Stroads and Strails

Livable streets, which are a joy to walk down, are essential. And the author of this piece is correct that you can't just use a top-down plan to segregate roads and streets.

It seems to me that the key is to find ways to make automobiles less mandatory in general. So instead of needing two or three lanes for automobiles in each direction, you only need one. And, ideally, a reduction in the need for curbside parking.

This can be accomplished through tax policies, zoning, and ordinances that promote walkability and transit-oriented development. Shift taxes off buildings and onto land value. Allow mixed-use development. End mandatory minimum parking requirements. Implement congestion pricing and smart parking meters. Use pigouvian penalties for pollution, in proportion to the harm caused.

All of those could be implemented without requiring top-down planning or accumulating more municipal debts.

I'm all for spending money on parks, libraries, bike trails, and public transit, but you can't just drop those into a community where all the economic incentives incline us towards the McLifestyle with big box stores, strip malls, and drive-thru.

I read Jane Jacobs in grad school (surprisingly relevant even after five decades), and I think she would question whether all of that traffic needs to exist in the first place. The article mentions "micromanaged" zoning in North America, one element of which seems to be that no residential window should ever face a commercial enterprise. Allowing small shops and restaurants to exist within residential areas (as they do in Europe and elsewhere) would eliminate some amount of the car traffic we current accept as normal. When every destination requires a car, every street becomes a stroad.

The same approach would be useful for dealing with the ubiquitous electric scooters. The real danger of them lies not within the technology (or their use) itself, but in infrastructure that was designed to support cars instead.

I wonder if the author has ever tried to walk across a stroad. It is a horrible experience: 5 lanes of traffic with no crosswalks or traffic lights. Left turns over 4 lanes are similarly irksome. There is no need for this apologism for stroads: certainly the author is not arguing we build more of them. He says something has to give: let it be the cars.

> Bicyclists prefer riding on major streets as well, which is why Copenhagen prioritizes bike infrastructure on major streets rather than on side streets – on side streets car traffic is so light and slow that mixed traffic is not so bad, but the desirable through-routes remain the major streets.

I've never really understood the appeal of major roads for bicyclsts. I much prefer sidestreets when bicycling and don't mind cutting over a block to have to deal with less traffic. I think this demand along with a general blowback against cars due to American culture treating non-vehicle traffic as second class leads to bad outcomes.

In my town, a six-lane arterial connects neighborhoods with a major N-S arterial, downtown, and past downtown is a US highway. The town has taken that six lane road and turned it into a two lane road with center turn lane, bicycle lanes, and parking. What should be a 40+ mph speed limit is now a 25 mph speed limit.

This has bad outcomes for drivers and bicyclists.

Effectively, from the perspective of a driver, this road is now equivalent to any of a dozen parallel roads: single lane in each direction and 25 mph. This disincentivizes drivers from cutting over to the arterial, effectively spreading out the traffic onto parallel roads (many of which lack traffic lights when they hit the major N-S artery). However, it remains the busiest road for vehicle traffic, and because it is so wide, speed significantly faster than 25 mph feel safe, so speed variance can be higher, with traffic typically traveling between 20-40 mph. It's particularly sketchy for traffic turning on from side streets. Drivers expect traffic to be going the posted 25 mph, but are sometimes surprised by the person going 40 mph. So, drivers generally get where they are going more slowly, but at increased danger due to increase in speed variance.

But it also increases danger for bicyclists in two ways. First, it encourages the bicyclists to use the still relatively busy arterial. It's not clear why anyone would want to incentivize this. For a bicyclist, any of the parallel streets were already attractive options and would get the bicyclist where he was going. Second, because of the changed incentives, those parallel roads are now busier than before (making the bicycle lane on the busier road more attractive). Whatever a bicyclist decides, there is an increase in vehicle/bicycle interactions.

A much better solution would have been to keep the arterial an arterial and make dedicated bicycle lanes on some of the parallel roads. This would encourage a separation of vehicle and bycicle traffic that wouldn't really inconvenience either one of them.

This just made me think of shopping centres (malls), you have a pedestrianised area surrounded by roads (and car parking).

I'm not suggesting that they're the solution, but a symptom, and evidence of demand for shopping without having to dodge cars.

An avenue is not a stroad; while it can have multiple lanes and less of an expectation of mixed use of the asphalt than a residential street, it's not designed for high speeds, and will often contain many speed-inhibition mechanisms (crossroads, traffic lights, curves, etc).

A good approach is to split the lanes - instead of 3+3 as in a high-speed road, they have 2+2 in the middle for thru-traffic, sandwiched by strip of sidewalk, plus another lane on each side for local traffic, and finally another sidewalk next to the buildings.

Interesting piece. I'd quibble with one point though:

> The same situation occurs on railroads: all uses want the same piece of infrastructure, leading to the usual problems of mixing trains of different speed classes on the same tracks. Freight bypasses are possible, but passenger bypasses are rare

France has built thousands of miles of what are effectively passenger bypasses: their LGVs (Lignes a Grand Vitesse).

The fundamental failing is that the ownership of 'stroads' (including those in city centres) is typically with a government entity that is charged almost solely with vehicular traffic concerns.

The design solutions are there and obvious for prioritising pedestrians, cyclists, etc. But its impossible to enact these when road authorities are separate to planning authorities. The overarching solution is a structural change in governing these spaces.

I think ideally you would have at least three separate but interconnected ground transport networks: one for pedestrians, one for bikes, and one for motor vehicles.

I think this piece takes too long to arrive at a underwhelming point, seemingly that prime transportation and activity corridors all want to co-locate because of interrelated and natural, rational reasons. This finding isn't obvious but is easily revealed, and though it's worth talking about, there's deeper insights if we continue the examination further.

Early road bypasses failed precisely because of the lack of development restrictions: they increased traffic and cheap land value drew businesses seeking to capitalize on it, so now the bypasses of yesteryear are of the urban fabric. The classic way to armor against this is to make the roadway limited access, and then you have development concentrating only at intersection nodes. Or the jurisdictions at play can always place additional restrictions on development.

But underneath all the SimCity we can play with roads and zoning, the transportation geography will always remain constrained to edges and nodes, corridors and chokepoints. It's these chokepoints that truly define the way people will get around, because getting to a point beyond them will require crossing it, and there's only ever a handful of time-effective paths to take between you and it. Bridges and mountain passes are the obvious chokepoints, but in a car-oriented world so are motorway interchanges and meetings of big arterials. Much criticism is levelled at US suburban development where single-family homes are plopped onto winding streets that only discharge to big avenues at subdivision entrances, so everyone has to take the big roads to get anywhere, but most European cities aren't that different: the lesser streets aren't passable at a pace that motorists have come to expect, and rarely does an uninterrupted network of them exist to get into a different part of the city using only small streets. Although the planning forces, commercial forces, and histories are different, they both arrive at the same result, of cars being channeled to a small number of higher-capacity paths, instead of distributed more evenly throughout.

There's cities that have leveraged the grid to great effect to arrive at a less crushing result. Las Vegas is a good example: attractions are located along a narrow corridor with heavy traffic that locals have learned to avoid. The rest of the urban area forms a large grid with dozens of avenues at regular intervals, and amenities and retail are sprinkled among housing. You have many options of traversing the urban area from one side to another.

There's other urbanized areas that have the same basic form, but they're imbalanced by a nearby node that draws traffic and upsets the network. Plano, TX looks really similar, but is a surburb to much larger Dallas. Other times, there's far too little commercial in a sea of residential, like much of South Florida or Inland Empire or Oklahoma City, or the desired directions of travel don't match the grid, like in Orange County, CA. Sometimes the grid is limited by natural obstructions that create chokepoints, significantly impairing the utility of the grid, like in Seattle, Minneapolis, or the connections of Manhattan to elsewhere.

One of the goals of railroads, motorways, subways, etc. is to "warp" and cheat the natural network and create connections among nodes that previously didn't exist, or weren't even nodes. This requires clever and thoughtful design that goes beyond simply putting transit along every avenue, or putting in more lanes.