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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

I'd say it's because the North America, car-dominated, strip-mall-and-stroad landscape is depressing as hell. Open a map and drop yourself somewhere in Europe. I just did, and I feel like identifying crosswalks in a photo like this wouldn't be depressing at all:

https://i.imgur.com/31AgNvs.png

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I didn't understand "stroad" so I looked it up:

> "Stroad" is a word we coined in 2013 to explain those dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town, and suburb in America. They're what happens when a street (a place where people interact with businesses and residences, and where wealth is produced) gets combined with a road (a high-speed route between productive places). -- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-...

That's pretty confusing, since in NZ the words "street" and "road" have identical meaning and are totally interchangeable. Is this distinction real in the US, or another thing Strong Towns have invented?

The different words for pavement became separate categories as the culture started to demand an easier way to add context to what you’re saying. English is very efficient in that context is often assumed or hidden in the different meanings of the words.

Americans also tend to use the words fairly interchangeably, but there is still at least some instinctive distinction. People often say "kids are playing in the street", but they almost never say "kids are playing in the road".

That's not a distinction I've ever encountered (from Indiana, US). I'd have said they were interchangeable, but if you told me there was a difference, and asked me what it was, my best guess would have been that a street is urban and a road is rural, just based on experience with whether something tends to be named "XXX St" or "XXX Rd". Wiktionary tells me that a street is within a single city/town, while a road runs between cities/towns, which I guess seems about right to me?

Okay, "street" being urban is a thing in NZ. The thing you drive on to get from one city to another is never a street. Within a city though, "road" and "street" seem the same.

Funnily enough my partner (native German speaker - there's only one word for this in German) recently mentioned "the street" and I corrected her saying "no this is not a street it's a road". When trying to explain the difference my first instinct was "a street has buildings on the side, a road is just transportation".

In my European world I think there's pretty much always an unambiguous difference between a street and a road, but "stroad" definitely evokes the places I've seen in sparser urban environments like in USA, South Africa and Australia.

Edit: after more pondering I think you can call the part of a street "the road" to distinguish the part where vehicles drive from the part where humans walk. E.g. "he ran out into the road" might apply where "it's a busy road" would sound wrong.

It's a real distinction, but would perhaps be described by a dictionary as antiquated for reasons that could reasonably be considered nefarious.

A relevant Strongtowns quip is a quote of the MUTCD entry for street: "see highway."

I just find it very amusing that simple pictures of outside in the US are being described as "unbearably depressing". A pretty good signal that modern urban design in the US is creating very ugly and depressing spaces.

Couldn't agree more. There are car dominated places where I live that give a similar 'American' feeling, but it's not a given.

I wouldn't call the images depressing, but certainly soul crushing.

Many places like that exist in the United States, they just don't show up in captchas because they're much more likely to include identifiable humans.

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