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.
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.