How do you fix a stroad? | Hacker News Reader

How do you fix a stroad?

strongtowns.org

306 pointsmilkytron389 comments

Has anyone ever put a picture of a stroad up as art/instagram etc like you see with downtown NYC, Paris, small european villages, shanghai, rural mountain towns, old downtowns in America etc?

Of course not. It is the McDonald’s of city planning. Cheap, ugly, bad for you but also shockingly expensive once the medical/infrastructure maintenance bill comes due. Its the overweight, white trash, lower back tattoo of aesthetics. WTF is wrong with us?!

Lets stop building ugly shit. Lets leave a legacy. Lets build things of substance and utility that inspires, encourages, and serves the people who use it.

> Has anyone ever put a picture of a stroad up as art/instagram etc like you see with downtown NYC, Paris, small european villages, shanghai, rural mountain towns, old downtowns in America etc?

Yes, but in a different way than I believe your question implies. Edward Burtynsky produced an amazing series of photographs centered around the automobile and in his words, how it "represent[ed] not only freedom, but also something much more conflicted."

https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/oil

One of the most internet famous images from that series is of a stroad in Breezewood, PA:

https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/news-hub/2019/7/25/what-inte...

To be fair, Breezewood is in the middle of a mountain range. Alternative routes are much longer or involve going around the geography. As a result it gets A LOT of traffic going to/from DC-area, Philly, Pittsburgh.

It's a pity that the only businesses that can cluster around there are just dull chains and yet another bleak HMS-Host-operated rest stop.

If any of you are going through there and have time to get off the PA Turnpike for a while for a meal (or hotel stay), a nice choice would be Bedford PA. It's ~20 miles west of Breezewood. It's an cute old-timey mainstreet town that hasn't been ravaged by rustbelt depression. There are good restaurants there. The Omni Bedford Springs Resort is a nice hotel with a great spa.

Breezewood is the way it is for historical reasons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breezewood,_Pennsylvania#Unusu...

Just trying to find some positive examples of American small towns. As a European, if I were to relocate to the US, where would I find strong town communities?

I know for example Ithaca, NY, might qualify. Other examples in the South, Midwest, etc?

Also stroads are not just an American problem. I have found horrible stroads in places where you would never expect them such as Oxford or Copenhagen.

As you say, there are plenty in the Northeastern United States. I think the primary historical factors that separates cohesive, walkable towns in the US from more stereotypical American development are the city having been established and built out prior to the 20th century (so there was some initial plan or development that predates cars), and the community either being wealthy enough or remote enough to avoid the pull of cookie-cutter post-war redevelopment. Of the places I’m familiar with, I’d call out Delaware and Montgomery County, PA, much of the Hudson Valley in New York (Hudson, Beacon, Newburgh, …). Outside of the northeast, there are remote locations (i.e. outside of commuting distance from a major city) in the southwest that have clearly defined and stroad-less cores. I’m thinking specifically of Taos County, NM and much of southwestern CO.

Ithaca is pushing into city territory (I think it has over 80k residents now), and if we’re going to count it, I’d also nominate small southeastern cities such as Savannah, Richmond, and St Augustine.

As someone who grew up in the Northeast, I feel like there aren't very many walkable towns unless you're essentially in the Boston or NYC suburbs. So many towns in upstate NY, MA, and PA had their main streets turned into major thoroughfares for cars... which made them completely unwalkable and miserable to live near, eventually killing the town. Most of my relatives who live near "cute" downtown strips can't even walk to them because their towns haven't bothered to build sidewalks even in the moderately dense parts of town.

> Of the places I’m familiar with, I’d call out Delaware and Montgomery County, PA

Maybe certain select towns within those areas, but most of the area within those counties is not "Strong". Particularly where I grew up in Montgomery County, there are potable water issues that the municipalities refuse to address because the costs are too high.

As a European, Ithaca does not look very walkable to me, even though it's a pretty small city. Fewer stroads is good, of course. But unless you live in Ithaca's very small city core — which is not dense — then you find yourself in typical American suburban sprawl, and Ithaca's only form of public transit is the city bus.

Zoning remains one of the biggest problems in American city planning. The lack of mixed zoning means you end up with a rigid segregation of urban areas, residential areas, and semi-industrial "big-box store stroad hell" areas. What's often missed in discussions about urban density is that in Europe, living in a residential area often means you still have access to amenities by walking, which is almost never true in the US.

This stroad seems completely alien to Dutch traffic, though. For a couple of decades now, Dutch traffic design has revolved around designating every street or road as one of three categories, two of which are two different types of Strong Town-style roads, and the third is a classic street, with slow traffic and all.

Not all Dutch streets fit this pattern perfectly, but even a century before Netherland came up with this explicit definition, we already had a good solution for a main thoroughfare with shops or homes: ventwegen. The main road still has as few access points as possible, but on both sides of it is a slow street for bikes and car-access to houses and shops. At main intersections you can switch from the main road to the ventweg, and this solution might actually be a good fit if you quickly want to fix these stroads without waiting for them to die a natural death.

Note sure I agree. I can think of a quite a few places that are essentially a stroad. Most feel like they were build between the 60s and the 90s.

Most of the larger, older cities will have neighborhoods that are walkable, though the city as a whole might fail to meet expectations. New York, Boston, Washington DC and Baltimore come to mind. But, they tend to be very expensive places to live (at least in the nicer areas).

Small and medium sized college towns (<100,000 residents, maybe) usually fit the bill as well. But, have the downside of many seasonal tenants and the other things you'd expect with a heavily young-adult-oriented area. But, even in these, you sometimes find you need to drive to a strip mall for big grocery runs - America doesn't really do small neighborhood markets and the price of real estate often drives grocery stores to the outskirts of town.

Look for cities with universities and ~ 250k population.

You probably want to look for towns pushing their "historic" qualities, at least in the Northeast, and live in/near the historic area. I live in Carlisle, PA, which has the downtown (about 3x3 blocks) designated as a historic district. The high street is one lane each way, with a center turn lane and parallel parking. Lots of crosswalks. No strip malls/box stores until you get about a mile away from the square.

There's a fair amount of car traffic, because that high street (and the main cross street) are both designated highways, but there's always a lot of foot traffic. Wide sidewalks and no parking lots generally. The surrounding neighborhoods in most directions keep the walkable nature; mostly rowhomes (some converted to student apartments), a university, very few street-facing garages or sidewalk-crossing driveways.

Mountain towns necessarily avoid the stroad/megalopolis layouts.

There is this interesting website called walkscore.com which uses afaiu google maps data to find distances along roads and such from a selected point to basic amenities, then it calculates a score for driving, walking, and biking. It's a little difficult to find on that website but on some page there is a heatmap of precalculated walkability scores overlaying google maps. If you just scan around on that thing you may get an idea about the walkability of various US cities. That should be correlated with the stroadedness / strongtownedness of those cities

I really liked Bishop, CA. I only stayed like 2 days there, but it was an interesting town.

I've heard that some Colorado towns have the same style and are lovely to live in. I was supposed to have a 6 weeks stay around Louisiana/Texas last year and Colorado + Midwest was supposed to be this year, but plans changed, so i cannot confirm if this is true.

Assuming you're looking for quaint walkable towns (and not stressing over the fact that they're surrounded by miles of car-dependent suburbs and rural areas), you can find them anywhere and everywhere. Most small/medium sized towns on the east coast have a historic/old town that is like this, for example in Virginia state:

Culpeper, VA [0] (passenger railroad station right in downtown that connects to all the big cities on the east coast)

Warrenton, VA [1] (Ridiculously good downtown restaurant scene, whenever I go there there always seems to be some festival or market happening)

Staunton, VA [2] (Beautiful area surrounded by some of the largest tracts of public land in the eastern US)

Fredericksburg, VA [3] (tons of interesting history here)

Charlottesville, VA [4] (look at that pedestrian-only shopping street a block away!)

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.4731207,-77.9962447,3a,75y,1...

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7131072,-77.7940715,3a,60y,2...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.1496218,-79.0715993,3a,75y,1...

[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.3031279,-77.460567,3a,75y,16...

[4] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.031349,-78.4795003,3a,60y,20...

Ojai in California was nice, though quite small at 8k population. As a child comment suggested, mountains as a constraint might help there. The Wikipedia page notes: "Chain stores are prohibited by city ordinance to encourage local small business development and keep the town unique."

Using Ithaca, NY as a qualifier perhaps Ann Arbor or Madison are good examples.

All of which are college towns to some degree. (Or at least have large universities.)

There are a fair number of smaller cities in the Northeast US with walkable cores. I worked in downtown Nashua for about eight years at one point though I didn't go in all the time. A number of those cores are even rather gentrified with nice restaurants, a park or two, newer housing, and so forth.

Here's the thing though. It's a fairly consistent pattern. The gentrified area is usually pretty small. Things are distinctly less nice when you get out of that area. And you probably need to get in a car to do anything beyond the most basic shopping.

Beyond the Northeast, somewhere like Raleigh NC is the same pattern.

Where have you seen stroads in Oxford?

There's tons of places similar to Ithaca all around the country

Check out Savannah Georgia

I live in a mediaeval town. Outside of the mediaeval centre are rows of victorian terrace and town houses that grew up around a large railway junction, with warehouses, sidings etc right by the house. When I was young the railway yards had become small businesses, builders merchants, coal merchants, milk rounds, car repair garages etc. Over time they have mostly been turned into more housing and the businesses have moved to out of town 'industrial estates' or 'enterprise parks' where you need a car to get there. Many jobs have moved out there too, even professional service firms that used to fill the quaint offices of the mediaeval centre. The centre edges closer to being a museum every year, and the real commerce is spread out for car drivers around the boundary.

On one route out of town the left hand side of the road is an early-mid 20th century parkway, with a grass strip before the street with the houses on it. The other side was little developed due to being a military reservist base. In the last 10 years they have developed it with no regard whatsoever with reflecting the parkway, and the result? Stroadification

That was spicy. I like the message; the analogies are alienating for some people. I agree that we should be focusing on the long term costs of our decisions.

> Lets stop building ugly shit

It's not just a matter of aesthetics. Stroads are incredibly dangerous.

Don’t believe this Imperial Tartarian propaganda. The stroad is the best road. Our urban architecture is the best ever. No one wants that old stuff any more, make it concrete and glass boxes arranged around a big ol’ stroad.

Just listen to it. Stroad! It sounds strong, regal, majestic! Rolls off the tongue like music, it does!

and the weird comercial buildings that look "welcoming" on the road side but actually the entrance is in the back, towards the car park.

I would buy a NFT of a picture of a nice stroad.

European here: While I don't advocate for stroads, they do certainly look cool to "America lovers" all around the world.

> Has anyone ever put a picture of a stroad up as art

Nobody puts up little ugly streets of Milan as art either, but stroads in Vegas and LA are certainly photographed quite a bit.

Edit: My comment is confirmed by a few comments just below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29507951

People unironically put up photos of the Painted Ladies and their stroad all the time

Based on the page in the OP, the SF Painted Ladies are about as opposite of a stroad as possible.... No strip malls, giant park across the street, houses all around, low speed limit, characteristic narrow SF street/road... How does that fit the graphic in the OPs link?

In what way are the painted ladies on a stroad? Steiner is a 2 lane street with parking and I think like a <25 mph speed limit. Most of it has bike lanes (although the particular piece in front of the ladies doesn't, or at least didn't until recently). It's very much a street, although it could be a better street.

Could you share such a picture? All the Painted Ladies photos I’ve seen feature a small community street with a top speed of 25mph.

This is so out of touch it's kind of offensive.

Unlike you, most people struggle to make ends meet, are happy they have a job and can provide for their family. The upper-class "let's build architecture that inspires" screams "I have more money and time than I know what to do with".

It's like looking down at people who eat at McDonald's (I got your reference!) with comments like "these folks wouldn't know good food if their life depended on it!".

Sorry not everyone can be rich and have the same "refined" sense of taste that you do. But they're too stupid to know what's best for them, right?

How does someone saying that things could be built better come off as high level elitism? I’ve stayed in small European towns where they have the cultural amenities of an American city perhaps five to six times its population. Normal people can live good, healthy lives there. Normal people struggling to survive while driving everywhere with few healthy options in sight is a manufactured issue.

When someone says :

  "Its the overweight, white trash, lower back tattoo of aesthetics."

It completely comes over as high level elitism.

> overweight, white trash, lower back tattoo

is elitism. Even if it's right, it's elitism.

Poor people aren't building stroads. Cities and states are, and they do have the money to make them safer and more enjoyable for everyone.

We as a society, in many aspects, used to eat AND build better when we were poorer. It is a matter of desire and priority.

Also McDonalds is only cheaper if you’re in a food desert. Which areas that rely on stroads rarely are.

Also, notice how the building around stroads and most “modern” buildings get knocked down and rebuilt every 10 years? Seems like something only a rich society could afford to do.

I have not noticed widespread occurrences of 10-year old buildings being knocked down and rebuilt. Have you noticed this? Where?

A building takes more than a year to build typically; if they were being knocked down every 10 years, the entire city would look like nothing more than a construction site.

We as a society, in many aspects, used to eat AND build better when we were poorer

Spoken like someone whose never been poor.

Stroads are more expensive to build than the alternative, and hence this entire argument can be dismissed outright.

Those evolved out of small towns. For some reason Strongtowns has no perspective on history. That “stroad” wasn’t one a decade earlier, it was a rural road through a small town.

Yeah, it’s be great if it were dense and walkable but guess what, we cant jump from farm land to NYC 5th Ave in one step.

It comes across as incredibly ignorant to be honest.

Hey, this is just a personal attack and has nothing to do with the topic of the post.

The Not Just Bikes youtube channel was quite the rabbit hole. It has convinced me that I really hate North American car-centric cities. It's a shame there's basically no country in the anglosphere designed for pedestrians like most European countries.

The Netherlands may not be an English-first country, but something like 95% of the Dutch speak English, a higher percentage than in Canada(!). In central Amsterdam, the default language may as well be English.

It is also surprisingly easy for Americans to relocate here if they are in a tech career (keyword: highly-skilled migrant) or remote-working/entrepreneurial (keyword: Dutch-American Friendship Treaty). It's even possible to keep paying an income tax rate similar to that of the USA for the first 5 years. Might even be a lower total income tax rate if you're coming from a high-tax state like CA/OR/NY (keyword: 30% ruling).

Some advantages: safety (both in terms of infrastructure and crime); affordable high-quality universal healthcare; efficient government bureaucracy; fast and easy travel throughout the entire country and to France, Germany and the rest of Europe; relaxed attitudes toward dogs compared to the US (generally off-leash friendly and dogs can go into most shops & cafes)

Some disadvantages: higher cost-of-living and lower salaries compared to the US; narrower variety of consumer products (food, clothing, etc.) available than in the US/UK; many say it's difficult to make Dutch friends, especially if you don't speak Dutch (though on the flip side, this effect makes it exceedingly easy to make expat friends); terrain is mostly flat; weather sucks compared to California; many find the Dutch language difficult to learn in spite of (or because of?) its similarities to English

Canadian living in The Netherlands writing to very much agree with all of this. A few comments:

The "efficient government bureaucracy" is only /relatively/ efficient, but yeah, it's actually less of a hassle as an expat than the Canadian system was as a citizen. The best part is that almost everything can be done online through websites that do not suck, but when you interact with a human they are firm but fair and always pleasant (my sunny disposition may contribute to this). There are no parasitic companies like TurboTax (which should not even exist!). Even in the year I bought a house I could complete my taxes by clicking "next" a bunch of times, because all of the numbers were already there.

Speaking of taxes, I feel like I get what I pay for: great (and always improving!) infrastructure, no violence, pervasive poverty, and ever-growing tent cities. The cost of living is higher because the quality of life is higher. When I visited Seattle a couple of years ago I was astounded by the street-level dystopia.

The biggest difficulty in learning the Dutch language is that the Dutch instantly switch to English when they notice you're not a native speaker. :)

My son (12) has since yesterday started claiming that Netherland has the second highest percentage of English-speakers in the world. After the UK I guess? But apparently beating out several native English-speaking countries according to at least one measure.

No idea what that measure is; I have strong doubts, because as much as the Dutch do indeed have a very strong command of English as a second language, we're really not native speakers, and can be very confidently wrong about idiom or pronunciation, even if we may be better at grammar than many native speakers (your/you're; their/they're/there; could of; etc).

That said, we've got a rather extreme housing shortage at the moment, and just this week I read about foreign students who are homeless or living in tents because there's literally nothing else, so I don't think we can actually accommodate a large influx of North Americans seeking better infrastructure. Focusing on fixing your own country is probably better for everybody in the long run.

> we're really not native speakers, and can be very confidently wrong about idiom or pronunciation, even if we may be better at grammar than many native speakers

Trust me, you have no monopoly on being confidently wrong, I'm in the US and have spent significant time in the Netherlands, and it's my opinion that the Dutch have better English skills than most in the US, precisely because it is learned formally. Many people in the US absorb little from the study of English as a language during education.

Two words: "should of" ;)

If you draw the line at country, sure. But America is huge compared to European nation-states.

NYC is very public transportation-oriented. The Northeast corridor Amtrak line also is a big boon!

The itty-bitty bits of America that have any kind of walkable community are incredibly expensive. It’s basically the equivalent of avoiding mediocre American factory food by doing all your shopping at Whole Foods. Why does it have to be a rare luxury to taste what the Europeans have in overflowing abundance?

Because what they have flowing in abundance is a loss in many other ways. Public transit is a generally a worse experience in all but the most urban of places, and even then there's often enough problems that make it significantly less desirable. Biking in the winter? Doable, but also pretty miserable in much of the world.

People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards. Car-centric cities are the price we pay for these things. Personally I think it's worth the trade-off, I would have spent the same money on my 2000sqft house as a <400sqft apartment, and having kids and a dog would have been entirely impractical.

You write like this was made as a conscious decision, based on city planning somehow. There is significant research that shows people are much happier in walkable communities. Moreover, the car centric solution is not scalable as cities grow. Almost 50% of the world population already live in cities worldwide. That number is estimated to grow to 75% over the next 30 years.

It is also interesting that you mention kids. Amongst the poorer and the elderly children are kids the main group to really suffer from the car centric design of cities. Essentially, you completely restrict their mobility, preventing them to move around on their own accord and instead making them relent on parents to drive them somewhere. I would not be surprised if this significantly contributes to the problems of children becoming less and less resilient and independent.

> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards.

People like these houses so much we have to pass laws banning other types of homes on most of our residential land.

Gotta make sure they don't accidentally demand the wrong type of housing!

That is rather suspicious. If people are so fond of this, then why the laws prohibiting the other.

It sounds like there’s a pressure group distorting the market and preventing people from expressing their preferences.

Fairly convincing actually.

The problem is not really necessarily that the car centric city exists, though it certainly has externalities related to health and the climate.

The problem is that only the car centric city exists. Nice walkable places are in extremely short supply and fetch a premium, and so there exist people who buy into the detached house, car centric lifestyle because it is the only thing available at their price point. It is illegal to build the traditional way in most of the country’s land. And making it simply legal to build does not mean that the people who like this lifestyle will be forced to densify.

This is the crux of the issue. I've said it before in HN, but urban density advocates need to focus more on why denser urban neighborhoods are good, rather than focusing on why car-centric suburbs are bad. New urbanists need the support of suburbanites whether they want to admit it or not, railing against people who like having space and privacy is less effective at winning allies than making a solid economic and social case for denser developments. Oftentimes urbanists actually explicitly say they want to "ban surburbs", which does nothing to help their cause or suggest that they are looking for a compromise that involves both dense developments and less dense developments.

For anyone interested in what _winter_ biking infrastructure could look like, some places in Finland have done a great job. Not for everyone, but popular nonetheless:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards. Car-centric cities are the price we pay for these things.

Maybe people don’t even like Personal transport that much, maybe they only use it because of the lack of suitable alternatives? Maybe many people don’t have the „single family home whatever it takes“ attitude and would much prefer a suitable apartment in a somewhat dense walkable neighborhood? It’s no coincidence that the few relatively quiet very walkable neighborhoods often are the most desired places in a city, even here in German cities where the issue is nowhere near as extreme as it is in the US.

Also, car dependency is not just a city planning issue. Car dependency increases the risk of obesity and often results in overall bad health. And what about the kids? Children are totally dependent on their parents for anything transport related until they can drive themselves. Cycling doesn’t seem to be encouraged, let alone walking. Public transport maybe works for school, but rarely for leisure activities. How do you want to raise independent adults if they are totally dependent on you for something as basic as transportation?

I use public transit every day, I love it. I used to live in a city with a light rail system 2 blocks away. Even with that, I would still find it easier to drive and park downtown due to the delays, congestion, and slowness of the light rail line. Walk 5 minutes, wait 5 minutes, cram on, take 20 minute ride, walk 5 minutes VS 15 minute drive. Public transit needs to be either faster or cheaper than driving and it rarely is.

> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards.

Then why are even small houses in walkable neighbourhoods so expensive? Maybe not everyone wants to live like that, but there's clearly demand for that kind of living too. Let's build some for people who want it.

>Then why are even small houses in walkable neighbourhoods so expensive

Location

These small houses are pretty much all necessarily in urban areas and the prices reflects what overpaid doctors lawyers and techies are willing to pay for convenience. The not un-walkable suburbs that are roughly the same distance from the city centers suffer pretty much the same price increase for the same reason.

> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards

I feel it's more like people are conditioned ro like those things. The first time I visited America, I went to my friend's place. It was just homes with big backyards and nothing else. Coming from india, I was frankly disappointed. Staying in a city now and frankly it has much more charecter than those places

Which goes to prove that those stroads weren't built by some evil conspiracy, but ordered and enjoyed by a (sizeable?) part of the population. Which is why they are meant to stay in the States, and reviled outside.

Organic carrots at Whole Foods in NYC are about $1/lb which is slightly less than the average price in France. Food is VERY cheap in the US.

but NYC and Amtrak aren't dramatically better than Toronto and Canadian rail issues that NotJustBikes constantly bashes as pathetically mediocre compared to the Netherlands.

The U.S. definitely has a range of insanely-awful to decent-enough with small now-premium-priced pockets of great bits (which are almost always pre-car neighborhoods that somehow were spared destruction).

Britain is in the anglosphere. We’re not exactly the Netherlands but we’re a whole heap ahead of the US, and getting (very slowly) better. Same goes for New Zealand.

I guess that's the main thing. I wouldn't particularly expect the US to make huge strides here, but e.g. in London the difference between now and years ago is night and day. The Netherlands didn't get to the present-day infrastructure overnight either. (Like London, my home town also improved a lot in the same period, even if it already was in a rather good place.)

UK has plenty of soul-crushing sprawls around every city.

> whole heap ahead of the US

That's a very low bar to clear, come on.

Better? Since when? During my lifetime in Britain it has only got worse. It's so bad now I no longer cycle myself for fear of serious injury or death and don't recommend others do either. Cars have become bigger and there are far more of them. We even see monstrous American cars on our roads now. They've taken more and more of the roads and there's no stopping them. Police don't bother any more.. The roads are in worse shape than ever. Far more money is put into car infrastructure than anything else. I assume you live in London or some other city. Outside of there it's way worse.

I was explicitly talking about cities because that's the context of the subthread (and indeed the OP). London, Cambridge, Birmingham, Manchester etc. are installing protected cycle infrastructure that was basically unheard of 10 years ago. I do agree that rural roads are more hostile for cycling now, and your assumption as to where I live is wrong.

I can only speak for Manchester but people here have looked at the cycle infrastructure and taken it as a signal to ride around dressed all in black with no lights. I don't think the accident rate will go down.

That means they feel safe. It's an improvement in infrastructure.

The next step (Amsterdam, Copenhagen) is to ride around in black, with no lights, while drunk.

>It's a shame there's basically no country in the anglosphere designed for pedestrians like most European countries.

Was also a bit confused why Britain and Ireland are not considered by the parent. Sure, they do not have as good cycling infrastructure as the Netherlands. But both of them are equally good at being pedestrian friendly - exactly what has been asked - and I'd say are even more pedestrian friendly than most European countries.

That's because people like their cars. You may not, but many people do. And I've traveled in many countries and it's not like cars are uniquely American.

People like their cars because the city design makes all alternatives comically impractical.

Nope. I live in a country with high quality transit and the first thing people buy when they can afford it is a car.

Why? Convenience, flexibility, ability to haul a family.

Cars certainly aren’t a requirement if you have good walkability and/transit, but given the choice many people prefer cars.

There is a big difference between buying a car and doing literally every trip in a car because the only connection from the place you sleep to anywhere is six lane road with speeds exceeding 40mph.

Of course cars are convenient for some things. I live in a city where the majority of households has access to a car, but only a quarter of the trips (accounting for 40% of the traveled distance) are made by car. I still consider the city to be built very car-centric, but it's a wholly different world from what I experienced when visiting the US.

>There is a big difference between buying a car and doing literally every trip in a car because the only connection from the place you sleep to anywhere is six lane road with speeds exceeding 40mph.

This is a massive over-generalization that pretty much only applies to the suburbs that were built out in the 1950s and 1960s mostly in the southern half of the country. As those suburbs have densified over the decades (where allowed by law, so not the southwest) some of them have become pretty darn walk-able.

I have a car, and was excited to get one when I moved out of NYC a couple years back.

But I hate using it for day-to-day tasks. For me, it's a machine that lets me take fun trips on the weekend, or go see family in their car-dependent towns and cities. If I want to go to a brewery, or stop by the post office, or shop for a few small items, or just go to a park, I would literally always rather do it on my bike or on foot. Driving around cities is miserable.

I have a car too. But when the opportunity exists, I will always prefer to go by bike. My kids ride bikes too, and my 7-year old son prefers to ride to his swimming lessons on his own bike. The car is only really for when we leave the city, or occasionally when we quickly need to go to the complete opposite end of the city and it's close to the motorway.

When given the choice between bad bike/walking infrastructure and cars, people prefer cars. But when you give them good infrastructure, many prefer bikes.

> Nope. I live in a country with high quality transit and the first thing people buy when they can afford it is a car.

I, too, live in a country with high quality transit and also got a car when i had a family and i could afford a car.

i have about 1400 km per year on it. having a car and driving it are two different things.

I find this is true nearly anywhere you go in the world, even in countries with excellent public transit (e.g. Korea, Japan, Taiwan). The moment people have the money to afford a car, they buy one. The only places I've seen that this is not the case are isolated, hyper-dense city states (Hong Kong and Singapore).

Most people don't like driving.

People might like their cars for the freedom of movement they provide - like being able to transport cargo without a headache; being able to go on a weekend trip with family; etc. But they certainly don't like their cars for having to spend 2 hours a day just to get to their workplace and back home.

They tolerate it.

That's why manuals are dying, that's why cars now HAVE to have things preventing distracted drivers from dying, that's why autopiloted car manufacturers are swimming in money thrown at them by everyone despite showing no results.

Should you ask why they tolerate it - the reason is very simple. The alternatives - cycling and public transport - have seen close to none of investments in the past decades all over the world. And therefore provide a horrible and humiliating experience to its users.

Also, the focus on cars allowed many cities and even countries to get lazy at planning and providing equal infrastructure to all districts. Having a smaller school in your neighbourhood is better for the kids - they could go there by themselves with friends and not spend much time doing nothing in traffic everyday. But because everyone has cars government will do the cheaper thing and build a bigger school that isn't convenient to anyone.

People shouldn't have to drive everyday.

All neighbourhoods should have adequate commercial and infrastructural exposure on the spot. No driving to school, groceries or GP. And when you have to commute, alternatives to driving should provide a better experience. Then many people would opt not to drive even if commute is needed, and therefore people like me - who like to drive - would have the roads free of traffic jams and distracted drivers, and be able to actually enjoy the experience.

Yes but designing roads that are hostile to anything other than a car, thus forcing people into cars, is very common in America.

Cars are nice, but I don't think people like being forced to drive because the other options all suck shit.

People like being able to walk and bike places too, IF the walk and bike options are actually decent (in terms of safety/comfort and distance).

And people certainly don't like getting fat, and yet there's a strong link between car-dominant infrastructure and weight. Surprise surprise, getting exercise as part of your transportation is a lot more reliable than getting exercise as leisure.

Is this a chicken and egg thing though? Do people like their cars because the world they live in requires cars, and thus they become part of their identity?

The question is not whether people have cars (they do) or whether they like them or not (some do and some don't). The question is whether the infrastructure forces people to use a car for every single errand. Much less road space is needed if cars are not required for everything. And if one actually likes cars one is more likely to enjoy driving through the mountains than going grocery shopping by car.

of course they do, that's the whole issue. in many situations it is better for the whole if people don't get everything they want. that's where regulation should come in. "people like it" is shortsighted thinking, prone to local optima, and should not be the sole criterion for policy decisions

Sure, but don’t act like it’s better when it’s not. Just admit to people they can’t have the better option so they should just deal with it.

That's its job. It's there to outrage you, but the reality is it doesn't teach you to do much else. The reality is, low density living in countries like the US rely on this structure.

The same way most of South Korea, including low density zones is built using large apartment blocks... because that's just what works for the country and there's no such thing as being a jack of all trades.

I've disliked the apples to oranges and emotional bias present in those videos since the start. But people eat it up. Shame.

NJB is not an "outrage" channel, that is utterly absurd. It's an information channel that mostly shows you how things work in the Netherlands and makes the case that it's a better way than the idiotic car-centric north American way.

If you're outraged after watching his videos, it's not his fault, it's the fault of your city planners.

I’m mostly outraged that the YouTube algorithm keeps showing me his crap just because I like cities skylines. His content is trash and despite consistently disliking it YouTube just won’t learn.

Dislikes have little effect on whether a channel is recommended, only individual videos and the related videos to that specific one. Also to dislike a video you need to click it in the first place, which tells YouTube you potentially like content of this sort but the individual videos aren't up to your expectations so it's going to keep trying.

As another poster said there is a way to get YouTube to stop recommending the channel to you. Use that instead.

Sidenote: i think it's hilarious that it's consistently the car lovers that think NJB is trash. Loving cars immediately must mean that his high quality, well researched content is "trash". Not something you personally dislike, not something you disagree with, no no, the worst trash in the world.

I guess disliking that channel is a useful shibboleth to spot the guy driving an SUV.

> Loving cars immediately must mean that his high quality, well researched content is "trash".

Why is it surprising that people who love cars don't like a channel that basically says you're a bad person if you don't think cars should be abolished?

You can click the three dots beside such videos then select "Don't recommend channel", you won't see these videos in your "Home" section of YouTube. There are a few gurning-in-the-thumbnail types that I've stopped seeing altogether after doing this.

If your issue is that you play a video then just keep watching whatever YT shows you next and it's sometimes this person, then I'm not sure if this solves that problem since I don't do this personally

Thanks!

I've come to understand that there are things that have three or so factors, and you will never get rid of them.

1. Views. Usually boosted by getting bandwagoned on a place like Reddit. High viewed videos pop up everywhere, irrelevant or not.

2. Feel good factor, which sprouts from feeling like you learnt something new or can change the world now.

3. Emotional mob mentality. People refuse to believe things are the way they are for anything other than "bad design" or "someone did it wrong". Capitalising on this, is factor three.

Some videos fill these 3 boxes and they just show up time and time again, EVERYWHERE. It's the algorithm of the internet, and YouTube loves to lead it.

I wish there were a way to "block" youtube channels. I feel similarly about this specific content source, but there are a bunch of others who are far worse on other topics.

There is a way, at least in europe? "Do not recommend the channel" in the options.

It is an outrage channel.

>It's an information channel that mostly shows you how things work in the Netherlands and makes the case that it's a better way than the idiotic car-centric north American way.

Yes. Comparing apples to oranges. What an outrage! My apples have less vitamin C! How dare they.

>If you're outraged after watching his videos

I'm not. But the majority who do watch the video are. It's his fault. The same way people are outraged at many things unjustly after watching a video filled with bias.

Are people outraged by what he says, or by the reality he exposes? Should that reality then remain hidden to keep people complacent?

I think it's reality that's outrageous, and it's people like NJB and Strong Towns that are pointing out it could be better, they are pointing out how to make it better. People are outraged because they realise how bad their infrastructure is, and how much better it could be. That's a positive, constructive type of outrage. It's not just fomenting anger for its own sake (as indeed happens way too often in other media).

It can't be better. That's the point.

If someone told you that it can't be better, and it was the truth, you'd get pretty outraged at them when another person claimed that it was all just bad design and that they didn't want you to have the better thing.

It's pretty obvious when you have no emotion to channel.

Comparing apples to oranges is an easy way to get anyone upset. After all, who wouldn't want both?

So you're saying it's an outrage channel based on what evidence? You say that the car centric cities of North America are like they are by thoughtful design and that NJB creates outrage by depicting this design as verfiably inferior while in reality it is just "what works for the country". So can you elaborate what is better (and works better) about the design of a car centric "stroad" City compared to a walkable city?

If it's an outrage channel how come I'm not outraged after watching all of his content?

What i am is pleased to have learned a lot about dutch urban design. If anything outrages me, it's how you keep insisting this channel "compares" anything when all it does is showcases dutch cities, and once in a while complains about specific issues in his hometown of London ON.

It's interesting how more city planning articles are making their way to HN. I've just been to the Nobel week dialogues yesterday discussing the city of the future (https://www.nobelprize.org/events/nobel-week-dialogue/Gothen...).

For those who have not heard of them, the Nobel week dialogues are discussions, talks with some of the leading experts on a given topic together with Nobel prize winners who have often worked on the same topic since winning the prize. It's a free event, held in either Gothenburg or Stockholm. On the 9th of December every year. But the great thing is that since the pandemic they have started to live stream the event so everyone from around the world can join. I highly recommend everyone to check it out, it is not often that you can see 5 or more nobel prize winners in one place.

Municipal planning has broad mass market appeal and is easy to bikeshed. It's not hard to see why HN loves it.

I love that this highlights an oft-missed truth about Urbanism and shifting our urban landscape: this is going to take a long time. It's going to take many decades, and it's going to require waiting for individual human beings to literally die before we get to start making the changes we want to make.

I mean, unless we can get someone really excited about this into federal office in which case it _might_ be possible to do what we did in the US with the interstate system but in reverse, but that'd require a pretty different political landscape than the one we're in now, I suspect.

I used to agree that these things take a long time, but since the pandemic my local council in Ireland has acted very quickly to build excellent bike infrastructure and curtail car access to village spaces [1]. Many roads got changed to one-way, to make way for segregated bike lanes. Pre-pandemic, there was dallying for years over building this stuff, but now its there, and the world hasn't imploded for motorists, and local businesses and residents are 99% very happy.

Of course when local government doesn't have the will it won't happen, but if they do, it can happen very quickly.

[1] https://www.dlrcoco.ie/en/civic-amenities-urban-design/dlr-c...

Yes, the pandemic has accelerated this, but everyone involved needs to be open for the possibility from the beginning. Here in Germany when someone proposes something like this there is a storm of protest from small businesses: "what we are already on the brink of bankruptcy with everyone ordering stuff online or going to supermarkets with huge parking lots and now you want to cut us off from our customers do you want to kill us off completely?!?!" (because everyone knows real customers come in cars, pedestrians and cyclists obviously don't have the money to afford a car, so they can't afford anything else either).

I've written about this on a similar post previously. The town I grew up in in Germany (Lüneburg for those familiar with Germany), turned some of the central city into a pedastrian mall about 30-40 years ago. I still remember the local newspaper being full of angry letters from local businesses complaining that this would be the death of the city centre, everyone would go shopping at the big malls on the outside of town which will soon pop up etc.. In reality the exact opposite happened the city centre is packed with people, the city is immensely popular with tourists who come from all over and many of the big "shopping centres " outside of town disappeared.

At the moment there are discussions on expending the pedestrian zones further and the same arguments are being made by businesses, it is as if nobody learned anything.

I've heard similar stories about Paris and other places. Business often resist changing their street to a pedestrian area, and every time it turns out that it will actually boost their business.

I think a true shift towards Urbanism in our cities may be only possible if there's a whole lot of money in it for somebody with political leverage. But who? I'm not sure. Real estate developers? They're already making money hand over fist building our cities in the shitty car-centric way. When the US made its shift to car-centricity with the interstate highway system, there was a ton of money in it for oil companies, and car companies. Who "wins" when we shift our building patterns towards Urbanism? Aside from everyone who gets to live there, of course. I feel like big political changes like this don't happen unless someone who stands to gain is busy lobbying to make it happen. And I don't know what, if any, entity stands to gain a lot from building pedestrian-friendly, dense, beautiful cities.

One of strong road’s arguments is that denser neighborhoods bring in much more tax revenue compared to strip malls and stroads. Take a classic, large mall. You could instead house hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the same space, as well as scores of small businesses. The tax revenue there would be much higher than if most of the space is a parking lot that, on average, is rarely fully utilized.

The main point of their argument is that strip malls and stroads and suburbia is unsustainable because it can’t generate enough tax revenue to support its infrastructure.

I think this means that entities do stand to gain from better planning, but it’s over the long term. You can’t build it in a year and expect it to be immediately full, but you can expect it to survive the long term (unlike the mall).

This is a good argument but I wonder how unaffordable sprawl is. Is it true across the board? Are there some that have done it better than others? I find it a bit of a stretch to say they are all unsustainable but maybe they're right I don't know.

It depends on the affluence of residents whether they can afford the much higher taxes required to maintain the infrastructure for urban sprawl (as well as its externalities), but it's always more expensive.

>Who "wins" when we shift our building patterns towards Urbanism? Aside from everyone who gets to live there, of course. I feel like big political changes like this don't happen unless someone who stands to gain is busy lobbying to make it happen. And I don't know what, if any, entity stands to gain a lot from building pedestrian-friendly, dense, beautiful cities.

You may be interested in a policy the UK government is considering:

https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Strong-Subu...

The idea is to let small groups of residents (a single street) vote to loosen planning restrictions in specific ways, allowing for incremental intensification of suburbs.

From that proposal:

"The housing crisis is often presented as a zero-sum conflict. More houses must be built to avoid rising homelessness, falling home ownership, and wider economic stagnation. But they can only be built by forcing them through against the will of local people, either by imposing high-rise on our historic centres, or by concreting over our countryside with more suburban housing estates. On this analysis, the interests of those who already own homes are fundamentally opposed to the interests of those who do not, and policy is simply a matter of choosing which interest group will triumph over the other. This analysis is profoundly mistaken. The appearance of opposed interests is the result of a defective system, which excludes existing communities from the benefits of development while imposing on them its adverse effects. If existing communities are allowed to control the form of development and to share in the benefits that it brings, they can become enthusiastic supporters."

I like it. I do hope it is possible for communities to become enthusiastic supporters.

The more I read of this proposal the more I like it. It feels realistic. I feel like it properly addresses the reasons people oppose development and offers a practical way out of the bind.

I know right? Reading it is like a pleasant balm. Sensible and humane, especially compared to a lot of the other stuff the UK government gets up to nowadays. I really hope it gets through Second Reading in 2022.

It's more likely to happen haphazardly, within small council areas over a long time as cities naturally evolve to suit their changing residents.

Not everyone wants to live in a human anthill though

They can go live in the country. That’s part of what’s good about Urbanism - it lets the city become a real city, and it reduces or reverses sprawl, which leaves more of the rural areas undeveloped. The city should be city, and the country country. It’s the in-between stuff that’s problematic.

Cultural-scale planning and prediction are hard.

Things move slowly and gradually until they suddenly don't. Much of the infrastructure presently dominant in the US dates to 1960/1970, and depending on where specifically you were in the country before then, things changed in a pretty major way with the birth of the Interstate Highway System (1960s), urban flight and suburban development (1950s), WWII (1940s), the Great Depression (1930s), and the first really big mechanisation and electrification drive (1910s--1920s).

Starting somewhere around 1960--1970, things levelled off. No major wars, no major economic disruptions, and for the most part no major new landscape-transforming technological inventions. (For those looking to criticise, note the key word major, which is not a synonym for any.)

I'd argue that things began shifting by 2001 with 9/11, the 2007--8 global financial crisis, the 2016 election, mobile + social + algorithmic Internet hitting critical mass, and since late 2019, the COVID-19 global pandemic, now entering its third year. Climate change impacts are also likely to be felt increasingly, with Blade Runner skies over much of the West Coast of the US being one interesting sign that the future has arrived.

Transformational change is a bit like going broke: it happens slowly at first, then suddenly.

If only our nation were able to pass some sort of "infrastructure bill".

No, I mean one that actually did what it said on the tin.

It's not just (or maybe even primarily) about money. As is indicated in the first part of the OP, changing things means changing things that a lot of people are fine with, affecting many businesses, causing a lot of disruption, etc.

I'd be fine with more walkable areas but it's not just about spending money.

IMO this is a question of ignorance. Most Americans simply don't understand that there are (far superior) alternatives to car-dependent suburbia. It's just not on their radar.

Hopefully channels like "Not Just Bikes" and our own social dissemination of the walk/bike/transit oriented urban development model will allow more Americans to understand what they're missing.

Once enough people in a given urban area realize what they could have, perhaps the political will to improve will materialize.

I don't much care for suburbs and like cities only in moderation. I prefer the country within striking distance of a large city. I'm perfectly aware of what an urban environment is like--I've lived in both Cambridge and NYC--and while there are things I like about it (I'm staying in one this week) it's not something I want full-time.

Seeing as those are both American cities, it's not surprising you don't like it. Even our best cities are pretty disappointing when compared to what Europe and Asia have to offer.

3 words: Manhattan bike lanes.

They're everywhere now even the bridges, the ebike messengers own the streets and slowed down the cars, Lyft bought citibike stop you don't need another app, so it's now a joy to bike NYC, even as a tourist. Really.

this is going to take a long time.'

The present world changes fast, when it changes. When someones says "this will take decades", I usually interpret that as "this isn't happening, there's nothing making it happen, only people talking".

The discussion is the first 20 years of the 25 year process.

The US is pretty fucked, but if at the non federal level some government can start issuing a fuck ton of bonds and do interesting things, we can see more change.

A basic horseshit politics in the US is to act like nothing is possible without controlling government (super-majorities if needed) at all levels.

We must work around that, because it will not happen reliably. Might need states to start seceding too.

----

Also recommend reading some post-Keynesian things about big projects such as http://jwmason.org/slackwire/climate-policy-from-a-keynesian...

The neat idea is that the extra work from rapid change makes a society richer, not poorer. (There is old "oil spills increases GDP" memes on this front.)

The flip side is

> Today’s neoliberal macroeconomic model depends on limiting economic growth as a way of managing distributional conflicts.

I.e. the stagnation serves a purpose of making labor not too needed and thus pliant. (We get a little tighter labor markets now, and good things because of it.)

The upshot is that if you can score some "against the odds" political victories doing more rapid denser develop development, you will get not only the increased "real" efficiency from better land utilization (and all the other good health, beauty, etc.) benefits, but also extra growth from the expenditures needed to retool things.

Build subway, build a bunch of public housing, increase area population by a few million. This stuff is less ridiculous than it sounds.

"Stroad" seems to be a recently popularized by strongtowns. I'm curious if anyone has actually managed to measure this sort of thing? My suspicion is that it "stroads" are essentially to-wide streets, and it should be possible to find research indicating that streets should be narrower, because widening them causes people to drive too fast. I was only able to find the following, coverage, though:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/05/27/compelling-evidence-t...

https://thecityfix.com/blog/bigger-isnt-always-better-narrow...

They both seem to fundamentally go back to a single conference paper, "Narrower Lanes, Safer Streets." I don't know those blogs, and a single conference paper is -- I mean the paper is probably good but, hard to build a case on just one paper.

What is up with this? Computer engineers produce reams and reams of papers. Where are the civ.Es hiding their secrets?

edit: changed slightly, original text seemed unintentionally dismissive.

It's definitely a word coined by Strong Towns. But, a "new" made up word? I guess it depends on your scale of "new."

The oldest reference to "Stroad" on strongtowns.org I've found is this[1] from January 2, 2012.

That makes the term nearly 10 years old. That being said, this term has been getting much more popular over the last couple years, especially due to Not Just Bikes.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/1/2/the-cost-of-aut...

Yeah, I edited that because it looked unintentionally dismissive (fwiw I think it is a great term). I think it is just blowing up now.

the argument is that streets and roads serve fundamentally different purposes and thus have different design goals, and stroads do both and thus fail at both. Roads are for transit, getting cars a long distance between interest points, and streets are for navigating within a point of interest like a neighbourhood. Roads want to optimise for higher cruising speed and streets are to optimise for parking, mixed-use with pedestrians and cyclists, etc. You can't combine these things - it's not a measurement divide but a categorical one.

it is a made up word, but all words are made up.

Traffic engineer here. Generally there is a hierarchy of roads called functional class. It goes local street - collector - minor arterial - major arterial - freeway. From local to freeway the speeds increase and the land access decreases. Good urban design should connect only roads one "step" apart, that is local roads should only connect to collectors and so forth. Reality is clearly different.

I would imagine everyone can think of a local road that is more convenient than another route therefore attracting high traffic volumes. These roads become problematic without improving the proper route. The other side of the coin is an arterial that is built but too many accesses are allowed to connect to it. In my home town this has happened when the city council caved to developers and allowed residential construction on a major arterial because nobody wanted to build commercial developments at the time. Jump ahead 10 years and there is now a strange neighborhood with driveways directly on the busiest street in town.

Changing roads is very tricky due to the funding sources. Usually local roads are only eligible for local funding where as arterials are eligible for federal funding. There are exceptions and it is much more nuanced than can be explained in one paragraph.

> Generally there is a hierarchy of roads called functional class. It goes local street - collector - minor arterial - major arterial - freeway.

This heirarchy seems to miss the importance distinction that Strong Towns makes between a "street" and a "road", in that "streets" are places where human life takes place, and "roads" are how vehicles move rapidly from place to place. It has only category with the word "street" literally present, and then moves immediately to other things whose relationship to the street/road distinction is unclear. This is a problem because streets include those that are purely residental as well as those with retail etc.

> Usually local roads are only eligible for local funding where as arterials are eligible for federal funding.

This is part of the problem. Want to build infrastructure to support walking or biking or transit? Fill out a grant, maaayyyybe the feds will help.

Want to build a highway that'll be used as a local road because the area is super low density? Excellent! *Uncle Sam's wallet instantly flies open*

Thank you for the informative post!

I'll actually defend the stroad, they work fine so long as you don't allow parking, and you limit the driveways to 2-3 per "block" - anything more than that and they cease to function as an street or a road. Often the stroad is just a section with a bunch of businesses on an otherwise well designed arterial road.

The pictures they post of supposed stroads look like normal arterials to me.

Where I live there's a diamond interchange between two state highways controlled only by stop-signs at the end of the off-ramps towards the smaller of the two.

Near that interchange there is a neighborhood. For whatever reason, both sides of the neighborhood have traffic lights, so when traffic is heavy, if you want to go from the larger to smaller highway (particularly if you want to turn left!), it's far more expedient to cut through the neighborhood.

>Changing roads is very tricky due to the funding sources. Usually local roads are only eligible for local funding where as arterials are eligible for federal funding. There are exceptions and it is much more nuanced than can be explained in one paragraph.

Don't get me started on all the perfectly functional things they screw up because some jerk central planner in DC wrote a spec based on national averages.

I get the idea, and I'm in favor of removing stroads. I think it would be more compelling if it was backed up by some data. Finding actual data on stroads is basically impossible because it is not a term-of-art as far as I can tell.

Try the terms "road diet" and "traffic calming", they will yeild more results. While not exactly the same concept, they are terms that have been in use within the industry for much longer.

Just yesterday was thinking about how much pavement is between me and my neighbors across the street. Standard suburbia single family home area, and I think we could have a car on each side of the street and still pass two cars through side by side, though thankfully cars never need to slow down out of fear of hitting things - one side is no parking. It's a ton of infrastructure and maintenance cost that is never fully utilized. Even at the peak of demand (Christmas or Thanksgiving probably) we're not all hosting at the same time, and most likely two very nearby neighbors will be traveling (not taking up street space, and probably fine with you parking in their driveway if you ask permission).

On top of the massive street, everyone has driveways that can hold 2-3 vehicles and typically 2 sometimes 3 garage stalls (though many are filled with "stuff", an entirely separate issue).

You're looking for what is known as "the green book" published by aashto

Geometric Design of Highways and Streets

https://aashtojournal.org/2018/09/28/aashto-releases-7th-edi...

But this comes after the traffic and environmental and planning studies, so it's more of a "how" to build, after you've at least gone through some preliminary design and figured out "what" to build.

And yes, there is literally a table (for highways at least) that gives values for lane width vs the "natural speed" that drivers gravitate to.

> "Stroad" seems to be a new made-up word by strongtowns

Thank you! I clicked the link and then scrolled through several top-level comments thinking that either this was some sort of internet joke that I wasn't previously aware of or I somehow managed to not learn word that everyone else has always known.

It looks like they came up with it in 2013 actually, I've only recently bumped into it (and suddenly, multiple times). I think it might be in the process of becoming a thing for... I dunno, there's a particular group of people online who get really into very specific policy things and kind of meme about them, but also kind of try and make solid arguments for them.

The word makes very limited appearance in the Google Ngram English 2019 corpus:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=stroad&year_st...

I suspect most of those are spurious.

Google Trends tends to be better for terms coined / come into common usage after the year 2000.

Even that's pretty spotty:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore#q=stroad

Check out: https://austroads.com.au/about-austroads

https://www.ite.org/

https://www.nationalacademies.org/trb/transportation-researc...

Honestly a lot of research in the transportation engineering field is paywalled. Some state DOTs have research departments that have free resources.

Thanks -- it has been neat to see some comments from somebody who knows the industry in this thread.

For those that want context on stroads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM&t=1s

I have a house in Sunnyvale, California a few blocks from El Camino Real. It's the ultimate stroad, hundreds of miles long and lined with thriving businesses and I love it. It's getting really quite clean and quiet now a ridiculous proportion of traffic around here is Teslas.

Take it from someone who grew up in Santa Clara: El Camino Real fucking sucks.

Now, many businesses along El Camino Real are great, don't get me wrong. But the road itself is miserable. When we lived in Sunnyvale there was a bigass Korean market literally across the street from us; we'd only drive there, despite it being, again, directly across the street, because that's how painful and dangerous-feeling it was to cross by foot.

This is not a problem we ever had while living in Munich.

> we'd only drive there, despite it being, again, directly across the street

That is just bizarre.

And it's important to understand how inefficient this is to need a car to cross the street; you need parking space on this side, parking space on the other side, you need to get on and off the stroad, causing wear, interfering with and slowing down the other traffic, which is mostly through traffic that's not interested at all in your house or that Korean market. It's unbelievably inefficient.

It's much more efficient if through traffic is separated from local traffic, if you can walk to the store, if stores are close to each other with one central parking space from which you can easily reach them all, and if people only use cars for trips that intrinsically require a car.

I'm not sure what you're imagining, but this is probably the location being discussed: https://goo.gl/maps/UJr6wGZ6GEhQypWg9

If not that particular market, there's similar ones along either direction of the stroad. The whole area is designed for cars, it's not walkable. Yes it's inefficient, but totally understandable why OP drives to cross a street.

Correct. Also, when I lived there, they didn’t have those lights. There was a crosswalk, but crossing vs 3 lanes of traffic each direction with no pedestrian island felt like playing chicken with every driver at once. Did it a couple times to try and make walking work, but it was clearly dangerous.

>And it's important to understand how inefficient this is to need a car to cross the street; you need parking space on this side, parking space on the other side, you need to get on and off the stroad, causing wear, interfering with and slowing down the other traffic, which is mostly through traffic that's not interested at all in your house or that Korean market. It's unbelievably inefficient.

But is this inefficiency and resultant drag on prosperity balanced out by making the market more efficient to access for people up and down the road?

If he had to cross the tracks to get to the market you could basically come up with the same list of gripes. Naive analysis like that is not useful.

But is it actually more efficient for others to access that market? The market needs a massive parking lot to accommodate those cars, which means they need a lot of ground. That too is inefficient. I've seen a comparison of two commercial blocks close together; one was old, had a row of old shops along the street and hadn't really been changed much since the 1920s or so. The other was new, modern, had a parking lot serving a single fast-food restaurant. But that meant it had only a single restaurant, and that single restaurant just didn't make anywhere near as much money as that row of old shops.

Elsewhere in this discussion someone pointed out that shops owners often resist attempts to turn their street into a pedestrian-only area, because they fear it will drive away their customers, but every time it turns out to be a boost to those shops. Turns out the car isn't actually that important. You can save a lot of wasted space and money by making shops more accessible to other forms of traffic.

> But is it actually more efficient for others to access that market? The market needs a massive parking lot to accommodate those cars....

See my point about the train. Sure people who could formerly just walk across the street or tracks lose but those pieces of infrastructure make the destination far more accessible. You turn one person's 1min trip into a 15min trip but you also turn hours long trips into 15-25min trips. Obviously rail is higher density (and much higher cost) but it's farcical to pretend like the road has no net benefit when clearly it allows more access to the attractive destination (market in this case) even if a few people's access is degraded.

>Elsewhere in this discussion someone pointed out that shops owners often resist attempts to turn their street into a pedestrian-only area, because they fear it will drive away their customers, but every time it turns out to be a boost to those shops.

Perhaps because the changes only ever get implemented where they actually make sense.

Where I live people raised the walk-ability issue twice in recent memory. It got implemented where it obviously made sense (near downtown) and didn't where it didn't (a strip mall area farther away).

> I've seen a comparison of two commercial blocks close together; one was old, had a row of old shops along the street and hadn't really been changed much since the 1920s or so. The other was new, modern, had a parking lot serving a single fast-food restaurant. But that meant it had only a single restaurant, and that single restaurant just didn't make anywhere near as much money as that row of old shops.

This means nothing without knowing the underlying economic circumstances, Buffalo NY vs NYC and all that.

> But is this inefficiency and resultant drag on prosperity balanced out by making the market more efficient to access for people up and down the road?

Nobody's saying we shouldn't have fast roads that are good for cars, just that they shouldn't be the same thing as where people go to shop. Stroads are the compromise of essentially putting businesses along the freeway.

> If he had to cross the tracks to get to the market you could basically come up with the same list of gripes.

No, this is incorrect.

There was actually a housing development I was interested in in Munich with exactly the setup you're talking about: the apartment buildings were on one side of the tracks and directly adjacent to said tracks and the train station, with two grocery stores on the other side. I would go there with my son occasionally to shop, and he and I would both easily cross under said tracks, because there was an underpass, and it's MUCH easier and cheaper to build a ped/bike underpass for two lanes of tracks than a 6+ car lane road.

Here it is on Google Maps if you're interested: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Siemenswerke/@48.0927833,1...

> But is this inefficiency and resultant drag on prosperity balanced out by making the market more efficient to access for people up and down the road?

If the current configuration really is the most efficient, why does the government feel the need to mandate it (through parking minimums)? Wouldn't private interests build it anyway?

I think big parking lots can be justified sometimes. But what we now is not "build big parking lots when efficient", it's "build big parking lots everywhere, even when it's not needed".

I cross El Camino Real on foot all the time. Yes my nearest section has has 3 lanes in each direction, but it has marked pedestrian crossings with traffic lights and drivers obey the lights. However, I admit, I frequently drive to things in my neighborhood because things are far apart and when you chain a few local errands together it is much faster to drive. Every business has parking nearby so driving is easy.

I used to travel regularly to my company’s satellite office in Sunnyvale. My hotel was less than a mile away, so I walked the 20 minutes instead of opting for a rental car. Because that’s what I do in Seattle.

I’m certain that I was the only pedestrian around for miles.

Oh god I lived a block from El Camino Real in Santa Clara and I hated it. I really felt like I was surrounded on all sides by concrete (I would say this to people at the time). I grew up in a forest and being so close to so many cars was not for me. Different strokes for different folks though I’m glad you enjoy it! But your experience is so different from mine I thought I would share.

My city just installed three roundabouts each about 500m from each. Three in a row on a four land (two each way) road. I'm all for roundabouts but it looks a mess. Some of the outer lanes end too without any sign to indicate that it ends. Stroads are designed by busybodies who are given too much money.

I used to be able to go over a small bridge that's over a small stream and turn left to get to my aunt's house. The bridge is now 10m higher has four lanes. Plus I have to drive 2km down the road go through two roundabouts come back the way I came just to get back to where I would have turned left in the old days.

Drive over the meridian, gouge the greenway, and leave tire streaks repeatedly. Then have a friend take pictures and start bugging your local politicians about the lack of consistent access. Have them make the point that paying to continually clean up after people will cost more than putting in a comfortable number of access openings. They'll be able to fix it and look like they're saving the city money at the same time, everybody wins.

Like a desire path for cars! Tired of having to drive around the local park? Just drive through it, the council will get the hint!

The Texas off-ramp.

We need that road... think of the children!

The problem with that is that the bad changes were likely made in part because "people are stupid and we need to save them from themselves" and giving them the bird like you suggest may make them double down.

I highly recommend the film "Together we cycle" for those that are interested in learning about the Netherlands' struggle with car dependency in the 20th century.

It's funny. As someone who has never been to the US stroads are what define the American urban landscape for me and what I want to experience. They feel really exotic. It's like being in an American movie or TV show.

Are you thinking of actual stroads or rather simply the large american roads?

US roads definitely have a cool factor to them but American stroads are awful and really not something you want to experience.

I remember taking a two hour walk in Irvine a decade ago. Walking in a straight line, palm trees in the middle of the stroad to separate the ten lanes, walking, walking... Nothing changing around me other than the names of the shops.

I didn't fully understand what made me feel so uneasy and what made the whole thing so surreal. I realized years later what i had experienced then.

It was not a good experience. I had little room to walk, almost died three times. I eventually hitchhiked and was picked up by a car, the woman who picked me up had two kids in the back and as soon as I hopped in the front seat, closed the door and said thank you, she said "and don't you try anything, I have a gun".

The whole trip left me with a horrible taste in my mouth that can only be rivaled by marmite.

It's actual stroads that stand out to Europeans. The excessively-wide, long, straight roads with an enormous lit-up business sign every 200-500m. "Motel 6", "Firestone", "Tire Center", then an American flag as big as a house[1].

In TV and films, they're not clogged with traffic, and they don't show it takes 10 minutes of driving to visit 3 shops.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3524597,-121.981251,3a,75y,2...

No, you really don't want to experience them. Transiting them by any means is an exercise in frustration. Cars and trucks clog the asphalt. Sidewalks are few and not interconnected. Two shops might be next to each other, but you have to drive between them because walking is like Frogger brought to life. So you waste your day sitting at red lights, being honked at, and wishing you were anywhere else.

No, the parent comment should experience them in the way I love dystopian fiction, at arms length. They should also make sure it never makes it to their corner of reality.

Experience as a tourist, or as a parent with children who have bikes?

I used to be impressed by these massive American roads too, but I understand much better now why they exist and how impractical they really are.

As a fun note, I immediately recognized the location of this stroad pictured. I live relatively close to it. There's been a lot of new development there recently. They just redeveloped a large chunk of the area including launching a major Costco and an Amazon Fresh.

I would honestly say it's a pretty healthy travel thoroughfare. It gets backed up during rush hour, but even interstates do here, so that's not unusual.

How is it walking or biking? Or is it only healthy if you’re in a couple thousand pound armored living room on wheels?

the nice thing about southern Texas is that we don't have to worry about walking/biking, not gonna happen in 105 degrees.

I'm so much more comfortable in here compared to Seattle. Car AC is great for my allergies, and I'm no longer a sweaty mess.

To be honest 40C is quite doable, as long as you have shade (trees) water features (lakes/rivers) and a distance of a couple of km - I’ve cycled like that for fun, not just to get to a destination.

Now I would never do that on such an asphalt desert of course, a car is way more comfortable, the question remains why would you turn a lush greenery (as I’d imagine a texan climate could be) into something you’re only comfortable crossing in heavy and expensive survival gear. Especially if living in that gear leads to all the allergies you’ve mentioned.

Where I live if I wanted to cycle the worst would be snow followed by cycles of thawing and freezing, which leaves the routes a miserable mess, so I have to fire up my trusty corolla, but apart from that (20% of the time) I prefer biking for sure.

And I live in the shithole of the european union, the poorest of the member states, and am constantly amazed how much better the city planning is here, even with all of its flaws.

For example a UK colleague when visiting sent a picture how he got lost in a wilderness forest, on his way on foot from the downtown hotel to the office, since the capital itself is littered with small pockets of lush (and I mean really lush) greenery.

I can’t imagine what great things could be accomplished if you had the resources of a place like texas… You could make your city be so great, people go there as a tourist just to enjoy being there, and not for the novelty.

Texas in the summer is not only hot, but humid. Humidity on a typical summer day falls in the range between "miserable" and "oppressive".

Physical exertion when the dew point is in the upper 70s is simply unhealthy. It's a bad idea.

Ya most Texans are pretty soft ;)

So as a suburban area, it is generally not optimized for biking as a mode of transportation. Suburbs absolutely cater to cars, and this road is no exception. There are significant and wide-reaching bike trails across the surrounding county, but if you're going to and from work in the area, you have a car, almost exclusively.

The very nature of the fact that very little of the surrounding area caters to pedestrian traffic, the road would do a bad job if it was optimized for that.

That's the case for most suburban areas in the US. In places like Germany it's still not great, but there are many more provisions for other modes of travel especially as a pedestrian and they're not unused.

The Netherlands has great bike paths in their suburban areas.

Here's the location, satellite view:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7892469,-88.1325316,17z/data...

The nearest true business / shopping district would seem to be downtown Naperville, here:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Downtown+Naperville,+55+S+...

About 2 mi / 3.2 km from the intersection pictured.

Yes, downtown Naperville is the closest condensed shopping area. And it's extremely walkable, by design, with three major parking garages well-placed to ideally allow you to park your car on the edge of the downtown area and then walk to where you want to go. There's still car traffic, but due to the amount of pedestrians and narrow streets, drivers in the area will almost always route around it.

Meanwhile, Ogden Avenue is one of the main through-roads in the area. Usually a road you'd drive up to to avoid going through downtown Naperville, in fact.

It's pretty simple. Sacrifice a lane to become a street or parallelweg as we call them here. Put a solid barrier in between the street and road portions. Have access points to the road only indirectly on sidestreets. This is how we 'stroad' in the Netherlands. Of course if you design in this manner from the ground up the result is prettier but it should be perfectly adequate.

Roads without public transport are a nightmare - nowhere to park. Those stroads at least allow to park.

Roads should not have destinations on them, they should be a connection between two destinations. Streets are an example of a destination, with businesses, homes, etc. Streets can have parking nearby.

I feel like almost all roads I see in a dense Indian city like Mumbai is a stroad. I don't think a distinct classification of a road and street as defined by strong towns can be made in a city that has heavy occupancy and pre-existing development. Then looking at a state like Kerala that is so urbanised and heavily populated I have seen a lot of houses with gates opening up into a national highway. How can anyone fix that when there is no land to expand on or extend?

It sounds exactly like Ho Chi Minh City here in Vietnam. The solution isn't hard -- the government uses imminent domain, takes a few metres of land on each side, and compensates existing owners.

Govts think thrice before taking over land as it becomes an election issue especially in a highly dense urban setting.

That's usually pretty hard. I guess it depends on your city. But imminent domain can take decades if done with a lot of community backlash.

Not trying to nitpick, but just a heads-up that the term is " eminent domain" (I know it's a pet-peeve when people don't correct me if I'm saying something wrong, but feel free to ignore me if you don't care).

Haha darn, I thought it was but I played it safe and just copied the parent comment.

nitpicking, when done respectfully (as you have), makes HN better.

I don't know how it would be fixed, but in the west it would simply be forbidden to build a house driveway onto a highway.

If the road is being upgraded into a highway, they would alter the driveway so it no longer connects to the highway: a service/access/frontage road, or some other route.

> it would simply be forbidden to build a house driveway onto a highway.

Sometimes the house comes first and then the highway is built later.

I'll just leave this here

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22sprawl+repair+manual%22&t...

https://smile.amazon.com/Sprawl-Repair-Manual-Galina-Tachiev...

"you'll be fighting all these strip mall tenants and owners who are making a living mining the public investment in roadway capacity for their own gain."

The gall of these people. I, in contrast, ride public transportation down a publicly maintained street to a workplace where I earn a salary. No mining here.

Strip mall tenants will put up a fight, you won't. Might makes right.

> Slow traffic; prioritize human movement over auto mobility;

This will most probably bring extra gentrification plus damn the businesses that might need that extra road-traffic for recurring clients. Bicycle-ing in a downtown-ish area is mostly done by people like us (yuppies, more or less), the person who has to get tho his/her job at Walmart or at a logistics center at 5-6AM doesn't have time for this, and after his/her job is done most probably doesn't have the energy for taking a bike-ride just for pleasure. The same goes for walking.

Redesigning infrastructure always produces winners and losers. Slowing down traffic will always make someone’s commute longer. Unfortunately, making these decisions is hard but necessary, because the trade offs are worth it.

Gentrification is when a place becomes more desirable to live. It’s caused by people enjoying themselves. Gentrification is wealth creation. If housing prices rise too much, you can build more housing. It’s something to be desired, not avoided.

> Gentrification is when a place becomes more desirable to live.

Yes, but the real problem here is that this term is also used to discuss an overlapping but different thing: the poor and otherwise vulnerable parts of society being displaced by raising rent. There should be two words to describe these things to ensure we don't talk past each other.

Anyway, the displacement issue is a problem solved by ensuring affordable housing through various means, not by ensuring the housing stays affordable due the location being a terrible place to live (as you already mentioned, I'm just putting it in the other "gentrification" context).

Redesigning always happens in little pockets though. And it often takes years due to how broken infrastructure planning is. So the first people to take advantage of it are the rich. And so shit without cars gets the stereotype of being only for the rich. And the cycle continues.

I've accepted it's just never going to change in the US. There's too many opposing forces all at odds with each other. Really makes you fucking mad how much the "Greatest Generation", in addition to their cancer boomer children, really fucked this country.

> Gentrification is when a place becomes more desirable to live. It’s caused by people enjoying themselves

Absolutely not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification

Idk man, how do you think people survived prior to 1945? We do not have to go far back into human history to see the alternative to car centric development. Were pre war cities and towns gentrified and devoid of commerce? Did everyone have no time for anything but walking? It’s always striking to me the extent to which people will take a 75 year old radical experiment (car centric suburban development) as the normal and the natural mode of civilization, and consider any deviation from that mode completely impractical. I guess people were entirely impractical for 8000 years or so?

People had cars before 1945. My grandparents were born in the 20's, their parents had cars by then.

They were farmers. Before cars, farmers had horse drawn wagons. Do you think they walked home with their groceries from the store ten miles away? Carried 160 acres of corn into town on their backs? Horses were noisy, expensive and polluting. Progressives back then whined incessantly about those, too. Some things never change.

Work horses shit about 30 pounds a day. Large cities would have had tens of thousands of horses. Hundreds of tons a day of shit on the streets. It was almost as bad as San Francisco.

Sure conveyances existed prior to 1945. What did not exist prior to 1945 was cities and towns designed such that the only effective means to get around was a car. Yes, I grant that the car is a useful invention for the rural farmer. It is not a useful invention for someone living in a town or city because it does not scale to a population the size of a town or city; the only reason a car may appear useful is that post war towns and cities are so badly designed that a car is the least worst option. The beauty of a well designed town or city is that everything you need for daily life is within a five minute walk of your home, a walk in which you often bump into friends and neighbors; work is a couple mass transit stops away at most, and a traffic filled commute is not eating hours of each day. A car cannot improve upon this mode of life; it can improve the life of a farmer, but it only detracts from the life of a town or city dweller. Unfortunately, people can’t imagine an alternative to the “convenience” and “freedom” of being stuck in traffic, fighting for parking, and paying for gas.

All of Anchorage AK that isn't a freeway is a stroad it seems.

To me, a generation that is too busy to buy groceries in the store or buy goods at a physical store in general does not strike me as one to push for walkable cities.

Half the urbanites I know get gassed just walking for a coffee.

This has always been the drama of urbanism. Only a minority is pushing for it, while the rest furiously resist thanks to years of car-centric propaganda (and vested interests).

To me, I think if this generation had to choose between same day delivery and walkable neighborhoods they're going for the former. Maybe that's a false dichotomy

This generation is a lot of people, and who is to say they can't have both? Same day delivery becomes easier in densely populated areas, and densely populated areas tend to be more walkable.

WTF is a “stroad”, and why would anyone care?

Why do you need to “fix” a stroad? Not everyone wants to live in a young bicyclist’s idealistic utopia. The reason people like high speed roads is that it saves time, and time matters. Biking and public transit are both slow compared to cars, and most people like the convenience cars offer. The point to point nature of driving, the faster travel speeds, the protection from weather, the capacity for people/cargo, and so on are a massive quality of life boost. Most people, particularly as they age into their late 20s/early 30s and start families, like having more space. It is useful for them to have the higher quality of life you get from a large home with a yard, but with fast access to areas with shops and restaurants. Having businesses and parking immediately accessible from high speed roads gives you that.

Point is that stroads don't give you that fast travel, because of all the traffic that needs getting in and off. The alternative of having a dedicated through-travel road with streets on the sides to access actual destinations does allow both fast travel and easy access to destinations.

You should check out the NJB you tube links. Stroads aren't fast for car travel. If you want a fast road, design for that. Stroad design gives you the worst of both worlds: slow and terrible for anything other than driving/parking.

I've seen these videos (they've been repeatedly brought up in other similar discussions), and I just am not convinced. It doesn't match my reality across several cities and states, where "stroads" seem totally fine and functional.

> The reason people like high speed roads is that it saves time, and time matters. Biking and public transit are both slow compared to cars

*Cities build streets primarily around cars*

You: Look! Cars are more convenient!!

This isn't some iron law of the universe, that cars are faster even for basic errands happens because we choose to make it that way. When I was living on the outskirts of Munich, many short trips to grocery stores and the like would take a similar amount of time for biking and driving, because they design their streets and roads for cars AND bikes AND walking, not mainly just cars like in the US.

I keep hearing this line about how cars are faster because cities 'choose' to make it that way. This isn't a convincing argument to me. Cars are fundamentally a faster mode of transportation. Just like walking cannot realize a maximum speed similar to bicycles, neither walking nor biking can realize a maximum speed similar to cars (at least safely). Driving is faster, first and foremost, because cars are faster and not because cities are making other modes slower. The faster travel times that cars unlock is a massive boost to quality of life that many, many people enjoy and take advantage of. That inherent value is why people are willing to pay taxes to fund roads for cars, and why cities have developed road infrastructure. It's not some kind of conspiracy theory to bring down bikes - the reality is that bikes are simply slower and there isn't some deeper level of insight beyond that.

No, this is incorrect.

High speed trains and planes both have a higher top speed than cars. Does that mean trains and planes are by default a faster way to get around for all trips?

No, of course not. How infrastructure is built around them matters just as much. Obviously there are trips in which they are indeed faster than cars, but plenty too where they’re impractical, or slower.

Cars have a higher top speed than bikes, sure, but they also demand far more space. Given equal space between cars and bikes, bikes will often end up fastest for trips under a mile or two — simply because drivers are more likely to get stuck in traffic. Especially since it’s easy to have walk bike cut-throughs.

Which, I know, you’ll object to as unfair, but it’s unfair in the sense that walking and biking being banned on the freeway is unfair: it’s actually just what’s suited to the transportation mode. A walk/bike cut through is a cheap, easy thing to slot in, much more so than the car equivalent.

Car speed relies on being given far more total space and money than other modes. Remove those advantages, and car utility would sink, while the utility of walking and biking would rise dramatically. Especially if zoning was loosened to allow — not force the way things are forced to the car’s advantage now, but simply allowed — higher density and mixed use areas.

Or consider an indoor mall vs a strip mall. One uses cars more heavily, one uses walking. Which one is more efficient to visit and browse stores?

The thing about car dominant spaces is that they force things to spread out, which reduces efficiency. That efficiency reduction is then ‘solved’ with the same thing that caused it: with cars. Which works out okay for cars, but everything else works horribly in that context, which is why US cities usually have extreme car dominance, with other options being hilariously ineffective. And some people cheer on this lack of choices, even as their waistlines expand and government budgets explode.

Now we have a set of existing conditions. Including a set of conditioned people, many of whom have arranged their life in light of those conditions.

I think where a lot of proponents of density go wrong is they ignore telling the story of how the transition will work (meaning “not suck”). It’s the urban planning equivalent of skipping step two and just writing down “3. Profit”

“It could all be better once we’ve completed these massive changes.” I agree that’s possible, but while a lot of people have existing conditions that they understand and are basically comfortable with (or even comforted by), I think proponents still have some convincing to do that “their way will be better” and a whole lot of convincing on “and here’s what that would look like in 2023, 2028, 2033, and 2038”.

“First we take away the parking and make these particular roads slower.” “Ok, then what?” “Then it’s ‘better’.”

Sure, it’s hard to get from A to B. But you can have plenty of incremental improvement along the way.

> “First we take away the parking and make these particular roads slower.” “Ok, then what?” “Then it’s ‘better’.”

Vancouver added a ton of protected bike lanes over a handful of years and doubled their bike mode share. It obviously made a big difference in how nice it was to bike there.

You generally don’t remove parking for nothing, you replace it with something else, like a bike or bus lane. Ideally, you have a coordinated plan, so that you don’t end up with one-off infra improvements that have little impact on the network as a whole.

That is a pretty ridiculous term, imo.

First, it sounds horrible to say.

Second, what is a 'strong road'? Or a 'street road'? The intended definition says something about ideally moving cars as quickly as possible, and making roads and streets economically viable in terms of 'value capture'. I guess that's all well and good if you're a capitalist and primarily care about those things.

If, on the other hand, you care about making places where people actually want to live, and transport systems that allow human flourishing, you're not likely to gain an understanding of how that can be done by paying attention to only, or primarily, economics and what 'the market wants'.

Generally speaking, the last thing you should do if you want to fix roads and towns, America's in particular, but a lot of The West, is to make sure you never listen to anything a trained urban planner says. They literally helped destroy our world, and now they're trying to incrementalism away some of their crimes, but only if they control the 'value capture'.

That's part of the idea, the joke is that 'stroad' is an ugly word to say because they're ugly places.

I think you nailed this on the head.

I like stroads, there is a place for them. I like streets, and I like roads and highways too, I drive everywhere because my workplace is 10 miles from my house.

While a walkable neighborhood sounds great, I still gotta drive to work - and even with hub and spoke transit, it's a 15 min car ride or and hour and a half by transit. (I'm lucky, a transit line down a freeway could leave me as little as 45 min from the office)

We keep talking about these neighborhoods without considering that. They're for other people to live in.

I'd live closer to work, but then I'd spend an extra N dollars a month, and no residential neighborhood will have an office for 300 in it, and I'll still want a car.

I think we need dense place for those who like living there, and suburban ones for those who don't - plus stuff in between. I'm in the "those who don't" category. I hope to own a single family home on a quiet street someday.

> I think we need dense place for those who like living there, and suburban ones for those who don't - plus stuff in between.

We agree. And this is a key point made by Not Just Bikes / StrongTowns - when you have exclusively Stroad infrastructure and Single Family Homes, even those who prefer to drive and live in those homes are worse off.

You need single family homes. You need bike lanes. You need multi-family homes. You need mid-rises. You need mixed-development. You need transit. We need all kinds.

Nothing is stopping anyone from building denser infrastructure, I'm in favor of lifting the often absurd parking requirements seen. But I don't wanna see a world where density is required, because I don't want to live in a dense area.

Overall, it seems simpler to say that malls, not stroads are the problem.

Malls will never be pedestrian friendly. Mall will never be aesthetically pleasant. Roads going by malls are usually stroads and might be made somewhat better. But that's such a trivial question compared to the pox that is mall urban organization that I really don't care.

A big, climate controlled, pedestrian-only space packed full of different kinds of shops isn't pedestrian-friendly? Give me a break. On the subjective side I think a lot of them look pretty nice.

I think they are talking about the outdoor style malls you with huge parking lots that most people will drive from one store to the other, rather than walking.

Do you mean strip malls?

American malls are islands. Europes malls tend to be hearts of networks

Australia has both, we have the multi level island malls surrounded by mega roads, and then inner CBD retails streets which are surrounded by high density residential and office space which are actually great for pedestrian access as you can easily get from your current location to the area.

There are (or were) malls in central business districts, say in downtown San Francisco or Chicago. These often have flagship stores, and frequently serve business travellers and tourists (in-country and international).

There are definitely more outlying malls away from downtowns.

Both have been suffering badly for years, and more so during the COVID pandemic.

Have you ever tried to walk to a mall from where you live or work?

Inner-city malls are awesome for this— think the Toronto Eaton Centre which literally has a subway station at each end of it!

But yeah suburban malls which are surrounded by an ocean of parking? Terrible.

And not a lot of downtown malls / department stores have made it through the past three decades. High cost of space and low value add vs online shopping are a tough combination to be up against.

Sure have, from both home and the office. It has several transit lines connecting to it. Easy peasy. Here it is:

https://g.page/FashionDistrictPhiladelphia?share

Right smack dab in the middle of the city.

Sure - I do it probably every other day in London.

fully agree

I guess, this is some of a hen and egg problem, as the argument is mostly about density and the economics thereof. (As the cost of extensive, car-centric infrastructure rises, the income generated per area drops and the reinvestment necessary to maintain this infrastructure approaches the median income of the inhabitants.)

Once, you are going the way of extensive infrastructure, malls may be actually some of a remedy to the problem, since they concentrate the necessary infrastructure, instead of each business occupying and maintaining a vast parking lot of their own, including all the infrastructure for access by car. (On a side note, malls were once inspired by some structural aspects of Vienna, where businesses of a kind tended to aggregate in certain areas – also an argument to density.) On the other hand, as you are aggregating your businesses in a major attractor, you're also depriving your townscape of landmarks and any reasons for the population to go and aggregate there, leading to an inevitable depletion (in terms of semantics, economics, and structural density) of centers and to even more suburban structure. Also, malls are mostly single-use areas, where you put all your business aspects of your town in a dedicated, single basket, by this decoupling and separating major aspects of life in a spacial expression. Worse may be what seems to come after malls: big businesses only, each sitting in a vast space of their own, lined up along stroads, single-use areas hundreds of feet apart, generating even less income per area, while requiring even more infrastructure to connect.

Stroads are everywhere though and make up so much of America's car infrastructure? Even if malls are a blight, their impact is much much smaller than the stroad. They're not a piece of civic infrastructure that fundamentally shapes the layout of, and interaction with, society.

I find the premise questionable that stroads are bad. Give a stroad good sidewalks, crosswalks with signs that light up when you hit a button, and a bike path and everybody is well-served.

That or just let car people (majority) have these areas that are good for cars and let the anti car people have their crowded little streets with no parking elsewhere.

> areas that are good for cars

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 use stroads all the time and I can't agree. They don't bother me at all. Easy to navigate and not too slow or fast.

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?

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.

> Bleh. Such an us vs them mentality.

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?

That's not necessarily a given:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

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.

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.

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.

* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/30/the-stroad

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:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

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:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/Queen+St+W+%26+Tecumseth+S...

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:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/05/27/compelling-evidence-t...

https://thecityfix.com/blog/bigger-isnt-always-better-narrow...

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...

Pedestrians are the majority where I live; and even car drivers end up as pedestrians some of the time.

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.

Edit: And public transit-takers, of course!

My observations:

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!

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

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.

They have right of way regardless but the flashing sign increases safety.

Are turn signals a "beg button"?

I dare you to cross a stroad without waiting for the pedestrian phase.

Turn signals are not beg buttons.

> making pedestrians hit a beg button to cross street is just reinforcing that they are trespassing on land that is not for them.

I love this quote.

> and a bike path

Why do you want to kill so many cyclists?

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?"

I said bike path, not bike lane. A small paved path on the other side of the crosswalk.

The Strong Towns people want to go back to 1950s midwestern America - small towns strung out along roads, with farms in between.

What were all those small towns for? They were built, mostly, as service centers for the surrounding farms. Today, only 1% of the workforce works on farms, and they can get their stuff from Amazon and Walmart. The need for most of those towns is gone. So they're decaying and disappearing.[1]

That's the problem. The Strong Towns vision no longer matches what people do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Uni...

Mind that Strong Towns isn't about picturesque communities, but about sustainable economics in the face of rising costs of extensive infrastructure and low income generated per area.

Tokyo is not a small town by any measure, and neither is the most of Europe.

I'm so confused by the idea that Tokyo is somehow bike-centric. Perhaps there's another Tokyo somewhere in Japan that is not a subway-and-taxi centric metropolitan area where bikes are rarely seen.

It's a pedestrian-friendly city, though, I'll give you that.

Tokyo has a far higher bike rate than any major American city: https://cityclock.org/blogs/cycling-mode-share-data-700-citi...

Keep in mind that "Tokyo" isn't just the super dense, most central area of the metro. Tokyo technically covers a huge swathe of land, including towns that are basically suburbs. And while Japanese cities don't usually include much bike-specific infrastructure, in practice many of the narrow roads are pretty bike friendly anyway, just due to their very narrowness.

Tokyo does not look like the ideal in the article, of small towns strung out along roads.

I'm not sure where you got this model.

It's not that small towns are strung out along roads. Rather, the town itself becomes a nexus for walk/bike-ability. Instead of every trip to the grocery store, movie theater, and gym being taken by car, the vast majority of trips are taken by walking or biking. This isn't to say there aren't cars in town: on the contrary, roads exist, ideally going around heavily trafficked areas. This lets the roads focus on being roads (getting people from place to place) and the streets focus on being streets (allowing people to walk, bike, and "experience the world", in the parlance of "Not Just Bikes".

Of course, the next town over (let's say it's 20 miles away) will be "down the road", with a both a road and a train connecting them.

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