter traffic. No way to get from where we are staying without hitting roads with no pedestrian paths at all and 40+mph (~64+kph) speed limits. When in the RV for months long trips, we don't have the car with us most of the time, so I've come to hate these designs that make no overtures to people not wanting to drive absolutely everywhere. They are just flat out hostile.
When we do find an area that has well designed ways to navigate, it's just more enjoyable and I want to go out and see what the area has to offer.
putting in crosswalks on a road like that will slow down drivers and get people killed, it is an inherently unsafe place to be.
the other reason that this is bad is this section of development is unprofitable for the city. The amount of resources it uses (road maintenance, electricity, sewage, emergency services) is far greater than the amount of taxes it brings in. This is why its mentioned at the end of the article that a place like this will inherently wither away and die.
stroads are miserable to walk through… usually large distances across large parking lots, too windy in the cold, too hot in the sun, bleak and depressing to look at, have many cars traveling at higher speeds, noise, air pollution… they’re not just ill-equipped, but unpleasant to people in the nature of how they’re shaped
In my city, stroads were created, presumably by agglomerative ad-hoc decision making as the population exploded for several decades straight. Now, in the majority of places, there is no width left in the right-of-way to add good sidewalks or bike paths. I don't know if the situation is similar elsewhere, but here it's clear to me that the concept of the stroad is useful, and that it's something to be avoided as much as possible in the future.
Stroads are a word that strongtowns seems to have recently successfully popularized, so it is hard to find actual measurements about "stroads." However, I was able to find a little research indicating that narrower streets are correlated to fewer/less damaging traffic accidents. There's a conference paper "Narrower Lanes, Safer Streets," or have a look at these blogs that talk about it:
Honestly I'm a bit surprised how little this has been measured. I mean obviously setting up experiments would be difficult, but you'd think more natural experiments would occur as different places try to fit weird geometries...
In my ideal city the majority of people would consider themselves pedestrians, cyclists, and (optionally) drivers, depending on the needs and conditions of the given day.
I grew up in Northern Ontario, where the cities are basically long stroads. Inside of a car, they can be stressful to drive in, as they combine high-speed travel with frequent and awkward turns.
God forbid you want to walk or bike next to one of them. The noise is extreme, and the infrastructure surrounding them is horrid. Whether in a car, on a bike, or on foot, they are ugly and soul-crushing. The patio bar next to a stroad isn't going to be people's first choice.
I haven't been to the Netherlands myself, but it appears that after moving away from stroads and "car-centric" infrastructure, the driving is actually much faster and more pleasant [1]. It gives me hope at least!
it's not people are anti-car as much as they are pro-human. the majority of people (in the states) would not be car people if they had alternatives. stroads are hostile to anyone not in a car. making pedestrians hit a beg button to cross street is just reinforcing that they are trespassing on land that is not for them.
I once ran across the observation that the amount 'jay walking' that occurs on a street is an indication of how much that street is pedestrian-friendly. More criss-crossing means people feel safer just moseying over to the other side.
no one is claiming education is needed, as much as changing the urban fabric to what it is in most of the developed world. nor one is saying suburbs should stop existing. some people want to live on a farm in the countryside, fine.
having a big apartment and living in a walkable area are not mutually exclusive things.
bike infra should indeed be separated from cars and pedestrians.
Though I suspect you're being tongue-in-cheek, I don't think this sort of question is conducive to productive discussion or debate. It follows the pattern: "I think your idea X will result in negative consequence Y. So now I accuse you of wanting Y". Once you know about it, you'll see it everywhere, and also notice how it tends to shut down any chance of finding common ground or changing someone's mind.
A more charitable way is something like: "I think X will result in Y, which I doubt is something any of us want. Have you considered that potential consequence?"
The idea that Earth being accessible to everyone at infinitely faster speeds is not a dark age. That is a golden age. It's sad that you've confused the two, but it's modern propaganda at work. The environment is damaged by humans. Not cars. If we banned cars, people would still ruin the environment, just in different ways. But that's cutting the nose off to spite the face.
The truth is, cars are, for the most part, amazing pieces of technology that allows nearly every person freedom of movement. You aren't going to change that without creating something better.
It seems like electric, self-driving cars are a possible dream, albeit even close to a pipe dream. Cars none-the-less though.
The reason StreetRoadTopia is a dark age is not because there are streets and roads per se, it's that the Pedestrians, in their hubris, smugly abolished Stroadlandia. Whether we get there by streets, roads or stroads, the real golden age is the friends we made along the way.
Car only allows you freedom of movement because the infrastructure are developed for cars. You would be singing a different tune of freedom if it were trains and bikes instead.
Stroadlandia is like meth or heroin? I didn't realize I was experimenting with something tantamount to drugs. I suppose it was a good trip, but one has to keep on dunetreading.
Stroadlandia is a noble, and beautiful place. Her cars are majestic creatures, worthy of human service. Her department stores and parking lots overflow with the abundance of a multifaceted thoroughfare that defies the reason of mortal man.
I will never forget what I learned from my time living with the Stroadlandians as a pedestrian. I shall wear your downvotes as badges to their honour. Long live Stroadlandia and her humble denizens.
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.
Mind that Strong Towns isn't about picturesque communities, but about sustainable economics in the face of rising costs of extensive infrastructure and low income generated per area.
I'm so confused by the idea that Tokyo is somehow bike-centric. Perhaps there's another Tokyo somewhere in Japan that is not a subway-and-taxi centric metropolitan area where bikes are rarely seen.
It's a pedestrian-friendly city, though, I'll give you that.
Keep in mind that "Tokyo" isn't just the super dense, most central area of the metro. Tokyo technically covers a huge swathe of land, including towns that are basically suburbs. And while Japanese cities don't usually include much bike-specific infrastructure, in practice many of the narrow roads are pretty bike friendly anyway, just due to their very narrowness.
I have spent a ton of time in Tokyo. I am fascinated by this. I actually suspect they are including the delivery bikes, which are not really the same thing, and the cited study, which I will try and track down, has poor data hygiene.
It's not that small towns are strung out along roads. Rather, the town itself becomes a nexus for walk/bike-ability. Instead of every trip to the grocery store, movie theater, and gym being taken by car, the vast majority of trips are taken by walking or biking. This isn't to say there aren't cars in town: on the contrary, roads exist, ideally going around heavily trafficked areas. This lets the roads focus on being roads (getting people from place to place) and the streets focus on being streets (allowing people to walk, bike, and "experience the world", in the parlance of "Not Just Bikes".
Of course, the next town over (let's say it's 20 miles away) will be "down the road", with a both a road and a train connecting them.
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.