The Stroad
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
> Americans do not understand the difference between a road and a street.
[...]
> The value of a road is in the speed and efficiency that it provides for movement between places. Anything that is done that reduces the speed and efficiency of a road devalues that road. If we want to maximize the value of a road, we eliminate anything that reduces the speed and efficiency of travel.
> The value of a street comes from its ability to support land use patterns that create capturable value. The street with the highest value is the one that creates the greatest amount of tax revenue with the least amount of public expense over multiple life cycles. If we want to maximize the value of a street, we design it in such a way that it supports an adjacent development pattern that is financially resilient, architecturally timeless and socially enduring.
[...]
> In the United States, we’ve built a 45 mile per hour world for ourselves. It is truly the worst of all possible approaches. Our neighborhoods are filled with STROADS (a street/road hybrid) that spread investment out horizontally, making it extremely difficult to capture the amount of value necessary for the public to sustain the transportation systems that serve them.
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/11/21/a-45-mph-worl...
Edit: Although generally once you get out of the very centre there are arterial "stroads" which have 30mph limits, but side-streets are usually still 20mph.
To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic.
Now, of course car drivers should remain vigilant and continually check their mirrors, but nobody is infallible, and I'm sure there are plenty of drivers that do not take proper care.
The speed is the issue. A collision at low speeds is much less likely to be fatal [0]. Being closely overtaken by a car when you're going at 20-25mph on a bicycle is 1) a scary experience and 2) unnecessarily dangerous for the cyclist (and not at all for the driver).
[0] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/31/3-graphs-that-explain...
Remember from physics class that kinetic energy is generated proportional to the square of velocity. Doubling speed quadruples energy.
speed increases the severity of an accident (e.g., more fatalities vs. injuries), but doesn’t generally cause the accident. distractedness and impairment are overwhelmingly the primary causes of auto accidents. it’s important for policy decisions that we keep this very clear, and why we have ineffective, revenue-oriented programs like speed enforcement rather than attention-oriented policies.
Also, it was not my intention (and I honestly don't see it in my words as hard as I look) to suggest there was any kind of "tit for tat".
This is conflating two different activities: when a bicyclist or motorcyclist is moving in space between cars, they're using space which is already open and it doesn't impose a risk to the driver of the vehicle or require the cars to move. That's distinct from people trying to illegally pass, which creates new demands for space and frequently endangers other road users and often obstruct oncoming traffic.
The underlying issue here is that cars are the least efficient use of space by a significant margin. That means that drivers see other people taking advantage of space which they are unable to use and feel like they're losing in some way, which often leads to attempts to prevent it. When I lived in California, even though lane-splitting was legal I used to regularly see drivers move their vehicles to the edge of a lane or a few times even open their car door(!) to block motorcyclists. This was clearly because they perceived it as unfair that someone else wasn't jammed the same way they were, but misattributed the problem to the motorcylist rather than the drawbacks of their personal vehicle choices.
But you're on a bike, so you deserve special treatment. An award for sacrificing comfort and safety in the name of efficiency! You demand deference when drivers see you, for them to slow down and fall behind as you sit up proudly on your bicycle in defiance of modern technology. You shout to the heavens, "I don't need infrastructure! I have yours already! I'll ride wherever I want!" The thought makes you chuckle at the plebs still riding in comfort and safety in their automobiles, capable of carrying a drunken friend, an elderly parent, or a new piece of furniture. What a bunch of fools. Don't they see how efficient they could be?
I propose a different protocol: Slow down, and follow the cyclist until the situation allows to safely overtake the cyclist at a nice distance without speeding up too much. You will still travel faster than the cyclist, and you have actively contributed to the safety of the cyclist.
The other wrinkle to this is that, outside of cities, cycling in America is a luxury sport. The people who partake in it are most in the position to force changes to infrastructure that supports safer cycling. NJB and other similar commentators make it clear that infrastructure improvement, not changes to driver behavior, is the most efficacious way to imrpove cyclist safety.
Maybe we could add a few zeroes each few years? So in some decades they'll be driving ultra fast at 25000 meters per hour? ;)
Which is kind of the point of the human-scale roads movement. If you design roads that feel fast, people will drive fast.
It seems to me that in such cases the US tends to choose to expand into a stroad instead. Belgium also has quite a few stroad-like roads, but at least those tend to have usable sidewalks and fairly often even bicycle paths.
There's a picture of one here, and the main road is a single lane in both directions. Which is as far from Queens Boulevard as you can get.
The 2 lanes to be crossed makes crossing safer. Further, the side roads are differentiated to make it clear that they are primarily for biking/walking (they are a different color, and are tiled).
Also:
> Service roads are purposely constructed to be discontinuous sections of road, meaning that through traffic cannot use it to get from one main street to another. Since the only traffic on it will be cars accessing the houses or shops along the service road, traffic is substantially lower that on the main roads, and speeds are kept down due to the short segments of roadway
Queens boulevard is a highway masquerading as a road.
The first time I went to the Netherlands I walked from Schiphol airport to the center of Amsterdam and it was an easy but amazing experience. Walking from JFK to Manhattan is a completely possible walk in terms of distance (I usually do better than a 20 minute pace on the flats so it takes only half a day) but when I think of the battle with the infrastructure you'd have to do it's like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
Doylestown PA: succesfully petitioned and built TWO of these. A 611 and 202 bypass leaving historic doylestown beautiful.
The problem is, for those suburbs that never had strong town centers, there was little objection and so as you go down 611, it's a 4 lane major travel route that passes right through a bunch of other suburbs leaving them without a downtown and a place thats not comfortable to travel.
of course, Doylestown was surrounded by farmland when this was build making it much easier to do... Good luck building a bypass through other towns
Both have in common that they suck for pedestrians.
Typical example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9997356,-0.9166437,14.25z?...
More complex example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1101752,-0.1713974,7297m/d... . Note the M23 on one side, Crawley Avenue on the other, and Peglar Way right in the middle. All of them serve to route traffic around the town centre instead of through it.
In many cases you can see how the original through-road (sometimes dating back to Roman times) had the bypass patched on; without the bypass the "High Street" would have been a stroad.
(Fans of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy may recall Arthur Dent's cottage being demolished to make way for a bypass. This was an issue: the nature of bypasses meant that building them often required the demolition of nice little cottages on the outskirts of small towns.)
'Not Just Bikes' has a ton of other great videos on the channel about what infrastructure makes a good city and what makes one hostile to residents.
- It's the cars that make the cities undesirable
- I was shocked how the historical center of London, ON was demolished to the ground and replaced with shacks
- Kids should be able to walk to school alone in safety
- I live in Europe and I was baffled to learn that multi-purpose developments are disallowed in most of North America. This alone makes me reconsider my plans to move to the States. I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes
If you live in a large US city, this can still be very manageable. There are two large grocery stores and a small one as well as a Target and a metro line within a 5 minute walk of my house. Apart from the metro line, we didn't really prioritize the grocery stores, etc when looking for a house. That said, there are many downsides to living in big US cities as well.
That district has been mostly livable without a car for the past couple years after a grocery store was built there. I say “mostly” because as soon as you want to do anything outside of The dozen or so blocks of the Haymarket a car quickly becomes required again.
This is a common theme of walkable areas in the US and Canada. They do still exist but because of the development patterns of the past 30+ years they are small islands in an ocean of cars. Their scarcity also drives up prices and makes them less affordable than surrounding areas.
Also Carmel, IN for some reason.
* 1x big REWE, 3x small REWE, 1x Real, 1x Netto, 2x ALDI, 3x LIDL, 1x Turkish grocery store, 1x Asian grocery store
* Too many kiosks too count (tobacco, drinks, snacks, maybe like a convinience store)
* Too many bakeries to count
* 2 tram/metro stations, soon to be 3
* 5 bus stations (not counting the weird ones)
What they probably meant was they can hop on a bike and be in /any/ supermarket they fancy in this time.
Your city seems pretty good compared to what we're usually seeing from city planning in the US though.
And even when the supermarket/mall is close by in the US, you still can't necessarily walk/bike there. I was visiting a friend who lived in the Midwest and his house was less than a mile from the mall. I asked him how to walk over there, and he admitted he'd never tried. So I set out to try, and the only way I found was by running across a busy 4 lane street without any crossings.
California, in particular, has a population density of about 100 people per square kilometer which is about the same as France. Most of California is either uninhabitable, factory farms, or military reservations. The population is highly concentrated near the coast.
People who haven't been there imagine that Los Angeles is "sprawl" but the truth it is very high density that is "sprawling" over a large plain that is boxed in by mountains. Millions of people have a line of sight to the Hollywood sign.
(I grew up in Southern New Hampshire which is based on Buckminister Fuller's diabolical geometry of airports and subdvisions -- where getting from one subdivision to the next is like going from the right side of your left lung to the right side of your left lung all the way up to the fork in your trachea. That is a self-inflicted wound that has nothing to do with how dense the population is.)
One approach is scale-dependent (divide the area into a grid of square kilometers, sort by population, pick the square kilometer where the median person lives.) but you would get different answers if you picked different scales.
The median of "How far away is your nearest neighbor?" seems parameter free at first but it is absurd if you live in an apartment. (e.g. ignores all the space around your apartment.) I guess you could look for the median (or other decile) of "What is radius in which N people live?" where N might be 100-10,000 but then you're back to having a spectrum instead of a single number again.
Maybe you can't avoid that.
And before anyone says I should just live in places that are like that, It's not so easy to just pick up my life and move somewhere else.
Does anyone have more details on this in written form? It's annoyingly difficult to google for because it's the other London.
Various British cities have been guilty of this; Bradford had a "hole" for about a decade due to an unbuilt shopping centre. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2009/08/27/b...
That said, I drive this mess everyday and my 25 min cross town commute makes Torontonians cry. I don’t bike or bus though, so I do ultimately agree with him.
Regarding downtown. You won’t find more information on that shack thing because it’s not real. Besides a couple historic floods and fires I can’t think of what he means.
It's not just bike and transit unfriendly, it's bad for cars too. There's no easy way to get from one side to the other in less than an hour during the day, short of taking a helicopter.
Compare London to nearby Kitchener/Waterloo. They essentially have a ring road (hwy 85), PLUS a light rail + bus rapid transit system. It's still absolutely full of stroads, but at least it's more accessible and things actually move around.
In London, Oxford is essentially a 10 KM long parking lot every day at 9 AM, and Adelaide spends about two hours a day blocked by freight trains. Every attempt to fix the city frankly makes it worse. I don't know if it's because of poor planning, inept council, the lack of geographical constraints, or some other factor, but this city is the absolute show piece for failed urban design.
So yeah, I think it's completely reasonable to lean into London ON, it's the perfect case study in bad north american cities.
It's easily accessible on real estate websites (like Redfin, https://www.redfin.com/how-walk-score-works), and now I see there's a publicly available dataset as well: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/walkability-index.
Walkability that is commonplace in many towns in Europe, roughly match up with very high 90's (98+) walkability scores in the US.
IMHO, anything below mid-90's is somewhere I would never live. The score is necessarily skewed towards US style living where walkability is relatively rare. So the difference between, say 70 and 40 is almost meaningless from the point of view of a walker.
As far as street design and urban planning goes, the key word is "complete streets" which is an umbrella term that covers rationale, design principles and practical guidance for how to implement a street layout (https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/complete-stree...). This work is based on studies and data, but I've not looked into it.
It really helps understand exactly what "induced demand" means. If you add another lane, some of the people on the bus will take the car, and thus the new lane is almost immediately full again. If you remove the bus lane, bike lane, sidewalk, same thing.
Adding capacity for cars actually makes travelling by car worse.
It also gives hope. Like just because a city was destroyed to make it more car centric doesn't mean it can't be fixed to be livable again.
There's more to strongtowns than this, but it's all interesting.
If people leave the bus to drive it indicates your bus system is providing bad service.
If more people drive it indicates that your city isn't filling its purpose as being a place where there are a lot of things to do.
Cities need to figure out how to get ahead of induced demand not how use it as an excuse to be a worse city.. sure, this is a hard problem, with many options that make something else work, but induced demand is still a terrible excuse to be a bad city.
I don't have a car. If there were capacity to drive, I would.
If a bunch of capacity to drive was added, I'd buy a car.
So that's one data point.
> If more people drive it indicates that your city isn't filling its purpose as being a place where there are a lot of things to do.
This sounds like an argument from someone who's never heard any alternative to American status quo.
> Cities need to figure out how to get ahead of induced demand
Wait, you said it's nonsense?
I'm starting to think you're misunderstanding me. Induced demand is not an excuse, it's an antipattern no be avoided, and it's not irreversible.
It's about how adding lanes to a road doesn't help traffic (see Katy, Texas).
Or the I101. Adding a lane, or improving the Caltrain? Clearly the latter will improve 101 traffic more.
You incorrectly assumed I'm advocating more lanes of traffic, that is one possible solution - if you do it be prepared to go up (or down), as you will need many layers of layers over layers (bridges) that way. There are many other possible solutions though. It didn't work in Katy Texas because they didn't build enough.
Improving transit would be my preferred option.
The point is if adding a lane of anything doesn't solve your traffic problem (or makes it worse) then you are not thinking big enough.
> It didn't work in Katy Texas because they didn't build enough.
The Katy Freeway is literally the widest highway in the world.
The biggest in the world. Adding lanes doesn't help. This is not controversial.
> Improving transit would be my preferred option.
There are many solutions, and you don't have to pick just one.
Better transit. Dedicated bus lanes. Mixed zoning (so much this). Separate bike lanes. Etc.. etc..
It's not that we should force people to use the bus. It's that if you're stuck in traffic and had a magic wand that could turn 30 cars into one bus, would you use it? Well, clearly yes. Many times. Ok, so now that this driver agrees that they want other people to use the bus, it's just a matter of making the bus experience better, so that they do.
But yes, that falls under (as you say) "improving transit". But there's more.
Anyway, "Not Just Bikes" says this so much better than I could.
It's been shown to be real in studies upon studies - what are you trying to say here?
So how is it an excuse? If spending billions on new lanes doesn't actually help anyone, that's just government waste.
Only when you don't add enough lanes. It hurts some people who are already using the existing lanes, but it helps other people who previously found the trip so painful they didn't take make it at all, but now the level of pain is low enough that they make it. Focusing only on those who are already using the road isn't the answer, we need to focus on everyone.
So if there are two routes from A to B and one is longer, then the shorter route should be reserved for the modes of transports that have a higher capacity. (That usually means banning cars)
Another really good option is to have dedicated bus lanes so buses don't get stuck in traffic.
As a car driver you massively benefit if other people take the bus or bikes instead of their car. Plus you and especially the ones who are to old, young, poor, disabled to drive a car have good options of getting around.
Well, you don't have infinite money, or space. Adding a bus lane and a car lane clearly will add more capacity than doing just one of them, but adding a bus lane will likely reduce traffic so much in the other lanes that you don't even have to add another car lane.
And adding just a car lane means people would rather be stuck in their car, than stuck in the bus, in the same lane, and we have tragedy of the commons.
So adding a car lane just means emptier busses, but same slow traffic. So what value did adding the lane add?
It'd just be government waste.
The first is true, but the second doesn't follow. For a bus lane to make a difference you need more than a lane, you also need good bus service using that lane. Bus service in many cities horrible and so nobody sane will ride it. A lane of empty buses running around helps nothing. If you propose a bus lane you need to do it with all the service that will happen so we can evaluate it.
It's not. This is a fact. It sounds like you are trying to reason about this from pure logic, and are not aware that this is an empirical fact.
You can only go so far armchair guessing about how city planning "ought to" work.
> Demand either exists or it doesn't.
To get to the place, yes. To get to the place in a car, no.
If you double the capacity of a road network, that means more people will choose to drive.
Example: If the city I live in doubled the car capacity, I would buy a car and drive it. But since everyone else would too, it'd actually stabilize to the same congestion. (I forget, but the actually observed phenomenon has a name)
Or let's say you had some billions of dollars to improve the situation of the I-101 in California. What do you think will happen if you add a lane? More people who currently take a tech company shuttle will start driving instead. More people who currently take Caltrain will start driving instead.
And then you're back. I'm not guessing, this is established knowledge. No matter how hard people try to double down on a failed strategy (see Katy Freeway), it just doesn't help traffic. It just makes more people drive.
Now spend those billions on making the Caltrain experience better, and you'll start seeing existing lanes on the 101 free up.
> After all, if you built 100 lanes there wouldn't magically be 100 lanes of traffic.
A 100? Maybe not. But apparently 26 lanes is not enough (Katy Freeway).
But there are other aspects to this too, other than roads and transit. E.g. zoning. It greatly reduces traffic on existing roads if you can just walk over to the store to buy some groceries, because it's a 5min walk. Instead of driving and being stuck in traffic for 10 minutes because it's too far to walk and crosses an 8 lane highway.
Every person who went shopping in the local store is another car not on the road, both ways.
> Demand is fulfilled only up to the point that the demand exists.
This is only true in the sense that it's irrelevant. If you widen every street and avenue in NYC to 26 lanes, then maybe that's enough. But only because there will barely be any houses left to go to.
> There's no magical induction that urbanists vaguely gesture at.
That's not what's happening.
If people leave your transit system for a car it is because your transit system sucks. Fix that problem. (hint, trains can easily reach speeds 3x faster than cars, stops should not take too long, and there should always been a train almost here for when you missed the last one - running good transit isn't easy)
That's the opposite of what I'm doing.
> The problem is people want to get someplace in your city and currently it is inconvenient for them to do so.
I agree. And we already know that "add more lanes" is a very costly (especially maintenance forever. Again, see Not Just Bikes), and we already know it doesn't even help.
> If people leave your transit system for a car it is because your transit system sucks.
No, not sucks. They just have to be subjectively a better choice for the individual.
So yes, then we agree. Money should be spent on improving alternative transport, not car infrastructure.
A transit system can almost never compete with a vehicle right in your garage taking you exactly to your destination. Unless you live in very rare circumstances, friction-free car travel will be preferable to most people. But car travel is not friction-free of course. You're setting up a goal post that's impossible to reach
Separate traffic that requires different speeds.
http://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Sign%201.JP...
> Vision Zero is based on an underlying ethical principle that "it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system." In most road transport systems, road users bear complete responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation system designers and road users.
Using Los Angeles as an example:
https://ladotlivablestreets.org/programs/vision-zero
https://laist.com/news/transportation/2020-traffic-deaths-lo... for the graphic "Traffic violence in Los Angeles" showing the increase since Vision Zero was adopted.
Then you have enforcement issues like jaywalking laws, the wording and culture around collisions and referring to them as "accidents", etc.
The entire country was REbuilt (US cities were not always like this) around the car. Until that changes, no city will reach Vision Zero.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/nyregion/traffic-deaths-n...
https://www.snowyvalleys.nsw.gov.au/News-Media/Brungle-Road-...
i dont know how widely this turn of phrase is used, but where i grew up in the US, we called the middle turn lane in a 5 lane road the suicide lane.
I dunno. People pack in as tightly as possible around here and we still get traffic. I think it is just inevitable.
On a serious note, the overtake left thing (or right for those strange people driving on the wrong side) is a big reason German Autobahn is as safe as it is. Reckless idiots notwithstanding.
A 3-lane is a road design where you’ve got one lane in each direction, and a shared passing lane in the middle.
These used to be quite popular as they were not much more expensive than a 2-lane but allowed better throughput, however as density and speeds increased they became more and more deadly as they’d encourage trying to pass and high-speed frontal collisions.
They’re mostly gone now, replaced by either 2+2 or 2+1 (the latter is very popular in europe, it’s basically a 3-lane except there’s a hard barrier which regularly swaps the center lane’s direction to allow safe passing sections — or more rarely a 1+1 with a protected turn lane).
You would never put one in a newly designed road, but when a road needs to be upgraded, they are a great solution.
The newspaper had regular reports of truck "capsizings", where a truck would lose control and turn over. It was common for a truck to have laborers who would fill up the truck with some bulk product like dirt, then ride on the top to go to the destination, then unload it. When one of these trucks capsized, it was a major disaster.
When evaluating the danger of such a design, you have to consider the alternatives. You’re probably considering 3/4 head on collisions from drivers misjudging the turn. Those happen, but how many rear-end collisions are avoided?
They are about improving throughput.
What makes them dangerous, particularly in the five lane configuration, is the poor visibility for crossing uncontrolled intersections of multiple traffic lanes.
There's a stroad on Staten Island that scares the crap out of me - Hylan Blvd. I have family that live on it. It's six lanes with a median, but sometimes and in certain places parking is allowed in the outermost lanes. So you can suddenly come up on parked traffic but only at certain times of day in certain places. It's totally insane.
To get in the driveway, you have to loop the block to the closest light, wait for the green, and then drive halfway down the block and back-in before the light changes and traffic starts up. It's quite stressful.
Colloquially called a "suicide lane".
Having just a general all-purpose two-directional left-turning lane looks incomprehensibly dangerous to me.
The businesses hardly complain; they love to be where the greatest numbers of eyeballs and potential impulse shoppers are going by.
Maybe you could start with a strong street vs. road discipline, but I would predict that within 40 years any American polity will surely break it, and the stroad will re-emerge.
I am reminded of that cartoon where aliens arive on earth, and assume that cars are the dominant species, since so much of our world has been dedicated to them.
When I go to the shop, I walk or take my bike. And even here, the shops aren't in my street, but there's a small shopping center (with two supermarkets, a pharmacy, two drugstores, a bakery, a butcher, two organic food shops, a small bookstore, a fast food place, a pizza place, and some other shops) two streets over. It's easy to reach by car, but even easier to reach on foot by the entire neighbourhood they serve.
In the other direction, there's the big shopping street of the next neighbourhood over, still walkable, though it's more than a kilometer so I always take my bike, and there's tons more shops and great restaurants there. It's an older neighbourhood, more a shopping street than a shopping center, and cars constantly clog that street. Maybe less fun to live in that street, but it's still a very popular street to live in. Personally I'd prefer to see cars banned from that street, but maybe that's not an option for some reason.
Still, it's a great neighbourhood and a great shopping street, and it's nice to have not one but two such shopping areas close to my home. (There's a third not far from that second one, which had a fantastic cheese shop and has a daily market.)
Car-dependent suburbia is about imposing your car on everyone else while not allowing anyone else to impose their cars on you. It is inherently selfish city design.
With single-family zoning being the overwhelming norm in the U.S, it would be unfair to call this a refusal - the supply is artificially constrained. Had multi-family housing been legal to build, then it's pretty likely that people would move into them at higher rates.
Attempting to use zoning to stop that runs into the problem that by and large people don't want to live in dense areas. Most of them want the cheap home in the burbs. And they'll vote for those that give it to them.
This is the root problem with Strongtowns and their ilk. They love to navel gaze and contemplate the platonic ideal of how a city should be laid out. But for the most part fail to provide a viable option that people can and will choose.
It's true there are also other, superior, options, but that's a bonus!
The reason donuts cost more at your local walkable place is because real estate prices are higher in walkable places, because walkable places are so in-demand that as a nation we've bid the prices of those places to the moon. So we ought to change our zoning rules so that the market can build more of them. That's the whole point of Strong Towns idea.
Yes, Strong towns loves to say this too despite it being obviously not true.
Infrastructure stuff like roads and pipes and so on is cheap. Usually 10-15% of the budget. The real cost of government is in providing services to people. And those are invariably more expensive in the cities than the suburbs.
Show me even one city in the US that has lower taxes and spends less per Capita than the surrounding suburbs.
For one, suburbs are pretty economically difficult for low-earning households. Low earners are more likely to live in cities, therefore cities tend to have more social services.
You need to do an apples-to-apples comparison, which unfortunately is not easy.
Of course property tax rates are inversely correlated with property values so it's a bit tricky to compare, but the point is it's not always true that suburbs have lower taxes than the central city. Transportation costs are also typically much lower in cities (transit fares/passes are typically significantly cheaper than car ownership).
Notice how the second statement doesn't disprove the first.
edit: here it is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
The law mandates that everyone drive everywhere whether they want to or not.
It's easy to see why people choose the suburbs.
If people in the suburbs had to pay enough property tax to recoup their share for the cost of roads, water, sewage, electric, telecoms, mail and other ancillary services to their large, non-productive plot of land, they'd likely consider other options.
Suburbs look nice in the short term, before the roads need repaving and the utilities need major overhauls; but the total lifetime cost to the public far exceeds how much tax they bring in.
With single-family zoning being the norm in the U.S, it would be unfair to call this a choice. The supply of other types of housing is severely constrained.
It kills me that US road planners don't even bother putting in medium-term solutions that would fix most of the issues, like a road with separated through lanes in the middle and a one-lane service road for the driveways.
https://www.google.com/maps/@32.8276267,-117.2033566,3a,75y,...
This ofc doesn’t solve everything, like how crossing a super wide stroad is terrible for both cars and non-motorized users given the large number of conflict points, the long cycle times needed to move cars through fat intersections, etc.
These shops aren't on the stroad because the US is an anarchy where everything goes, they're there because it's designed that way. But the design is inefficient and dangerous.
They fail to provide a viable option because, as they point out, cities are complicated so universal prescriptions will fail. If no one in your place cares enough to come up with a local solution, then any intervention would have failed anyway, as we've seen for decades with aid work throughout the world.
Most of what they do is showing that what we have now is on a predictable, medium-term trajectory to insolvency by its fundamental financial unsound structure. Their 'ilk', so much as they have any, would be Urban3, who do GIS mapping of financial productivity within cities. So, 'navel gazing', I guess.
No, strong towns "and their ilk" (biased much?) provide an unlimited supply of solutions to a variety of problems. If you're not seeing them it's because you don't want to see them.
There isn't a "now the city is better" red button you can hit. It takes a lot of effort to get there. One of the efforts is in fact a marketing one: you need to spread awareness of where the problems actually are and why they are a problem. Stroads are a good example; I had never realized they were a problem, but since I discovered them I've been noticing them whenever traveling and thinking a lot about the implications and how they could be redesigned in that spot.
Stroads are very difficult to find in western Europe by the way, compared to the US. In some countries they're non existent. Clearly you're mistaken about how they can and will just appear out of nowhere. Maybe things are more nuanced and complex than your three second opinion lets on.
While driving through that stroad, I remember thinking that the only people who benefit from this planning disaster is the local PD, as every corner gas station had cop cars hidden with their lights switched off.
Here’s Not Just Bikes’ video about Stroads: https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM
I can't find the exact video right now but I remember one where he compared a horrid stroad with a lovely Dutch street. The Dutch version contained two single lane streets, bike lanes, a lightrail line and lovely shade from all the trees. And ironically the second had a higher carrying capacity because single-occupant vehicles are just terrible at moving people.
I think that's probably because it was a Patreon exclusive ;) However, his recent video includes a similar comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-v2-qyCc8
I agree it’s an exceptional YouTube channel though. :)
St might have a huge audience amongst professional city planners, but in the “public consciousness” NJB is what popularised both ST’s concepts and knowledge of ST as an organisation.
NJB is closing in on half a million subscribers and has 11 vids above a million (one above 3), by comparison ST’s youtube channel is under 20k subs and their biggest video is 10 years old and has 350k views. Their 2 STROAD videos follow with 60k each, NJB’s top stroad video has 1.3m views. Hell, 3 videos of NJB’s “strong towns” series have more views than the entire strong towns channel.
The “bicycle dutch” channel is larger than ST, and it’s essentially a cycling vlog.
You say that ST is a sponsor and promoter of NJB, but NJB has a much larger lay audience and regularly plugs donating to strong towns.
Here’s their newer stroad video though, which is pretty good: https://youtu.be/OZ1HhLq-Huo
I tried the ride on and it's about an hour one way to work by bike, so I think I will get an e-bike. I have other physical training to do so I don't want to completely deplete myself by riding, but I still don't want to use the car.
[0] https://content.tfl.gov.uk/rtf-report-chapter-2-part-1.pdf
The busiest and most economically vibrant areas in the US are the ones that deprioritize cars (main streets, downtowns, outdoor malls, bar districts).
But if you try to change an existing area into a less car friendly area people absolutely lose their heads
People are scared of change, even when the benefits are quite obvious. At least it was obvious to me when I was handed an hyperbolic leaflet opposing the change before it was done: I knew pedestrian streets were beneficial to shops, the area has no lack of transportation being in the center of Paris, there's no parking nearby, and you don't get in a car to go buy a damn sandwich in Paris unless you're completely fucking insane.
Ironically, the city is considering expanding the pedestrian zones and shop owners are bringing forth the same arguments they did 30 years ago, as if they didn't learn anything.
If we’re fighting stroads, those have to become roads. One way to get this done is simply banish the businesses. But this strains capacity on the arterials even worse, since you now need to leave the suburb to go shopping.
The other way is to push businesses down the tree, closer to houses, more decentralized. But the residents won’t abide that either, on the theory that businesses will attract traffic to their sub-trees.
To that I say: get over it. It’s utterly insane to have a whole street for the private use of a few dozen families. It’s literally impossible to make arterials big enough to compensate. You can have your street slow, but it’s going to be part of a network and it’s going to be used by more than just the hyper local community.
But of course they don’t see this as particularly less bad than total isolation, so they won’t allow it either. The whole thing is fucked.
One of the interesting points is that there is a commonality between those suburbans and people who want walkable urban areas: few of us want to deal with the problems of lots of cars driving around us.
I would say communities like San Mateo or Belmont on the peninsula are what's in demand. Small "cute" downtowns with trendy shops and dining, but also enough parking so you can drive, surrounded by single family homes, big parks and open spaces and mixed multi-unit apartments/condos. People can have the benefits of their own property, exclusive space and enough space for a family, while enjoying a "downtown" experience when they want to.
“California is changing because of a desire of many millions of people to have something that looks like the conventional, traditional California Dream: a house on a lot in a neighborhood of similar houses on lots,”[1]
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/californians-flee-the-coast-to-...
Famous examples: people wanted better horse-carriages and didn't anticipate cars. People wanted better keyboards on their blackberry-style phones, not an iPhone. Etc etc.
Nobody who experiences life in the Netherlands where biking and walking is actually safe ends up wishing they could return to stroad-style car-dependency. Everyone who says they prefer it is just saying that they don't know any better.
And any appeal to saying we have to keep making dangerous garbage sprawl because that's what people demand, that's disengenuous nonsense.
Strong Towns actually has the answer to this, the one that doesn't involve being condescending to people in sprawlville, USA. They point out that EVERYONE when you ask them about their priorities, especially for the streets where they live, they always say they care about safety, capacity, cost, and speed, basically in that order. But engineering assumptions put it more like speed, capacity, cost, safety.
(Wish I could give you the optimal link, but the one thing Strong Towns is weakest at is making it easy to find the right links in their enormous backlog of articles; the site search tool is really annoying; I know the concepts I'm mentioning are discussed multiple places, including in their two books)
I also spent some time in Singapore and it seems much closer to the Strongtowns ideal than the US - dense housing, top-notch transit (most don't have cars), carefully planned development with first-floor shops on every block, lots of greenspace and public areas.
And when I talked to my colleagues you know what their desired was? Make enough money to buy a car and get the equivalent of a single family home. They lived in dense housing and got by without a car not out of choice but out of affordability. Again, not all of them (many who could afford cars choose not to buy one), but it was a pretty common theme.
Culture also matters; in the west the city is often seen as a place for single professionals, rather than somewhere to build your life long term. This will affect perceptions, for good or ill.
Also, although you can get by without a car in many locations, I think there’s probably a relatively stark difference in how livable that is depending on how it’s implemented. If your city is filled with two lane roads through the core that’s clearly much worse than the Netherlands equivalent.
Cost is fixed by building more housing and traffic is solved by making the Bay Area less car centric (public transportation in the Bay Area isn't terrible but it can still be a lot better). I don't have great solutions for crime and homelessness but building more housing all over will definitely help reduce it and better social safety nets can help eliminate it entirely.
Additionally, you don't need to build a second SF to solve the problem. In fact, most dense housing can be built for relatively cheap. You don't need to build 20 story buildings everywhere.
Since that was the class of people with the most money and significant political power, city planning departments were heavily dominated by the idea that the people who mattered the most weren't actually residents for many decades, especially since it's always easier to continue a direction than radically reconsider the approach.
I saw a good example of that here in DC a couple of years ago when our pedestrian safety project was being led by an older traffic engineer who could not stop talking about cars per hour as his primary metric. It was very clear that this was a deeply engrained way of thinking, and that it had never been subject to much critical analysis. When he retired and a much younger replacement got the job, they treated neighborhood safety as their top priority — and since they actually ran simulations rather than relying on their gut, it turned out to have almost no impact on overall commute speeds because all the reckless drivers were doing was getting to the next backup slightly faster.
For the same amount of money they could get a 1,100 at ft home, with a yard, lots of families close by and good schools.
You cant “build more housing” if the desirable housing is a single family home with a yard. SF is out of space.
Like I said in my other reply, countries where raising a family in a 2 bed apartment is mostly due to cost - they can’t afford more space. American has plenty of space.
Sure, people want the impossible: quiet beautiful wilderness where you can also walk to school, groceries, concerts, and medical centers.
But the question at hand is actually how much of all the good things we are capable of having. And we really can do a lot better than sprawlville USA without the only alternative being San Francisco.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/11/3/our-self-impos...
Incidentally, car-dependent affordable space is a farce. It's not actually more affordable, it only externalizes the costs. The huge infrastructure costs to support sprawl-style development are subsidized by denser parts of town. This is laid out bluntly in the articles on https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme and that's not to mention the externalized costs of the pollution of all the car traffic and many other things we could bring up.
In short, the car-dependent suburbs are artificially more affordable. And yes, tons of people will accept car-dependency in order to get the benefits and affordability of those places as we know them.
> For the same amount of money they could get a 1,100 at ft home, with a yard, lots of families close by and good schools.
You can't build tons of detached single family homes but you certainly can build higher-density housing with public parks and playgrounds. Similarly, I'd say the lack of families and schools is more of a symptom than a cause of not having the infrastructure to support families. In the United States there's a lot of marketing, culture, and laws which mean the detached single-family suburban home model is heavily subsidized but if you look at the better U.S. cities or many examples internationally, there's no shortage of families living in smaller places using shared public space — even a small playground is going to be more fun than the average back yard.
Schools are similarly prone to this: standardized test scores closely track family socioeconomic status so if you're in an area where there's limited family-friendly housing, lack of areas for kids to exist safely without getting hit by cars, etc. the scores will go down as the most affluent parents move without any change in the quality of the school's education.
Agree. I don't understand the claims in this discussion about kids not being able to get around in suburbs on their own. I lived part of my childhood in a dense metropolis and part in a suburb. I was able to get around the suburb just fine on my own on a bicycle. This was before bike lanes (which many suburbs now have), and I would just ride on the sidewalk - this is perfectly safe and legal.
> And when I talked to my colleagues you know what their desired was? Make enough money to buy a car and get the equivalent of a single family home.
This isn't surprising to me, particularly if people know what the two different lifestyles are like (with and without a car). I am more of an advocate for different cities to have different styles of living for different people. The big issue in discussions like this, is a belief that there must be only one way to do things, and it must be forced onto every town and city through aggressive activism, which people who are older or have children or other responsibilities just don't have time to combat. That's not just disruptive but also unethical, in my opinion.
This thread also has several people with a fetishistic obsession with life in the Netherlands. Granted - the Not Just Bikes channel that many have mentioned is run by someone who moved to NL - so the bias there is expected. But lots of people who fantasize about NL would not actually like living there. To be blunt about it, most of the Dutch cities are soulless and boring. At first the immediate walk-out-the-door access to local businesses/destinations was charming. But ultimately I felt that the anti-car lifestyle led to a cultural lack of spontaneity and people implicitly had committed to a limited life that is centered around just what is nearby. Ironically, unlike the GP, I felt those living in NL who reported high levels of happiness were the ones who didn't know there were other options.
It's not just a vague grass-is-greener issue. And sure, Dutch cities can be soulless and boring by some measures, but that's the norm for American suburbia too.
It's not just a matter of self-report of happiness, the support for the Netherlands style of living is strong by a ton of measures.
Here's the thing: stuff like the eyes-on-the-street effect are HUGE. A sprawly American suburb that still has a neighborhood park where there are reliably dozens of kids who know each other… that works, because it's safe enough to let your kids go to the park with their friends without adult supervision. The fact is, other kids there means it's not bizarre to see one isolated seemingly-abandoned kid, and if they get hurt, there are other kids around to help them or to run home or call their parents etc.
It's not strictly a matter of cars. The whole issue of "stroad" vs road isn't anti-car. Roads are for cars mainly. Stroads are fundamentally dangerous. They are part of the development style that makes it unsafe for younger kids to get out on their bikes and be independent.
Given the choice of dense urban life vs car-dependent-sprawl, it's understandable why many people choose the latter. The problem is the missing-middle. Why is it illegal in most places to build moderate-dense walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that are neither densely urban nor car-dependent-sprawl? The capacity of people to choose different lifestyles along this continuum is missing. The rare places in the middle are crazy expensive because demand far outstrips supply. So, we really don't get anywhere with a conversation focused on which of the limited polarized choices people are stuck with in the USA.
While this is possible to be true, I suspect on a per-utterance basis, it’s wrong way more often than it’s right. People often do know what they want; it’s just inconveniently not the same as what the utterer prefers.
People's utterances about what they want are almost never in light of the question of what they "really want". We rarely have the space and perspectives to reflect on and learn about what we "really want" to be able to even answer that question.
Most of life is people having low-level fears about loss and acceptance and so on and expressing our wants from that position. We rarely settle into our deeper values enough to even ask what we "really want" let alone find answers.
Real estate prices for high density housing and walkable neighborhoods disproves this statement outright. As for why this type of housing is not built more frequently, there is a fairly simple explanation: they are illegal to build under zoning laws, which massively favour single-family homes.
> Some of them stick around once they have kids, but it's rare and usually reserved for the well-off who can afford private schools and family-sized homes. In SF you've got the parents who are happy to put their kids and groceries on the back of their bike, but most look to find something a bit closer to suburbia.
There's a simple explanation for this: cities in the U.S are unsafe in particular for children due to the massive infestation of cars and car-oriented infrastructure. Suburbs appear to be the only alternative, but they are pretty damn harmful to the development of children - basically being a prisoner inside your house until you are old enough to drive a car is quite frankly demeaning.
So yes, there's almost an equal amount of demand for this type of housing.
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/26/more-americ...
As for walkability - its utility is vastly overblown in my opinion. Your note about childless adults rings true for me, and the only parents I know who care about walk scores are the ones who are themselves urbanist activists (few in number). Even then, when it came time to purchase a home, walkability was not a decision maker for those couples. To me, that was a signal that even parents who were very anti-car in their political sentiment ultimately didn't put enough of a value on the pro-walk/bike lifestyle to prioritize it when their money was on the line.
I also think it is impractical to not have a car. If you want to live a rich life with access to diverse activities, instead of being boxed into a 15 minute radius or your metro line, then you need a car. Who wants to deny their children the memories of day trips and the thrill of exploration? And if you have a car, then you already have the vehicle you need to live in a more suburban neighborhood, where you can enjoy additional space and safety while still accessing commercial areas in a time efficient manner.
I have seen more comments and people talking about this toxic car culture than seen it in real life.
Not everyone is young, healthy and rich enough to bike. There is a historic racial divide. White folks live in more bike friendly places.
https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycl...
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
Also, bikes are not the only or natural alternative to cars.
It's the money sink that is a car that's the real privilege.
In the same way curb cuts improved the well being of way more than people in wheelchair, good, grade-separated walking and biking infrastructure makes moving around much easier and safer for way more than just cyclists.
Not everyone is young, healthy, and rich enough to be able to own and operate a 2.5t vehicle at high speed. And where walkers, wheelchairs, and other assisting devices can mix with little difficulty with bike traffic, that’s not the case with high-speed road traffic.
Anyway, as to your other points - firstly, changing or building cities in a way that is not car centric doesn't mean there are no cars and nobody drives - obviously people still have to and will. Actually, building cities in a way that is not car-centric is safer for people who still drive, and there's a lot less traffic, so that's good. It's just even better for people who don't or can't drive (think of people under 16 years old, who have little independence to travel living in suburbs).
It should be noted too that non car-centric cities are much better for e.g. elderly people to live in, because everything is much closer, and good cycle and walking paths are much better to ride mobility scooters on. Things being in walkable distance also helps people age better, because the exercise means you retain your mobility longer. It's pretty scary how as people age, you get to a point where if you're not staying active, you really quickly start to lose the ability to be active, which is a unfortunate spiral.
The last thing - it's not just bikes (look up the YouTube channel with the same name, by the way - it's awesome). Improving zoning laws and building good public transport is also a key part of the puzzle, and helps solve lot of the issues as well.
Bikes are orders of magnitude cheaper than a car. Both in terms of the infrastructure needed as well as the individual cost of bicycles. Good bicycle infrastructure also improves accessibility for those using mobility scooters, and a bicycle culture has hugely beneficial health benefits to individuals and society - not to mention the awful health effects of cars.
I find it hilarious that anyone would ever try to start a debate making the standpoint that car-oriented development would be the less racist alternative, what with highways inside cities having been used to absolutely ravage areas where non-whites have lived, and suburbs basically having entirely excluded non-whites, by both economic and non-economic means. Not to mention the added economic strain of owning a car, making it even worse for those who are less well off economically.
Making biking, public transport and walking more attractive also improves the experience for the few that still need to use a car.
Cars have a really low capacity. If you reserve the fastest route for biking or public transport and force cars to take a longer route then you will still be faster by car over the longer route than you would over the shorter route if cars where allowed there.
Not just bikes did a video on just that and explains it much better than I have:
This is such an alien attitude to me. Why would you need to be young or rich to ride a bike? Then I remember that American cities are so hostile to cyclists that, of course, only the young and rich would be able to do it there. Then this inequality is somehow taken to be a problem with the _bikes themselves_ rather than the cities that made cycling so dangerous. It's maddening to see.
And cars are not cheap either, you know.
Go to a European metropolis, you will see cyclists young and old, rich and poor, black and white.
Is there a name for the following fallacy:
"X is good, we should have more of X and make X available for more people." "No we can't do that, X is only for rich white people and therefore bad."
I have to take issue with this, though:
> 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.
Futons (good ones, at least) are fantastic beds. I've been sleeping on them for over 20 years entirely by choice, having plenty of space and money for the alternatives. How anybody came to consider them a form of couch is the mysterious bit to me.
Apparently someone saw a futon and figured “we could use [cotton-filled and somewhat foldable mattresses] instead of rigid split mattresses for sofabeds” and so “futon” became a style of sofabed (obviously shitty since it’s a sofabed).
In japan, a futon is not a sofabed, it solely bedding and during the day it gets stowed into a closet (or a corner of the room).
It’s not seating and it doesn’t have a frame. Those are western “additions”. But not improvements, because futons were never intended for slatted frames (or even hard surfaces). Because of this incompatibility and the desire to make them permanent the “futon-style mattresses” thus have to become much thicker and heavier, thereby losing the flexibility and stowability of the original, and just becoming bad mattresses (la requirement for sofabeds, really).
In essence, “futons are shit” is one more example of taking something which is perfectly fine, moving it completely out of its context, misusing it entirely, and then calling it bad after making it so. And the badness gets attributed to futons where it’s been a universal constant of sofabeds.
Futon-style mattresses have not made sofabeds worse, they’ve always been shit[1] they’ve just tarnished the name of futons.
[1] Which in fairness is not normally an issue, their purpose is to be an ok-at-best couch with some ad-hoc bedding so guests don’t sleep on the floor.
One thing strikes me though: there's network effects to "Stroads"; in the USA if you designed a shopping district or neighbourhood as being "roads to streets" with limited parking (as is suggested) then the people operating businesses or living in that neighbourhood would be worse off... because everyone judges things in ability to get to it by car. It's almost a culture of cars and it's probably impossible to remove, but first movers in this space will be the losers, even if in the long run everyone wins.
It's game theory at a national scale; and we're all losing.
Parking can be free if the citizens of said city decide to issue a bond and build a bigger garage. But there’s no free lunch, you pay for it one way or another.
In order to de-car American life, it’s going to take some frustration with this situation to drive people and businesses to locations better suited for fewer cars. Driving is only going to keep getting more expensive until this happens.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restor...
They're trying to overthrow the design vernacular of an entire society, and that's necessarily hard despite that vernacular being dangerous, dehumanizing, and expensive. It's a team effort, but I think they're pulling their weight.
If you're (reasonably) wondering what they, as a particular organization, bring to the table, look at Chuck. He's a conservative Catholic engineer from a small Midwest town, which is significant both because that's a rare voice in this space, and because his broad appeal indicates something the organization is doing well so that it can reach a group that doesn't jump for 'Vision Zero', 'look at Europe', etc.
In his recent announcement that the fatal library crossing from his second book just brought about another death, Chuck is as feisty as I've ever heard him; he's out for blood. I think he might be on to something with the goal of bringing crippling lawsuits against city engineers who have been sheltering from responsibility by hiding behind MUTCD.
For example, there's lot of housing developers out there that build "eco-villages" housing developments -- the houses have solar or are well-insulated or there's a community garden or something else cute like that.
But a real "eco village" isn't a housing development with a gate or two onto the local stroad, it's a walkable/bikable/mixed-development town where you don't need a car to go grab a cup of coffee. Outside of the old pre-car suburbs like Cambridge/Somerville, are there any towns that are actively all-in on these ideas?
At midnight, they actually functioned as good roads; I probably averaged 47mph.
During the day, I averaged about half of that because of all the lights -- even when I didn't stop at a red, the traffic in front of me did.
About Here (Specific to Vancouver, BC): https://www.youtube.com/c/AboutHere
Oh the Urbanity: https://www.youtube.com/c/OhTheUrbanity
City Beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/c/CityBeautiful
Which fundamental assumptions?
The point they're trying to make isn't "you should only have tiny side streets and massive highways, with nothing in between". It's "don't build roads that require you go from a driveway or parking lot straight into high speed six-lane traffic". Drivers need reserved space for speeding up and slowing down, something that stroads do not provide.
* to be able to walk from business to business in minutes or seconds * to feel safe walking across the street * to be able to have conversations with other people outside without having to yell over traffic.
The stroad is also really bad at providing these needs because pedestrians are not considered at all in US roadway design.
(In math, that would be like saying that a homomorphism exists because you feel like it should)
Roads can move a lot of people and material long-distances, quickly. CLIs are powerful, but I've never seen an e-commerce application with a command-line interface. It'd be the wrong tool for the job.
Similarly, you shouldn't build multi-lane roads with wide lanes (which is all a great fit for highways) in places where you expect a lot of people to be, especially if they're shopping.
Having two classes of devices would be an improvement of the current situation.
If your goal is to move people, a limited access high speed road is the right way to do it.
If your goal is to support commerce, a low speed, mixed traffic street that can support a lot of homes an businesses in a small area is the right way to do it.
The high speed and land use of stroads makes them inefficient and dangerous for commerce, and the fact that there's so much on-and-off traffic makes them slow and dangerous for transit. They are the worst of both worlds.
Strong Towns appears to be arguing that the trade-off between movement (roads) and value (streets) is highly non-linear, and that the middle-ground's combined performance is so much worse than either a street or road that it's not worth building. See the comment below about counter-tops vs. stoves for an example of an extreme binary case.
Correct. Because as a sibling comment notes, they are a "compromise" that serves neither purpose very well. See the Not Just Bikes video referenced elsewhere in this discussion for a fuller treatment.
> If we want to build towns that are financially productive, we need to identify and eliminate stroads.
You're missing the point on why they're made. They're built to facilitate expansion in confined areas. I'd argue that it's more dangerous and less financially productive to have a street there, and incredibly more dangerous to put a road there. So, what's the solution?
In any case, if that is the point, it's better to say it that way, to talk about the distinction the article is making (like the sibling comment to the one I replied to) rather than saying "by definition" with some expectation that the conversation is being carried out with whatever precise set of definitions you've chosen.
The vague implication, that 2-lane state and federal highways shouldn't have driveways on them, is not and will not be the situation for the foreseeable future, so there's a pretty good case for using some nuance instead of insisting on some particular technical definition.
While the cropping of the image obscures what is at the end of the laneway, it most likely does have a building. As you can see there is a 911 number plate, which usually don't get issued in Ontario unless there is a building on the property. Additionally, it appears to be a recycling bin at the end of the lane under the Canadian flag, which further indicates that a building is present.
Moreover, we can find plenty of examples of buildings, including houses, that have direct access to that road.
Note the verbiage on road from the article:
> […] where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two.
See specifically "high speed connection". I have a hard time believing that a paved dirt 'road' would allow for a "high speed connection".
There is the colloquial use of the word, and the 'technical' distinction that the article is trying to make between different types of way that vehicles can travel on.
> The function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth
> the function of a road is to connect productive places
Is your house located on a street or a road? If it's on a street... how is wealth being built? And how is it not connecting productive places (your home to your office) ? And how is connecting productive places not building wealth?
This concept just doesn't make sense. Roads and streets are synonyms. Yes, I get that they have different definitions, but separating their usage actually leads to more problems than solutions.
"Make sure you look both ways when you cross the street." - So, I don't need to look both ways before crossing the road?
"There are so many potholes on the road." - So, are there none on the street?
"I think I will be late to work because of all the road works on the way." - So there's no works being done on the street?
"Kids, don't play in the street!" - Gotcha, we will just play in the road.
"No street level parking." - OK, but can I park on the road?
It's tax revenue, aka wealth, for the city. That counts for homes and businesses.
> And how is it not connecting productive places (your home to your office)?
The main purpose of a street is access to the productive places which is different from a road. The main purpose of a road is connecting two areas with productive places, usually attached to streets. A street has businesses or homes lining it, a road should not.
> but separating their usage actually leads to more problems than solutions.
No it doesn't. You want transportation to be fast and efficient and you want streets to be safe and accessible.
> Roads and streets are synonyms.
No, they're similar but are designed for different things. My smartphone and my laptop are both computers but we call them different things because their uses are different.