> Americans do not understand the difference between a road and a street.
[...]
> The value of a road is in the speed and efficiency that it provides for movement between places. Anything that is done that reduces the speed and efficiency of a road devalues that road. If we want to maximize the value of a road, we eliminate anything that reduces the speed and efficiency of travel.
> The value of a street comes from its ability to support land use patterns that create capturable value. The street with the highest value is the one that creates the greatest amount of tax revenue with the least amount of public expense over multiple life cycles. If we want to maximize the value of a street, we design it in such a way that it supports an adjacent development pattern that is financially resilient, architecturally timeless and socially enduring.
[...]
> In the United States, we’ve built a 45 mile per hour world for ourselves. It is truly the worst of all possible approaches. Our neighborhoods are filled with STROADS (a street/road hybrid) that spread investment out horizontally, making it extremely difficult to capture the amount of value necessary for the public to sustain the transportation systems that serve them.
A thing that you can often see in the Netherlands is frontage roads. When a road with houses on it needs a speed upgrade, it gets split into a fast road and a parallel frontage/access/service road for access to the adjacent houses. Possibly even on both sides. This is something that was already being done way back early in the 20th century. (Edit: found a reference to the Dutch word, "ventweg" ("hawking/peddling road"), in 1923.)
It seems to me that in such cases the US tends to choose to expand into a stroad instead. Belgium also has quite a few stroad-like roads, but at least those tend to have usable sidewalks and fairly often even bicycle paths.
We have a major one of those in NYC, queens boulevard, and it’s a disaster. It’s dangerous to cross, and wide enough that it’s inconvenient to get across, so it effectively divides neighborhoods in half.
There's a picture of one here, and the main road is a single lane in both directions. Which is as far from Queens Boulevard as you can get.
The 2 lanes to be crossed makes crossing safer. Further, the side roads are differentiated to make it clear that they are primarily for biking/walking (they are a different color, and are tiled).
Also:
> Service roads are purposely constructed to be discontinuous sections of road, meaning that through traffic cannot use it to get from one main street to another. Since the only traffic on it will be cars accessing the houses or shops along the service road, traffic is substantially lower that on the main roads, and speeds are kept down due to the short segments of roadway
Queens boulevard is a highway masquerading as a road.
There's a few of these around the suburb-y metro Detroit area. They're nice to bike on, and they haven't seemed awful to drive, but they do still do "divide neighborhoods" quite well, which is unfortunate
The Dutch versions of these have elaborate systems to separate pedestrian and bike traffic that minimize the "divide neighborhoods" effect.
The first time I went to the Netherlands I walked from Schiphol airport to the center of Amsterdam and it was an easy but amazing experience. Walking from JFK to Manhattan is a completely possible walk in terms of distance (I usually do better than a 20 minute pace on the flats so it takes only half a day) but when I think of the battle with the infrastructure you'd have to do it's like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
It's a half marathon's distance as the bird flies from JFK to midtown. That's almost four and a half hours at a twenty minute pace. Not walkable for anyone but an athlete.
Barring something like serious obesity or disability it’s impossible for me to imagine an adult who couldn’t walk for for and a half hours, especially on flat terrain. That’s basically an easy hike.
The centres of most UK towns and cities are now limited to 20mph. Although in practice that means that people drive around 25mph - i.e. just low enough not to be caught for speeding - it does make the streets less threatening for both pedestrians and bikes. The thing that would make it better for cyclists is to line up the speed limit of e-bikes (currently set at a max of 15mph) and the speed limit. Currently the 15mph / 20mph disjunction means that some idiots still try to squeeze their cars past relatively fast-moving e-bikes (which then often catch up with the car at the next set of lights...), whereas if those bikes could go at 20pmh or the speed limit was 15mph I don't think they'd bother.
Edit: Although generally once you get out of the very centre there are arterial "stroads" which have 30mph limits, but side-streets are usually still 20mph.
Counterpoint: I regularly go 40-50 km/h on my (not e-)bike on a downhill rural road (40 km/h speed limit) and drivers still feel obligated to overtake me.
I tend to overtake cyclists specifically for their safety. I figure that the farther I am from them, the lower a chance of a collision there is. If that holds true, then the only options when encountering one is to slow down and possibly impede other traffic, or speed up, overtake, and move away. This works for single cyclists. Groups would be different, but I've never encountered them.
If there is traffic, that means that your spot behind the cyclist will immediately be replaced by another car. If everyone acts like that, the biker caries a bubble of faster-than-average cars with them. Hardly ideal.
I propose a different protocol: Slow down, and follow the cyclist until the situation allows to safely overtake the cyclist at a nice distance without speeding up too much. You will still travel faster than the cyclist, and you have actively contributed to the safety of the cyclist.
If we're optimizing for the cyclist's safety wrt a "pack" of cars, they themselves should pull over and wait for the "pack" to pass. Otherwise, a driver doing their best to clear the hazard as quickly as possible is the ideal compromise. A cyclist that is impeding the natural flow of traffic with a slower speed than is normal for the road is a danger to himself and others; any individual driver cannot account for the behavior of other drivers, particularly those who might drive recklessly if impeded by others' attempts to wait out a slow cyclist. Your protocol increases the danger, per likely factors.
The other wrinkle to this is that, outside of cities, cycling in America is a luxury sport. The people who partake in it are most in the position to force changes to infrastructure that supports safer cycling. NJB and other similar commentators make it clear that infrastructure improvement, not changes to driver behavior, is the most efficacious way to imrpove cyclist safety.
Absolutely true, and that's happened to me plenty of times too. There's definitely a trigger in the minds of some drivers where seeing a cyclist means that they need to overtake them because the vast majority of the time the cyclist isn't going to be near the speed limit.
> Currently the 15mph / 20mph disjunction means that some idiots still try to squeeze their cars past relatively fast-moving e-bikes (which then often catch up with the car at the next set of lights...)
To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic.
Now, of course car drivers should remain vigilant and continually check their mirrors, but nobody is infallible, and I'm sure there are plenty of drivers that do not take proper care.
> To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic.
This is conflating two different activities: when a bicyclist or motorcyclist is moving in space between cars, they're using space which is already open and it doesn't impose a risk to the driver of the vehicle or require the cars to move. That's distinct from people trying to illegally pass, which creates new demands for space and frequently endangers other road users and often obstruct oncoming traffic.
The underlying issue here is that cars are the least efficient use of space by a significant margin. That means that drivers see other people taking advantage of space which they are unable to use and feel like they're losing in some way, which often leads to attempts to prevent it. When I lived in California, even though lane-splitting was legal I used to regularly see drivers move their vehicles to the edge of a lane or a few times even open their car door(!) to block motorcyclists. This was clearly because they perceived it as unfair that someone else wasn't jammed the same way they were, but misattributed the problem to the motorcylist rather than the drawbacks of their personal vehicle choices.
By that logic, even people in cars should be driving up on the shoulder, driving in unused bike lanes, squeezing in wherever they want, utilizing the unused space. I don't think it would work that well if everyone operated like that. Thankfully they don't.
But you're on a bike, so you deserve special treatment. An award for sacrificing comfort and safety in the name of efficiency! You demand deference when drivers see you, for them to slow down and fall behind as you sit up proudly on your bicycle in defiance of modern technology. You shout to the heavens, "I don't need infrastructure! I have yours already! I'll ride wherever I want!" The thought makes you chuckle at the plebs still riding in comfort and safety in their automobiles, capable of carrying a drunken friend, an elderly parent, or a new piece of furniture. What a bunch of fools. Don't they see how efficient they could be?
I don't understand how it could be at all controversial that different vehicles require different regulations. 18 wheelers are not allowed to go everywhere cars can go and cars should not be allowed to go everywhere cyclists and pedestrians can go. Cars are an order of magnitude heavier and faster than a bicycle and significantly restrict the visibility of their operator - they are far more dangerous and the law should reflect that.
> To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic.
The speed is the issue. A collision at low speeds is much less likely to be fatal [0]. Being closely overtaken by a car when you're going at 20-25mph on a bicycle is 1) a scary experience and 2) unnecessarily dangerous for the cyclist (and not at all for the driver).
Not only does speed increase the damage inflicted by a given collision, it also makes them more likely: there is less time available to see and respond to hazards, and the space required to stop also is proportional to (speed^2). So for a given road, the risk level (frequency * consequences) is probably even steeper than squared: perhaps more like (speed^3).
no, this is an all-too-common misconception, because you’re missing the other half of the distribution where accidents were avoided because the car speeded past an accident that would have happened at a lower speed.
speed increases the severity of an accident (e.g., more fatalities vs. injuries), but doesn’t generally cause the accident. distractedness and impairment are overwhelmingly the primary causes of auto accidents. it’s important for policy decisions that we keep this very clear, and why we have ineffective, revenue-oriented programs like speed enforcement rather than attention-oriented policies.
With respect, this feels like whataboutery. "To be fair" makes it sound like cars speeding past cyclists is a response to cyclists whipping between lines of cars, but they're entirely separate issues and can both be wrong at the same time without needing to be compared to each other.
They should switch to kph from mph so the effective speed limit is lowered to ~15mph while being labeled as 25kph. Drivers will feel like their going '25' so less likely to feel inconvenienced :)
We do understand it. It's why Americans love quaint towns. There's a few in my suburbs. It's why many old towns you see a BUS sign. It's not for a bus, its' the 'business' route and the highway has been sent around them.
Doylestown PA: succesfully petitioned and built TWO of these. A 611 and 202 bypass leaving historic doylestown beautiful.
The problem is, for those suburbs that never had strong town centers, there was little objection and so as you go down 611, it's a 4 lane major travel route that passes right through a bunch of other suburbs leaving them without a downtown and a place thats not comfortable to travel.
of course, Doylestown was surrounded by farmland when this was build making it much easier to do... Good luck building a bypass through other towns
Here in the UK stroads were pretty much eliminated everywhere during the 70s and 80s by building bypasses. A bypass is a road built in an arc around a town to divert through-traffic away from the town centre, leaving only the slow street traffic (mostly people coming from outside town to shop). Larger towns have more complicated arrangements, but the pattern is the same: keep through traffic away from the streets in the business area. The business area itself is often pedestrian-only and always has restrictions to make driving through it a slow business.
More complex example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1101752,-0.1713974,7297m/d... . Note the M23 on one side, Crawley Avenue on the other, and Peglar Way right in the middle. All of them serve to route traffic around the town centre instead of through it.
In many cases you can see how the original through-road (sometimes dating back to Roman times) had the bypass patched on; without the bypass the "High Street" would have been a stroad.
(Fans of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy may recall Arthur Dent's cottage being demolished to make way for a bypass. This was an issue: the nature of bypasses meant that building them often required the demolition of nice little cottages on the outskirts of small towns.)
The DDIs he mentioned had me thinking about Cloverleaf interchanges at first, the standard interchange at German Autobahn (or roads with more than one lane when round-abouts aren't feasible, incredible for that application, lots of traffic, high speeds and so on. DDIs are close enough it seems, just worse in every aspect.
Both have in common that they suck for pedestrians.
Great channel, have been following it for some time, a few takeaways from there:
- It's the cars that make the cities undesirable
- I was shocked how the historical center of London, ON was demolished to the ground and replaced with shacks
- Kids should be able to walk to school alone in safety
- I live in Europe and I was baffled to learn that multi-purpose developments are disallowed in most of North America. This alone makes me reconsider my plans to move to the States. I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes
I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes
And even when the supermarket/mall is close by in the US, you still can't necessarily walk/bike there. I was visiting a friend who lived in the Midwest and his house was less than a mile from the mall. I asked him how to walk over there, and he admitted he'd never tried. So I set out to try, and the only way I found was by running across a busy 4 lane street without any crossings.
America is _very_ big. Bigger than Europe even. That means that there are lots of different development patterns all across the country. While it is true that most places are car dependent, there are also cities where the majority of people who live there don't even own a car. I lived in Boston/Cambridge Massachusetts for 10 years and New York for 8, and I have never owned a car (or bike). Walking and taking the subway/metro are the most convenient modes of travel in those cities, and you get all the benefits of vibrance that comes with that. For the past 18 years, I've had about 2-3 big grocery stores and too many smaller shops and fruit stands to count within a 10 minute walking radius. The same goes for bars, restaurants, book stores, coffee shops, music/dancing venues, etc. All without even needing to get on the subway.
The "low density" of the US is deceptive. It's true that there are vast expanses of desert, and even that New York has a forest in it the size of the Netherlands, but when you compare the density of individual US states to European countries, you see it is no excuse for us not building broadband infrastructure and otherwise being sensible about things.
California, in particular, has a population density of about 100 people per square kilometer which is about the same as France. Most of California is either uninhabitable, factory farms, or military reservations. The population is highly concentrated near the coast.
People who haven't been there imagine that Los Angeles is "sprawl" but the truth it is very high density that is "sprawling" over a large plain that is boxed in by mountains. Millions of people have a line of sight to the Hollywood sign.
(I grew up in Southern New Hampshire which is based on Buckminister Fuller's diabolical geometry of airports and subdvisions -- where getting from one subdivision to the next is like going from the right side of your left lung to the right side of your left lung all the way up to the fork in your trachea. That is a self-inflicted wound that has nothing to do with how dense the population is.)
The population-weighed density - the density experienced by the typical American - is also much higher than you’d think. For example California is expansive and empty-seeming on paper, but half of the state lives in L.A. Population-weighting makes more sense than dividing the gross population by the gross area.
One approach is scale-dependent (divide the area into a grid of square kilometers, sort by population, pick the square kilometer where the median person lives.) but you would get different answers if you picked different scales.
The median of "How far away is your nearest neighbor?" seems parameter free at first but it is absurd if you live in an apartment. (e.g. ignores all the space around your apartment.) I guess you could look for the median (or other decile) of "What is radius in which N people live?" where N might be 100-10,000 but then you're back to having a spectrum instead of a single number again.
There's a bunch of literature on this if you start with a search for population-weighted density. There isn't one true way to do it, and scale matters greatly.
My comment about how big America was had nothing to do with density. I only mentioned the size of the country to highlight that there are a lot of different jurisdictions with lots of different development patterns.
You're right that there are places like that in the US, but we haven't been building like that for nearly 100 years at this point. Those places are historical curiosities, and not at all representative of the United States.
And before anyone says I should just live in places that are like that, It's not so easy to just pick up my life and move somewhere else.
That's true but it's also true that the transportation to parts of Boston sucks and outside of it it quickly becomes impossible to get around without a car.
Boston/Cambridge and NYC were initially built during colonial times, before cars and railroads, so were originally built for navigation by foot or horse.
Everything about this channel is great except the way he leans into London so hard. It’s his hometown and as a life long Londoner… I get it.
That said, I drive this mess everyday and my 25 min cross town commute makes Torontonians cry. I don’t bike or bus though, so I do ultimately agree with him.
Regarding downtown. You won’t find more information on that shack thing because it’s not real. Besides a couple historic floods and fires I can’t think of what he means.
It's fair because London is a horrible city. (Rant alert)
It's not just bike and transit unfriendly, it's bad for cars too. There's no easy way to get from one side to the other in less than an hour during the day, short of taking a helicopter.
Compare London to nearby Kitchener/Waterloo. They essentially have a ring road (hwy 85), PLUS a light rail + bus rapid transit system. It's still absolutely full of stroads, but at least it's more accessible and things actually move around.
In London, Oxford is essentially a 10 KM long parking lot every day at 9 AM, and Adelaide spends about two hours a day blocked by freight trains. Every attempt to fix the city frankly makes it worse. I don't know if it's because of poor planning, inept council, the lack of geographical constraints, or some other factor, but this city is the absolute show piece for failed urban design.
So yeah, I think it's completely reasonable to lean into London ON, it's the perfect case study in bad north american cities.
> I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes
If you live in a large US city, this can still be very manageable. There are two large grocery stores and a small one as well as a Target and a metro line within a 5 minute walk of my house. Apart from the metro line, we didn't really prioritize the grocery stores, etc when looking for a house. That said, there are many downsides to living in big US cities as well.
Oh, that wasn’t an exhaustive list, just the places my wife and I go. We also have various american, african, asian, and middle eastern corner stores and a dozen restaurants, Dollar Store type shops, liquor stores, and some other things I’m forgetting. But I also live between a large park and a body of water so there’s presumably less area in my “1km radius” than yours. Either way, my point wasn’t that my US city is better than European cities, but rather that it’s more walkable than most American cities.
That is ultimately a problem of scarcity. No one is building walkable communities, so the only remaining walkable communities are the "historic" ones that, surprise, everyone wants to live in because the alternative sucks. Elastic demand, inelastic supply.
As someone who has lived in the Midwest for the past ten years I think you’ll be hard pressed to find this. In Lincoln NE, for example, all new housing for at least the past 30 years has been in car-dependent suburban developments which has resulted in all but the Haymarket district of downtown being car dependent.
That district has been mostly livable without a car for the past couple years after a grocery store was built there. I say “mostly” because as soon as you want to do anything outside of The dozen or so blocks of the Haymarket a car quickly becomes required again.
This is a common theme of walkable areas in the US and Canada. They do still exist but because of the development patterns of the past 30+ years they are small islands in an ocean of cars. Their scarcity also drives up prices and makes them less affordable than surrounding areas.
I’m in Milwaukee, WI. Houses in my neighborhood are a bit expensive - starting around $300k for a SFH - but you can live a very full life without a car. For myself: we have a car for visiting people outside the city and going to the lumberyard, but groceries, schools, parks, hospital, etc are all in walking distance and downtown is about 10 minutes away on the bus
Move to an older part of an urban city or small town and your experience is totally doable in the states. Just don’t move to a suburb with million dollar McMansions.
The not sure about the multi purpose thing- it might be prohibited by zoning in a lot of spaces by master plans, but it’s been actively encouraged for the last 10-20 years most places I’ve been, at least in infill areas. Also, the lack of “multi-purpose” development can be misleading, as “good” zoning does mix in commercial lots with housing, but they end up developed separately on different lots. The suburban development I live is walking distance to a shopping center with a grocery store, several restaurants, a services, and a park. That’s not 100% common here, but it wasn’t hard to find. The cost was reasonable to, at least until 2020 made the entire market go crazy, regardless of walkability.
It's a great channel that puts words to just why American cities are so dystopic.
It really helps understand exactly what "induced demand" means. If you add another lane, some of the people on the bus will take the car, and thus the new lane is almost immediately full again. If you remove the bus lane, bike lane, sidewalk, same thing.
Adding capacity for cars actually makes travelling by car worse.
It also gives hope. Like just because a city was destroyed to make it more car centric doesn't mean it can't be fixed to be livable again.
There's more to strongtowns than this, but it's all interesting.
If people leave the bus to drive it indicates your bus system is providing bad service.
If more people drive it indicates that your city isn't filling its purpose as being a place where there are a lot of things to do.
Cities need to figure out how to get ahead of induced demand not how use it as an excuse to be a worse city.. sure, this is a hard problem, with many options that make something else work, but induced demand is still a terrible excuse to be a bad city.
You incorrectly assumed I'm advocating more lanes of traffic, that is one possible solution - if you do it be prepared to go up (or down), as you will need many layers of layers over layers (bridges) that way. There are many other possible solutions though. It didn't work in Katy Texas because they didn't build enough.
Improving transit would be my preferred option.
The point is if adding a lane of anything doesn't solve your traffic problem (or makes it worse) then you are not thinking big enough.
You did say "Induced demand is nonsense". And it's not.
> It didn't work in Katy Texas because they didn't build enough.
The Katy Freeway is literally the widest highway in the world.
The biggest in the world. Adding lanes doesn't help. This is not controversial.
> Improving transit would be my preferred option.
There are many solutions, and you don't have to pick just one.
Better transit. Dedicated bus lanes. Mixed zoning (so much this). Separate bike lanes. Etc.. etc..
It's not that we should force people to use the bus. It's that if you're stuck in traffic and had a magic wand that could turn 30 cars into one bus, would you use it? Well, clearly yes. Many times. Ok, so now that this driver agrees that they want other people to use the bus, it's just a matter of making the bus experience better, so that they do.
But yes, that falls under (as you say) "improving transit". But there's more.
Anyway, "Not Just Bikes" says this so much better than I could.
I agree with you. I think people are downvoting you because they misunderstand your first sentence. Using the concept of induced demand to justify building fewer roads is bullshit, if you don't figure out why there's so much pent up demand to begin with. The way forward should be making all the alternatives more attractive, so that the demand for cars disappears.
To avoid induced demand, you need to make other modes of transport more attractive than driving.
So if there are two routes from A to B and one is longer, then the shorter route should be reserved for the modes of transports that have a higher capacity. (That usually means banning cars)
Another really good option is to have dedicated bus lanes so buses don't get stuck in traffic.
As a car driver you massively benefit if other people take the bus or bikes instead of their car. Plus you and especially the ones who are to old, young, poor, disabled to drive a car have good options of getting around.
> Using the concept of induced demand to justify building fewer roads is bullshit
Well, you don't have infinite money, or space. Adding a bus lane and a car lane clearly will add more capacity than doing just one of them, but adding a bus lane will likely reduce traffic so much in the other lanes that you don't even have to add another car lane.
And adding just a car lane means people would rather be stuck in their car, than stuck in the bus, in the same lane, and we have tragedy of the commons.
So adding a car lane just means emptier busses, but same slow traffic. So what value did adding the lane add?
> Adding a bus lane and a car lane clearly will add more capacity than doing just one of them, but adding a bus lane will likely reduce traffic so much in the other lanes that you don't even have to add another car lane.
The first is true, but the second doesn't follow. For a bus lane to make a difference you need more than a lane, you also need good bus service using that lane. Bus service in many cities horrible and so nobody sane will ride it. A lane of empty buses running around helps nothing. If you propose a bus lane you need to do it with all the service that will happen so we can evaluate it.
Speed and convenience is part of service. Speed and convenience are greatly elevated when you don't have to stand on the side of a stroad for 45 mins to catch a bus that's constantly going to get stuck in traffic.
Sure it has been shown: because people have places they would like to get to that the city is making too difficult for them. It clearly exists, it is just a stupid excuse.
> Adding lanes has been shown (as you agree) to not help the people who want to use the road, as is just induces more demand.
Only when you don't add enough lanes. It hurts some people who are already using the existing lanes, but it helps other people who previously found the trip so painful they didn't take make it at all, but now the level of pain is low enough that they make it. Focusing only on those who are already using the road isn't the answer, we need to focus on everyone.
I think the point here is it's not practical to build enough lanes to ever saturate demand someplace like LA, so it would make sense to build other options besides driving your car everywhere (and then make these options more attractive than driving). These will of course induce demand of their own, but it's easier to meet just because each person traveling in his own car is one of the least space-efficient means of getting around imaginable. That's not necessarily a big deal in the middle of the day, but at rush hour, with countless people heading in the same direction, it doesn't necessarily make sense to keep doubling down on the same strategy over and over.
I agree that induced demand is nonsense, but for a different reason. Demand either exists or it doesn't. It is either fulfilled or unfulfilled. Building more lanes into a road doesn't "induce" demand. It fulfills it. People use up that road space because they genuinely get a benefit from it. It's really that simple. After all, if you built 100 lanes there wouldn't magically be 100 lanes of traffic. Demand is fulfilled only up to the point that the demand exists. There's no magical induction that urbanists vaguely gesture at.
It's not. This is a fact. It sounds like you are trying to reason about this from pure logic, and are not aware that this is an empirical fact.
You can only go so far armchair guessing about how city planning "ought to" work.
> Demand either exists or it doesn't.
To get to the place, yes. To get to the place in a car, no.
If you double the capacity of a road network, that means more people will choose to drive.
Example: If the city I live in doubled the car capacity, I would buy a car and drive it. But since everyone else would too, it'd actually stabilize to the same congestion. (I forget, but the actually observed phenomenon has a name)
Or let's say you had some billions of dollars to improve the situation of the I-101 in California. What do you think will happen if you add a lane? More people who currently take a tech company shuttle will start driving instead. More people who currently take Caltrain will start driving instead.
And then you're back. I'm not guessing, this is established knowledge. No matter how hard people try to double down on a failed strategy (see Katy Freeway), it just doesn't help traffic. It just makes more people drive.
Now spend those billions on making the Caltrain experience better, and you'll start seeing existing lanes on the 101 free up.
> After all, if you built 100 lanes there wouldn't magically be 100 lanes of traffic.
A 100? Maybe not. But apparently 26 lanes is not enough (Katy Freeway).
But there are other aspects to this too, other than roads and transit. E.g. zoning. It greatly reduces traffic on existing roads if you can just walk over to the store to buy some groceries, because it's a 5min walk. Instead of driving and being stuck in traffic for 10 minutes because it's too far to walk and crosses an 8 lane highway.
Every person who went shopping in the local store is another car not on the road, both ways.
> Demand is fulfilled only up to the point that the demand exists.
This is only true in the sense that it's irrelevant. If you widen every street and avenue in NYC to 26 lanes, then maybe that's enough. But only because there will barely be any houses left to go to.
> There's no magical induction that urbanists vaguely gesture at.
Why are you assuming you have to use a car to solve the problem. The problem is people want to get someplace in your city and currently it is inconvenient for them to do so.
If people leave your transit system for a car it is because your transit system sucks. Fix that problem. (hint, trains can easily reach speeds 3x faster than cars, stops should not take too long, and there should always been a train almost here for when you missed the last one - running good transit isn't easy)
> If people leave your transit system for a car it is because your transit system sucks.
A transit system can almost never compete with a vehicle right in your garage taking you exactly to your destination. Unless you live in very rare circumstances, friction-free car travel will be preferable to most people. But car travel is not friction-free of course. You're setting up a goal post that's impossible to reach
> Why are you assuming you have to use a car to solve the problem.
That's the opposite of what I'm doing.
> The problem is people want to get someplace in your city and currently it is inconvenient for them to do so.
I agree. And we already know that "add more lanes" is a very costly (especially maintenance forever. Again, see Not Just Bikes), and we already know it doesn't even help.
> If people leave your transit system for a car it is because your transit system sucks.
No, not sucks. They just have to be subjectively a better choice for the individual.
So yes, then we agree. Money should be spent on improving alternative transport, not car infrastructure.
Walkability that is commonplace in many towns in Europe, roughly match up with very high 90's (98+) walkability scores in the US.
IMHO, anything below mid-90's is somewhere I would never live. The score is necessarily skewed towards US style living where walkability is relatively rare. So the difference between, say 70 and 40 is almost meaningless from the point of view of a walker.
As far as street design and urban planning goes, the key word is "complete streets" which is an umbrella term that covers rationale, design principles and practical guidance for how to implement a street layout (https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/complete-stree...). This work is based on studies and data, but I've not looked into it.
Similar video (but then an hour long) that I always post together with that channel: What can Seattle learn from Dutch street design? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0GA901oGe4
I don't think this article is making the point veey clearly, but it is a very important point: roads are for long distance connections at speed, streets are for local traffic: reaching houses, shops, people. These stroads try to do both and fail at both because the goals are contradictory; you can't have high speed traffic with lots of side streets and crossing traffic, bikes and pedestrians. It will be too slow for a road or too dangerous for a street, and probably both.
Every time I end up on a five lane road with the center turning lane and tons of curb cuts and cross streets and abutting parking lots, I remind myself that it's one of the most dangerous places I am likely to be in.
I love the "zero excuses" at the bottom. "now that we informed you of the danger, anything bad happening is entirely your fault and the city can't be held liable for its bad decisions"
I guess it might come across that way, but I was happy to see the "Vision Zero" thing in the bottom left. Vision Zero has been a very successful road traffic policy in Sweden.
> Vision Zero is based on an underlying ethical principle that "it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system." In most road transport systems, road users bear complete responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation system designers and road users.
I don't think any American city or police department knows what vision zero is. They frequently include the words "vision zero" in their plans or posts, but then car crash deaths continue as normal or even increase.
Same in NYC. There was some progress for a few years, but then traffic deaths rebounded. The pandemic gets some blame, though it’s a poor excuse for weak leadership and the trend started before that. “Vision Zero” has become the “thoughts and prayers” of traffic deaths.
Sounds like a derivative from a road style which has (mostly, thankfully) been abandoned: originally, “suicide lanes” designated the center lane of a 3-lane.
A 3-lane is a road design where you’ve got one lane in each direction, and a shared passing lane in the middle.
These used to be quite popular as they were not much more expensive than a 2-lane but allowed better throughput, however as density and speeds increased they became more and more deadly as they’d encourage trying to pass and high-speed frontal collisions.
They’re mostly gone now, replaced by either 2+2 or 2+1 (the latter is very popular in europe, it’s basically a 3-lane except there’s a hard barrier which regularly swaps the center lane’s direction to allow safe passing sections — or more rarely a 1+1 with a protected turn lane).
In Mexico there are still a good number of 3-lane roads where the middle lane is for passing in both directions. A close family friend died on one: head-on collision with a truck passing a truck on a curving mountain road. (He was an aggressive driver who got lucky for decades until one day he finally didn’t.) Truly horrible road design.
Middle shared turn lanes are quite safe though, though I don't have actual stats. It's very hard to hit someone in one because no one is driving more than 50 ft in one, and you're always coming to a stop to prepare for a turn. On busy streets they are usually a bit wider than a normal lane, and on 80 km/h highways, they are a full lane-and-a-half wide. On busier residential streets with lots of single family homes, they are a great alternative to two lanes in each direction, because they allow for separated bike lanes and left-turning cars don't block traffic flow. Many 50 km/h roads in my city have been converted like this.
You would never put one in a newly designed road, but when a road needs to be upgraded, they are a great solution.
I spent a summer in India in the late 1980s (Tamil Nadu). Going between cities, the roads were only partially paved. There were two dirt lanes, with a blacktop middle lane. The trucks would play a continuous game of "chicken", driving at each other until someone lost their nerve.
The newspaper had regular reports of truck "capsizings", where a truck would lose control and turn over. It was common for a truck to have laborers who would fill up the truck with some bulk product like dirt, then ride on the top to go to the destination, then unload it. When one of these trucks capsized, it was a major disaster.
Likewise in Ontario. Strong term, but gets the point across. I also once saw a dump truck with stickers on either side of the tailgate. On the left, "passing side." On the right, "suicide." Had a big impact on my driving habits... I never, ever pass on the right.
That might make sense for dump trucks because they're bulky and have poor visibility, but what's the increased risk of passing on the right? The only thing I can think of is marginally worse visibility because the right side is slightly further away from the driver's seat. However, I don't think that's enough risk to justify going out of your way to pass on the right. Having to change lanes to pass on the left carries its own risks.
Some cars have a blind spot on their right. Also, the convention is passing on the left, so people are generally less aware of things going on on their right. Of course bad drivers are almost by definition unpredictable, but if some bad driver is going to absent mindedly merge into you, they will probably do it while you are on their right. In particular, distracted people whose texting has been interrupted by their GPS telling them to take the next exit...
In many countries, it's a hard rule that you need to pass on the left. Passing on the right is only allowed when it's a lane going in a different direction (like an exit), or traffic is moving very slowly (you don't want people changing lanes in a traffic jam to avoid passing on the right).
While "keep right except to pass" is technically the law here in Ontario, the de facto standard is that the middle lane is the cruising lane, the left is the passing lane, and the right is basically a second merging lane. This means that it is not uncommon to have stop-and-go traffic in the left two lanes while the right lane is still moving and mostly wide open. Drivers will frequently move right into the middle lane from the ramp even with no traffic in the right lane and not having sped up to the highway speed. It's an complete waste of resources.
Highways are a complicated graph problem I guess, which I'm not very good at, but I wouldn't be surprised if the true bottleneck was some offramp later. So, increasing the throughput of the road leading up to it shouldn't really improve things, right? And leaving rightmost lane less heavily populated might make it easier for cars to do the off/on ramp thing which might make things easier around the bottleneck.
I dunno. People pack in as tightly as possible around here and we still get traffic. I think it is just inevitable.
Going onto the IdiotsInCars subreddit, it's kind of shocking how commonplace it is for people to undertake other road users by speeding past in the slow lane. It's already more difficult to merge back into a slower lane because you have a much bigger blind-spot (and have to twist your neck a lot more to get a good look), so it doesn't make it any easier if you have to expect that people will be speeding to undertake you.
I hate it when my GPS on my second phone does this!
On a serious note, the overtake left thing (or right for those strange people driving on the wrong side) is a big reason German Autobahn is as safe as it is. Reckless idiots notwithstanding.
If slower traffic kept right, there’d be a lot less passing on the right. (If you’re getting passed on the right regularly, you might consider your own lane discipline as well as that of those passing you.)
Yes, this is also true, but I think the bigger problem is just speeding. People on the left are usually moving faster than people on the right or middle, on average, but some people want to go 20-30 mph over the speed limit. Normally I'd pull to the right so they can pass, but by the time I start doing that they're already starting to change lanes too!
True. If you take a highway that people feel is reasonable and prudent to drive at 75-85 mph and post it as 55, people will drive 20-30 mph over. I think the problem is more likely the 55 signage in that case.
I think you're thinking of UPS, and IIRC the decision is mostly to reduce waiting time/idle fuel burn. (Most jurisdictions in the US allow right-on-red and that makes this even easier to justify.)
I've also called it that for as long as I can remember, and it's probably helped me drive more defensively around that lane. Drivers misuse it all the time.
That's exactly it, except with businesses with parking lots on each side and lots of cars pulling in and out. Also a 55 mph speed limit that's routinely ignored unless there's enough traffic to slow everyone down.
The way it's shown on that page, it looks like every part of that lane can be used in both directions. In Netherland we do have separate lanes to turn left, but only before an intersection, and only to be used in the direction towards that intersection. People turning left in the other direction will be on the other side of the intersection. There will be lines on the road directing you where you're supposed to go. The left-turning lane will have a very limited length, only existing near the intersection that it's for. Also, I think there are usually traffic lights ensuring safe crossing for left-turners.
Having just a general all-purpose two-directional left-turning lane looks incomprehensibly dangerous to me.
It is, but they’re more common on one travel lane each way streets.
When evaluating the danger of such a design, you have to consider the alternatives. You’re probably considering 3/4 head on collisions from drivers misjudging the turn. Those happen, but how many rear-end collisions are avoided?
The center turning lane isn't there to avoid rear end collisions, which are only problematic due to too-high speeds in a commercial area.
They are about improving throughput.
What makes them dangerous, particularly in the five lane configuration, is the poor visibility for crossing uncontrolled intersections of multiple traffic lanes.
The examples in the article show anywhere from 5 to 7 lanes. The outermost lanes in one of the 7-lane examples are parking lanes.
There's a stroad on Staten Island that scares the crap out of me - Hylan Blvd. I have family that live on it. It's six lanes with a median, but sometimes and in certain places parking is allowed in the outermost lanes. So you can suddenly come up on parked traffic but only at certain times of day in certain places. It's totally insane.
To get in the driveway, you have to loop the block to the closest light, wait for the green, and then drive halfway down the block and back-in before the light changes and traffic starts up. It's quite stressful.
Over here we have that, well something similar, outside of towns and cities for one lane. In cities max 2 lanes, with a 50 kmh speed limit. And those are rare, street cross section have traffic lights and those from parking lots are scary enough. And slow enough, it is sometimes faster to not cross lanes and just turn around at the next traffic light.
A common thing I see drivers in my city do is pull into the center turning lane and then merge into their intended lane when doing a left turn. It's super illegal afaik, but I see it done all the time, I've even seen police do it. Of course, the alternative to this maneuver is waiting a very long time until both lanes are clear before turning because the stroad you're turning left on is extremely congested (though not extraordinarily congested in my cities case)
We have lots of slow and calm streets in American suburbia, and we love them that way. We value this calm so much that we refuse to admit shopping or even multi-family housing to them, for fear of disturbing it. These uses have to go somewhere, so they go where there is no presumption of an entitlement to low traffic, and that’s the road.
The businesses hardly complain; they love to be where the greatest numbers of eyeballs and potential impulse shoppers are going by.
Maybe you could start with a strong street vs. road discipline, but I would predict that within 40 years any American polity will surely break it, and the stroad will re-emerge.
Mixed use medium density is my urban nirvana. Anywhere I have been with it just makes so much sense for daily life at person scale. Cars tricked us into thinking life can be comfortable spread across large distances and I think we are suffering in various ways for it.
I am reminded of that cartoon where aliens arive on earth, and assume that cars are the dominant species, since so much of our world has been dedicated to them.
Suburbanites hate cars too, and that’s why they’ll never let you have mixed use. It would perhaps eliminate the snarl in commercial areas, but it would also bring some portion of that traffic into what are now quiet residential sanctuaries.
But American suburbia seems entirely designed around cars. Exactly because there are no shops nearby, you need to take the car for everything. If there were shops around the corner, there would be far less need for cars in these streets.
When I go to the shop, I walk or take my bike. And even here, the shops aren't in my street, but there's a small shopping center (with two supermarkets, a pharmacy, two drugstores, a bakery, a butcher, two organic food shops, a small bookstore, a fast food place, a pizza place, and some other shops) two streets over. It's easy to reach by car, but even easier to reach on foot by the entire neighbourhood they serve.
In the other direction, there's the big shopping street of the next neighbourhood over, still walkable, though it's more than a kilometer so I always take my bike, and there's tons more shops and great restaurants there. It's an older neighbourhood, more a shopping street than a shopping center, and cars constantly clog that street. Maybe less fun to live in that street, but it's still a very popular street to live in. Personally I'd prefer to see cars banned from that street, but maybe that's not an option for some reason.
Still, it's a great neighbourhood and a great shopping street, and it's nice to have not one but two such shopping areas close to my home. (There's a third not far from that second one, which had a fantastic cheese shop and has a daily market.)
It is designed around pushing cars away from houses. The thing about walkable neighborhoods is that they’re nice to visit. If you live near one, those visitors will be near your home. To a suburbanite this is unacceptable.
Where I live, every neighbourhood is walkable. There's nothing special about it. Sure, people walk past our house. They're our neighbours and we say hi.
A neighborhood street that literally cannot allow through traffic is not really conducive for high-traffic stores, but really more like low-traffic uses like a convenience store or a hair salon or a daycare, many of which also generally tend to be prohibited by overly restrictive residential zoning.
Car-dependent suburbia is about imposing your car on everyone else while not allowing anyone else to impose their cars on you. It is inherently selfish city design.
Generalizing a bit, it seems that suburbanites hate other people’s cars, but are OK needing to drive everywhere, whereas urbanites hate having a car-dependent lifestyle.
I don't understand how people think that cars zipping by at high speeds is particularly conductive to impulse shopping. When I'm traveling at high speeds I usually have a goal I want to reach quickly and don't have time to follow any impulses.
Exactly. These are two different types of traffic that need to be separated from each other. Maybe have fast 1+1 or 2+2 road in the center for through traffic, with the occasional connection to slow parallel streets to access the shops. Make the center road a level higher or lower so everybody can cross it everywhere without interfering with the through traffic. That way you're still serving both purposes, but a lot more safely and efficiently.
> We value this calm so much that we refuse to admit shopping or even multi-family housing to them, for fear of disturbing it.
With single-family zoning being the overwhelming norm in the U.S, it would be unfair to call this a refusal - the supply is artificially constrained. Had multi-family housing been legal to build, then it's pretty likely that people would move into them at higher rates.
I remember driving through suburbian Atlanta at night a few months back, and there was this road that was 6 lines wide through a residential area, with a speed limit of 40 mph. That road was legitimately wider and straighter than Interstate 75, which I hopped on to in a few minutes.
While driving through that stroad, I remember thinking that the only people who benefit from this planning disaster is the local PD, as every corner gas station had cop cars hidden with their lights switched off.
But this isn't how the world works. It's not Simcity where you lay down neat grids of zones and the dutiful citizens follow your orders. People will want to take advantage of cheap(er) land alongside your "road" so that they can own a house while still having reasonable access to the "street". And boom now you have a stroad.
Attempting to use zoning to stop that runs into the problem that by and large people don't want to live in dense areas. Most of them want the cheap home in the burbs. And they'll vote for those that give it to them.
This is the root problem with Strongtowns and their ilk. They love to navel gaze and contemplate the platonic ideal of how a city should be laid out. But for the most part fail to provide a viable option that people can and will choose.
No, strong towns "and their ilk" (biased much?) provide an unlimited supply of solutions to a variety of problems. If you're not seeing them it's because you don't want to see them.
There isn't a "now the city is better" red button you can hit. It takes a lot of effort to get there. One of the efforts is in fact a marketing one: you need to spread awareness of where the problems actually are and why they are a problem. Stroads are a good example; I had never realized they were a problem, but since I discovered them I've been noticing them whenever traveling and thinking a lot about the implications and how they could be redesigned in that spot.
Stroads are very difficult to find in western Europe by the way, compared to the US. In some countries they're non existent. Clearly you're mistaken about how they can and will just appear out of nowhere. Maybe things are more nuanced and complex than your three second opinion lets on.
And the reason people often move out with kids is that it's too expensive to own a large-enough property for most people due to the high demand for walkable places.
If only it were so simple. Building walkable places is illegal almost everywhere in the US due to onerous parking minimums, regulations about street design and restrictive zoning. It's still possible to build walkable places with highrises, but low-rise walkable areas like https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9181247,-87.6517955,3a,60y,7... are almost lost art in the US. There are entire major metro areas in the US with no street like this.
Exactly. And it's those policies that need to change. But because this is such a lost art, and because Americans have been raised to believe in the car-centric suburban dream, most people don't even know that this is an option. It's a policy issue, but also an awareness issue.
I wonder why nobody just changes these regulations. Sure it's difficult and you won't get a majority in most places, but I find it hard to understand why not at least some cities designate a small area as a "model community" and relax zoning and parking requirements.
This is happening to some extent (e.g. Chicago removing parking minimums near transit stations, Houston removing parking minimums in two downtown-adjacent neighborhoods) but mainly only in large cities. Parking minimums are especially onerous since they almost ensure you can only build strip malls for retail.
Walkable places are inherently more expensive because they lack economy of scale. It's why Dunkin Donuts can sell a dozen for $10 but it costs ~$20 for half a dozen at my local walkable place. Granted, there is a quality of ingredients difference but not 4x the cost.
No, it's the suburbs that lack economy of scale. The walkable areas contribute far more per acre in taxes than the suburbs. They also require fewer resources to maintain per person because they're physically smaller. The suburbs have such a paucity of "economies of scale" that municipalities around the country have gone into debt to support them.
The reason donuts cost more at your local walkable place is because real estate prices are higher in walkable places, because walkable places are so in-demand that as a nation we've bid the prices of those places to the moon. So we ought to change our zoning rules so that the market can build more of them. That's the whole point of Strong Towns idea.
Plus the Dunkin Donuts was gifted expensive public infrastructure since, in all likelihood, they have a 10 year tax incentive that prevents them from paying almost any property taxes.
Dunkin Donuts also doesn't bake their donuts on premises (with a few exceptions). Surprise, you can get even cheaper (and shittier) donuts at the dollar store!
>No, it's the suburbs that lack economy of scale. The walkable areas contribute far more per acre in taxes than the suburbs. They also require fewer resources to maintain per person because they're physically smaller. The suburbs have such a paucity of "economies of scale" that municipalities around the country have gone into debt to support them.
Yes, Strong towns loves to say this too despite it being obviously not true.
Infrastructure stuff like roads and pipes and so on is cheap. Usually 10-15% of the budget. The real cost of government is in providing services to people. And those are invariably more expensive in the cities than the suburbs.
Show me even one city in the US that has lower taxes and spends less per Capita than the surrounding suburbs.
That's not the right metric though. Cities and suburbs are not comparable in terms of overall experience. The extra services you cite are one of the reasons why.
For one, suburbs are pretty economically difficult for low-earning households. Low earners are more likely to live in cities, therefore cities tend to have more social services.
You need to do an apples-to-apples comparison, which unfortunately is not easy.
At least in Illinois, valuations are determined at the county level, and the majority of sales tax is also county-level. All things being equal, more commercial property (and tourism) moves some of the burden to taxpayers outside the city. Comparing Chicago to the neighboring suburb of Oak Park, sales tax in Chicago is 10.25% vs. 10% in Oak Park, but property taxes are nearly double in Oak Park. Maybe things like rental cars or hotels are taxed less, but that's not a big impact.
Of course property tax rates are inversely correlated with property values so it's a bit tricky to compare, but the point is it's not always true that suburbs have lower taxes than the central city. Transportation costs are also typically much lower in cities (transit fares/passes are typically significantly cheaper than car ownership).
You have it completely backwards. Suburbs aren't scalable. That's why back in the 50s-70s when they were first built, they were amazing, but today, they are rife with traffic problems, noise pollution, and crumbling infrastructure.
There are plenty of Dunkin Donuts stores in walkable places. I have a Dunks across the street from my condo and another one around the corner (and several others several blocks away). (I live in this area, which is VERY walkable: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8822495,-87.6254941,1122a,35...)
It's true there are also other, superior, options, but that's a bonus!
Is that actually true? That's absolutely true in SF, but the Bay Area is bonkers for lots of reasons, housing prices is a well known one so I want to be careful about extrapolating from there.
It's true. The Not Just Bikes channel has a video on walkable neighborhoods in the US. They're all massively expensive because of the high quality of life.
How much of that is "choice"? People can only live in places that exist, and places that exist must be constructed in compliance with certain government standards, and the government standards for the US for the last fifty years have been all cars, all the time. In most places, it is illegal to build a house without a garage, or a bar without a parking space for every stool.
The law mandates that everyone drive everywhere whether they want to or not.
None of this is true. You can easily find dense walkable places to live. You will just pay more money for a much smaller house. Your living expenses will be higher. And you'll have to rely on public transportation which is a pain in the ass when you have small kids.
People will continue to choose the wildly tax-subsidized option, yes.
If people in the suburbs had to pay enough property tax to recoup their share for the cost of roads, water, sewage, electric, telecoms, mail and other ancillary services to their large, non-productive plot of land, they'd likely consider other options.
Suburbs look nice in the short term, before the roads need repaving and the utilities need major overhauls; but the total lifetime cost to the public far exceeds how much tax they bring in.
Dense walkable places exist, but they are diminishing because in most places they are illegal to construct. No new walkable places have been built for nearly a half century, and many of our old ones have been bulldozed to make room for empty parking lots and jammed highways.
>But they choose not to. US population is roughly 1/2 suburban, 1/4 rural, and 1/4 urban. Which backs up my point.
With single-family zoning being the norm in the U.S, it would be unfair to call this a choice. The supply of other types of housing is severely constrained.
I just watched a video in response to this story that explained how zoning in North America is actually too much like SimCity, with very restrictive homogenous zoning and no mixed zoning at all. It's mixed zoning that allows people to live closer to the shops for their daily needs, and that reduces traffic.
These shops aren't on the stroad because the US is an anarchy where everything goes, they're there because it's designed that way. But the design is inefficient and dangerous.
we do have roads where we prohibit driveways onto them. They're called Interstates. somehow we don't have massive issues with people illegally building driveways onto them.
It kills me that US road planners don't even bother putting in medium-term solutions that would fix most of the issues, like a road with separated through lanes in the middle and a one-lane service road for the driveways.
Lots of them in San Diego, too. Here's an example in Clairemont, which is an early post-war suburb. Note that the homes pictured are also 'missing middle' construction.
My problem with this is that it is the exception and not the rule. Even this is the case; that type of service road access is only on one side of the road.
This ofc doesn’t solve everything, like how crossing a super wide stroad is terrible for both cars and non-motorized users given the large number of conflict points, the long cycle times needed to move cars through fat intersections, etc.
For what it's worth, I actually lived in the pictured neighborhood, and having that simple 25-MPH max offset from the main road was so much nicer than when I lived right up next to a 35MPH road, even though the larger road was 45. It was also great to be able to walk across the street to the grocery store. The street width really wasn't an issue.
>This is the root problem with Strongtowns and their ilk. They love to navel gaze and contemplate the platonic ideal of how a city should be laid out. But for the most part fail to provide a viable option that people can and will choose.
They fail to provide a viable option because, as they point out, cities are complicated so universal prescriptions will fail. If no one in your place cares enough to come up with a local solution, then any intervention would have failed anyway, as we've seen for decades with aid work throughout the world.
Most of what they do is showing that what we have now is on a predictable, medium-term trajectory to insolvency by its fundamental financial unsound structure. Their 'ilk', so much as they have any, would be Urban3, who do GIS mapping of financial productivity within cities. So, 'navel gazing', I guess.
And yet somehow the country I live in has proper streets. I see that more often, where things are dismissed as "not viable" in the US even though they actually exist elsewhere.
You might have a parallel street immediately next to the road but separate from it. That way people or business can be next to a road but will not block traffic. It's what we often do here. Those then will be connected to the road at some point via a side street. I have never seen a multi lane road with a lot of intersections and parking space next to it, immediately adjacent to stores. We don't have 'turning lanes' either. I'm really wondering whether they are cherry picking these things for badness or whether it's really very common in the States.
Cool seeing strongtowns here. Not Just Bikes is a YouTube channel that has helped popularize them recently, and has a lot of other videos about what makes living in the Netherlands so great (i.e. it’s not just bikes, although that’s a big part of it).
I can't find the exact video right now but I remember one where he compared a horrid stroad with a lovely Dutch street. The Dutch version contained two single lane streets, bike lanes, a lightrail line and lovely shade from all the trees. And ironically the second had a higher carrying capacity because single-occupant vehicles are just terrible at moving people.
The popularization is more likely the other way around: Strong Towns has been around 12 years, has a huge audience, and is a sponsor and promoter of Not Just Bikes.
I agree it’s an exceptional YouTube channel though. :)
> Strong Towns has been around 12 years, has a huge audience, and is a sponsor and promoter of Not Just Bikes.
St might have a huge audience amongst professional city planners, but in the “public consciousness” NJB is what popularised both ST’s concepts and knowledge of ST as an organisation.
NJB is closing in on half a million subscribers and has 11 vids above a million (one above 3), by comparison ST’s youtube channel is under 20k subs and their biggest video is 10 years old and has 350k views. Their 2 STROAD videos follow with 60k each, NJB’s top stroad video has 1.3m views. Hell, 3 videos of NJB’s “strong towns” series have more views than the entire strong towns channel.
The “bicycle dutch” channel is larger than ST, and it’s essentially a cycling vlog.
You say that ST is a sponsor and promoter of NJB, but NJB has a much larger lay audience and regularly plugs donating to strong towns.
On YouTube, Strong Towns has 9.7K subscribers and Not Just Bikes has 425K. NJB’s video about stroads has 1.3M views while Strong Towns’ videos about stroads have 62K and 63K and are 3 and 8 years old. I’ve only seen people talk about stroads online when NJB made his videos.
Since this wasn’t clear: I was not referring to YouTube audience, where ST makes no effort, but to overall audience across different media. ST primary media are blog articles and podcasts, and the main social channels are Facebook and Twitter.
Anytime I leave the city and spend a few days getting around by car I’m amazed at just how completely exhausting it is to go shopping or run errands in suburbia. I am not sure why exactly, after all I’m just sitting there, but I think all the stop-and-go and waiting 10 minutes at lights trying to get across a stroad intersection to a shop I can see the whole time is a big contributor.
I moved recently to where everything is a car drive away. The constant in an out of the car is exhausting. Not physically but mentally. Conter-intuitively because cars are also weather proof and comfortable, I felt a lot of the inertia is actually in getting out of the car. I found myself just waiting a little while before getting out. I am a fit and healthy individual and it is draining.
I tried the ride on and it's about an hour one way to work by bike, so I think I will get an e-bike. I have other physical training to do so I don't want to completely deplete myself by riding, but I still don't want to use the car.
I once had a serious learning experience driving from the suburbs into the CBD to meet friends. My attempt coincided with a Zombie Walk that bisected the city. It took me forever to reach where I was meeting friends, then another forever to find somewhere to park the car (all the paid parking was full) given I had to radiate out and cross the zombie parade again. Took 90 minutes to do what would've taken 5 minutes normally, or maybe 10 minutes on foot. All for one person in a car.
Needs a (2017) in title. This has been a very important article/concept in US planning circles. Personally I don't really like the street/stroad/road distinction but prefer the Transport for London 'movement and place' approach [0] which is clearer on necessary compromises. The end goal of both of course is to ensure traffic engineers (trained primarily in efficient car movements) take into account pedestrian considerations where pedestrians need to be, which have taken a back seat where there is any conflict with cars over the last 50 or so years.
I couldn’t agree more with the article. Unfortunately as for America I think people wouldn’t be very happy with turning their stroads into streets. There is a very toxic self centered car culture here; any impediment to it real or imaginary will make people very angry.
Suburbia is a tree. The best residential property is closest to the leaf nodes, since this minimizes through traffic (think cul-de-sac). The best commercial property is closest to the root, since this maximizes it (think McDonalds). The tree empties every morning and fills every night, placing enormous demands on the edges near the root. Those are generally the stroads. Slashing the capacity of a stroad/arterial by turning it to a street would cut off the entire subtree from the world. Homeowners are right to resist that. Their property would be useless.
If we’re fighting stroads, those have to become roads. One way to get this done is simply banish the businesses. But this strains capacity on the arterials even worse, since you now need to leave the suburb to go shopping.
The other way is to push businesses down the tree, closer to houses, more decentralized. But the residents won’t abide that either, on the theory that businesses will attract traffic to their sub-trees.
To that I say: get over it. It’s utterly insane to have a whole street for the private use of a few dozen families. It’s literally impossible to make arterials big enough to compensate. You can have your street slow, but it’s going to be part of a network and it’s going to be used by more than just the hyper local community.
But of course they don’t see this as particularly less bad than total isolation, so they won’t allow it either. The whole thing is fucked.
In practice, new cities, when that even happens, doesn't happen out of thin air either, not in the US at least. We don't build cities (too much infrastructure investment required), but even when we do, they don't go from 0-100 mph and go from being a small sleepy town into a city overnight. History of a place thus dictates what the future of it will look like. How we build cities, effectively, involves decreasing traffic capacity in some places. Strongtowns.org has a large number of other changes, not just limiting stroads.
No, they need to move the commercial property closer to the leaves. Not at the leaves, but close enough that the distance is still walkable. That would really reduce car traffic, and therefore reduce stress on the road capacity.
One of the interesting points is that there is a commonality between those suburbans and people who want walkable urban areas: few of us want to deal with the problems of lots of cars driving around us.
There's no cognitive dissonance here really. People are just self interested. They don't want a bunch of bars because that means people will drive drunk and piss and puke all over their property stumbling back after last call. They don't want fewer lanes because its just going to turn their commute from work into even more of a bottleneck. They don't want a mall built near them because of the traffic bottlenecks it would create, but they want a fast road to get to a mall at just enough distance away to not be affected by these issues themselves.
It's definitely true in certain cases, induced demand is not some law of physics. Take a one lane road and a two lane road. It's pretty common for one lane roads to end up clogged up due to left turning traffic that's unable to clear intersections fast enough. On a two lane road, traffic that goes straight or right will have room two maneuver around the left turning traffic. And on top of that, planners for highways are really planning for throughput rather than commuting times. When you widen a freeway, speeds don't change or might even go down, but total throughput goes up accordingly and that's whats important when you have a mile of trucks backed up at your port.
If they're afraid that a mall will create traffic bottlenecks, maybe build those malls so they're easy to reach on foot, by bike, or with public transport. That way you don't get that traffic bottleneck.
People buy shopping carts worth of stuff at malls. That's not exactly easy to schlep on a bike or a bus for most people especially if you are in poor shape. A lot of people in the U.S. today live in walkable areas, but opt to just take a climate controlled car with a spacious trunk 5 mins to the grocery store vs walk 15 minutes one way and back with 25 pounds of groceries in poor weather.
If shops are nearby, you go more often for a quick trip to the shop and buy much less. Lots of Dutch people go shopping on their bike, and that works perfectly fine. And people who really buy a lot, walk home with two big shopping bags. That works too. It has never been a big problem here.
I truly believe the reason has more to do with being antisocial than anyone cares to admit. It's not always the car's mobility that people enjoy so much as the barrier it creates from the outside world.
Socialization needs norms. It’s no accident that relatively urbanized civilizations have relatively strict codes of behavior. America’s wild and free frontier spirit, God bless it, is less fun in a crowded subway.
And soul crushing traffic is wild and free? Or suburban strip malls are wild and free? Or endless cul de sacs? There is a lot of imposed structure to suburbia too, specifically because it is planned.
In fact, it has more imposed structure, exactly because of the unreasonably restrictive zoning laws in the US. Allow more variety and you get more choice.
Right, but like everything else in the US right now, the split is obvious along political lines. People who like cities are left, people who like suburbs/rural living/driving everywhere are right.
It was interesting for me to learn how this process happened in Copenhagen and Groningen in the 1960s and 1970s—people were angry, they protested, made death threats.[0] So it seems like re-pedestrianising areas has always made some people very angry everywhere, and that anger may not be so unique or significant a barrier as it might initially seem.
Just a few years ago, when Paris decided to pedestrianize (or rather restrict traffic on) rue des Rosiers, a small, commercial street in a historically Jewish neighborhood, shop owners were strongly opposed to it. When the work was completed, foot traffic in the shops doubled almost overnight. You can easily tell by the fact that long queues pop up in front of fallafel shops and delis at peak business hours that overflow in the street and that wouldn't have fit before on the tiny sidewalks.
People are scared of change, even when the benefits are quite obvious. At least it was obvious to me when I was handed an hyperbolic leaflet opposing the change before it was done: I knew pedestrian streets were beneficial to shops, the area has no lack of transportation being in the center of Paris, there's no parking nearby, and you don't get in a car to go buy a damn sandwich in Paris unless you're completely fucking insane.
This is similar in the town in Germany where I grew up. When I was a kid they converted the central part of the inner city into a walking mall, no cars allowed (except for delivery traffic outside of certain hours). The shop owners were up in arms, saying it would be the death of the city, everyone would go shopping at big malls outside of town etc.. The exact opposite happened, the city is absolutely packed, people come from far to go shopping there, cafe's everywhere.
Ironically, the city is considering expanding the pedestrian zones and shop owners are bringing forth the same arguments they did 30 years ago, as if they didn't learn anything.
My favorite example of this is something I saw in a local bicycle planning study. A 4 lane stretch about 6 blocks long was converted to 2 lanes with parking and wider sidewalks (with the idea that people will naturally drive a bit slower with less of the street devoted to traffic). Someone was livid that it had happened, ranting about delays at the light on one end of the stretch. At busy times, the typical wait at the light is for the green (so not even a full cycle). Very occasionally a couple of cars don't make the busiest left on the first green.
The truth is there isn't that much demand for high density housing and walkable neighborhoods. They are mostly attractive to young childless adults. Some of them stick around once they have kids, but it's rare and usually reserved for the well-off who can afford private schools and family-sized homes. In SF you've got the parents who are happy to put their kids and groceries on the back of their bike, but most look to find something a bit closer to suburbia.
I would say communities like San Mateo or Belmont on the peninsula are what's in demand. Small "cute" downtowns with trendy shops and dining, but also enough parking so you can drive, surrounded by single family homes, big parks and open spaces and mixed multi-unit apartments/condos. People can have the benefits of their own property, exclusive space and enough space for a family, while enjoying a "downtown" experience when they want to.
“California is changing because of a desire of many millions of people to have something that looks like the conventional, traditional California Dream: a house on a lot in a neighborhood of similar houses on lots,”[1]
It's mostly a case of people not knowing what they really want. Demand-driven economy has a place, but it's definitely not something to accept simplistically.
Famous examples: people wanted better horse-carriages and didn't anticipate cars. People wanted better keyboards on their blackberry-style phones, not an iPhone. Etc etc.
Nobody who experiences life in the Netherlands where biking and walking is actually safe ends up wishing they could return to stroad-style car-dependency. Everyone who says they prefer it is just saying that they don't know any better.
And any appeal to saying we have to keep making dangerous garbage sprawl because that's what people demand, that's disengenuous nonsense.
Strong Towns actually has the answer to this, the one that doesn't involve being condescending to people in sprawlville, USA. They point out that EVERYONE when you ask them about their priorities, especially for the streets where they live, they always say they care about safety, capacity, cost, and speed, basically in that order. But engineering assumptions put it more like speed, capacity, cost, safety.
(Wish I could give you the optimal link, but the one thing Strong Towns is weakest at is making it easy to find the right links in their enormous backlog of articles; the site search tool is really annoying; I know the concepts I'm mentioning are discussed multiple places, including in their two books)
I'm not convinced. It's not like your "better horse-carriage" example because the option already exists and people reject it. My colleagues in the Bay Area all lived in SF, then quickly moved to the subrurbs when they got older. Sure, there is no pedestrian/biking utopia in the US, but there are places where you can pretty much get by without a car. And many people don't choose to live there.
I also spent some time in Singapore and it seems much closer to the Strongtowns ideal than the US - dense housing, top-notch transit (most don't have cars), carefully planned development with first-floor shops on every block, lots of greenspace and public areas.
And when I talked to my colleagues you know what their desired was? Make enough money to buy a car and get the equivalent of a single family home. They lived in dense housing and got by without a car not out of choice but out of affordability. Again, not all of them (many who could afford cars choose not to buy one), but it was a pretty common theme.
What were the reasons your friend gave for not wanting to live in SF? The common reasons I see are often that it's too expensive, there's too much crime and homeless people, and it's noisy and full of traffic. All of these are solvable problems.
Cost is fixed by building more housing and traffic is solved by making the Bay Area less car centric (public transportation in the Bay Area isn't terrible but it can still be a lot better). I don't have great solutions for crime and homelessness but building more housing all over will definitely help reduce it and better social safety nets can help eliminate it entirely.
Additionally, you don't need to build a second SF to solve the problem. In fact, most dense housing can be built for relatively cheap. You don't need to build 20 story buildings everywhere.
Yes, the funny thing is that because cities allow so many cars in the city center, congestion, pollution, and noise are everywhere, which makes people want to move to the suburbs, which means they have to drive to get anywhere, which makes congestion, pollution, and noise everywhere in the suburbs, which makes them want to move further out...
It makes a lot more sense when you look at the history. American suburbs exploded in popularity after the successes of the civil rights movement started cutting into the ability of white people to live in a city without having to share public spaces with black people. Public pools were closed around the country, tons of people moved into suburbs which had barriers of various levels of subtlety where they could create a de facto segregated school system, etc.
Since that was the class of people with the most money and significant political power, city planning departments were heavily dominated by the idea that the people who mattered the most weren't actually residents for many decades, especially since it's always easier to continue a direction than radically reconsider the approach.
I saw a good example of that here in DC a couple of years ago when our pedestrian safety project was being led by an older traffic engineer who could not stop talking about cars per hour as his primary metric. It was very clear that this was a deeply engrained way of thinking, and that it had never been subject to much critical analysis. When he retired and a much younger replacement got the job, they treated neighborhood safety as their top priority — and since they actually ran simulations rather than relying on their gut, it turned out to have almost no impact on overall commute speeds because all the reckless drivers were doing was getting to the next backup slightly faster.
Their reason often came down to “raising a family of four in 700 sq ft 2 bed kinda sucks”.
For the same amount of money they could get a 1,100 at ft home, with a yard, lots of families close by and good schools.
You cant “build more housing” if the desirable housing is a single family home with a yard. SF is out of space.
Like I said in my other reply, countries where raising a family in a 2 bed apartment is mostly due to cost - they can’t afford more space. American has plenty of space.
> Their reason often came down to “raising a family of four in 700 sq ft 2 bed kinda sucks”.
> For the same amount of money they could get a 1,100 at ft home, with a yard, lots of families close by and good schools.
You can't build tons of detached single family homes but you certainly can build higher-density housing with public parks and playgrounds. Similarly, I'd say the lack of families and schools is more of a symptom than a cause of not having the infrastructure to support families. In the United States there's a lot of marketing, culture, and laws which mean the detached single-family suburban home model is heavily subsidized but if you look at the better U.S. cities or many examples internationally, there's no shortage of families living in smaller places using shared public space — even a small playground is going to be more fun than the average back yard.
Schools are similarly prone to this: standardized test scores closely track family socioeconomic status so if you're in an area where there's limited family-friendly housing, lack of areas for kids to exist safely without getting hit by cars, etc. the scores will go down as the most affluent parents move without any change in the quality of the school's education.
Seems we're talking past one another. The point isn't that people can afford whatever they want, the point is that people don't directly want car-dependent suburban sprawl.
Sure, people want the impossible: quiet beautiful wilderness where you can also walk to school, groceries, concerts, and medical centers.
But the question at hand is actually how much of all the good things we are capable of having. And we really can do a lot better than sprawlville USA without the only alternative being San Francisco.
People want the impossible, but if they can't have it they will make trade-offs. And it's pretty apparent the trade off is "I'll put up with having to get a car in order to get more space at an affordable price".
Yes, but that's not an argument for anyone wanting car-dependent life. It's an argument for people being willing to tolerate car-dependent life (in order to have some benefits like affordability and more space), and that was never a disputed claim.
Incidentally, car-dependent affordable space is a farce. It's not actually more affordable, it only externalizes the costs. The huge infrastructure costs to support sprawl-style development are subsidized by denser parts of town. This is laid out bluntly in the articles on https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme and that's not to mention the externalized costs of the pollution of all the car traffic and many other things we could bring up.
In short, the car-dependent suburbs are artificially more affordable. And yes, tons of people will accept car-dependency in order to get the benefits and affordability of those places as we know them.
I suspect this will also suffer from the “grass is greener” problem. Those who live in cities will romanticise suburban living, and vice versa in suburbs.
Culture also matters; in the west the city is often seen as a place for single professionals, rather than somewhere to build your life long term. This will affect perceptions, for good or ill.
Also, although you can get by without a car in many locations, I think there’s probably a relatively stark difference in how livable that is depending on how it’s implemented. If your city is filled with two lane roads through the core that’s clearly much worse than the Netherlands equivalent.
> My colleagues in the Bay Area all lived in SF, then quickly moved to the subrurbs when they got older. Sure, there is no pedestrian/biking utopia in the US, but there are places where you can pretty much get by without a car. And many people don't choose to live there.
Agree. I don't understand the claims in this discussion about kids not being able to get around in suburbs on their own. I lived part of my childhood in a dense metropolis and part in a suburb. I was able to get around the suburb just fine on my own on a bicycle. This was before bike lanes (which many suburbs now have), and I would just ride on the sidewalk - this is perfectly safe and legal.
> And when I talked to my colleagues you know what their desired was? Make enough money to buy a car and get the equivalent of a single family home.
This isn't surprising to me, particularly if people know what the two different lifestyles are like (with and without a car). I am more of an advocate for different cities to have different styles of living for different people. The big issue in discussions like this, is a belief that there must be only one way to do things, and it must be forced onto every town and city through aggressive activism, which people who are older or have children or other responsibilities just don't have time to combat. That's not just disruptive but also unethical, in my opinion.
This thread also has several people with a fetishistic obsession with life in the Netherlands. Granted - the Not Just Bikes channel that many have mentioned is run by someone who moved to NL - so the bias there is expected. But lots of people who fantasize about NL would not actually like living there. To be blunt about it, most of the Dutch cities are soulless and boring. At first the immediate walk-out-the-door access to local businesses/destinations was charming. But ultimately I felt that the anti-car lifestyle led to a cultural lack of spontaneity and people implicitly had committed to a limited life that is centered around just what is nearby. Ironically, unlike the GP, I felt those living in NL who reported high levels of happiness were the ones who didn't know there were other options.
It's not just a vague grass-is-greener issue. And sure, Dutch cities can be soulless and boring by some measures, but that's the norm for American suburbia too.
It's not just a matter of self-report of happiness, the support for the Netherlands style of living is strong by a ton of measures.
Here's the thing: stuff like the eyes-on-the-street effect are HUGE. A sprawly American suburb that still has a neighborhood park where there are reliably dozens of kids who know each other… that works, because it's safe enough to let your kids go to the park with their friends without adult supervision. The fact is, other kids there means it's not bizarre to see one isolated seemingly-abandoned kid, and if they get hurt, there are other kids around to help them or to run home or call their parents etc.
It's not strictly a matter of cars. The whole issue of "stroad" vs road isn't anti-car. Roads are for cars mainly. Stroads are fundamentally dangerous. They are part of the development style that makes it unsafe for younger kids to get out on their bikes and be independent.
Given the choice of dense urban life vs car-dependent-sprawl, it's understandable why many people choose the latter. The problem is the missing-middle. Why is it illegal in most places to build moderate-dense walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that are neither densely urban nor car-dependent-sprawl? The capacity of people to choose different lifestyles along this continuum is missing. The rare places in the middle are crazy expensive because demand far outstrips supply. So, we really don't get anywhere with a conversation focused on which of the limited polarized choices people are stuck with in the USA.
> It's mostly a case of people not knowing what they really want
While this is possible to be true, I suspect on a per-utterance basis, it’s wrong way more often than it’s right. People often do know what they want; it’s just inconveniently not the same as what the utterer prefers.
"really want" is a poor phrase, but it was intended to mean not "what people sincerely/honestly want" but instead "what people would choose if they really had deeply informed understanding of the options".
People's utterances about what they want are almost never in light of the question of what they "really want". We rarely have the space and perspectives to reflect on and learn about what we "really want" to be able to even answer that question.
Most of life is people having low-level fears about loss and acceptance and so on and expressing our wants from that position. We rarely settle into our deeper values enough to even ask what we "really want" let alone find answers.
>The truth is there isn't that much demand for high density housing and walkable neighborhoods.
Real estate prices for high density housing and walkable neighborhoods disproves this statement outright. As for why this type of housing is not built more frequently, there is a fairly simple explanation: they are illegal to build under zoning laws, which massively favour single-family homes.
> Some of them stick around once they have kids, but it's rare and usually reserved for the well-off who can afford private schools and family-sized homes. In SF you've got the parents who are happy to put their kids and groceries on the back of their bike, but most look to find something a bit closer to suburbia.
There's a simple explanation for this: cities in the U.S are unsafe in particular for children due to the massive infestation of cars and car-oriented infrastructure. Suburbs appear to be the only alternative, but they are pretty damn harmful to the development of children - basically being a prisoner inside your house until you are old enough to drive a car is quite frankly demeaning.
I agree there isn't much real demand for high density housing as much as reluctant demand. What I mean by that, is that no one actually wants to live in high density areas, but they go for it when it gives them access to a desirable location they otherwise can't afford, or if they genuinely want that lifestyle, which I would argue is age-based more than anything. In reality, most people don't like the downsides of high density like crowded public spaces (for example parks), dealing with the habits of bad neighbors (like playing loud music at odd times), increased crime that correlates with urban areas, poor schools guided by populist policies, and so on. If you're young, you might put up with those downsides to get back access to bars or more social networking. But as you age, the value of those things drops significantly for most people.
As for walkability - its utility is vastly overblown in my opinion. Your note about childless adults rings true for me, and the only parents I know who care about walk scores are the ones who are themselves urbanist activists (few in number). Even then, when it came time to purchase a home, walkability was not a decision maker for those couples. To me, that was a signal that even parents who were very anti-car in their political sentiment ultimately didn't put enough of a value on the pro-walk/bike lifestyle to prioritize it when their money was on the line.
I also think it is impractical to not have a car. If you want to live a rich life with access to diverse activities, instead of being boxed into a 15 minute radius or your metro line, then you need a car. Who wants to deny their children the memories of day trips and the thrill of exploration? And if you have a car, then you already have the vehicle you need to live in a more suburban neighborhood, where you can enjoy additional space and safety while still accessing commercial areas in a time efficient manner.
This[1] Pew Research article shows that, pre-pandemic, it was about a 50-50 split between car-centric + low-density and walkable + high-density living. It is now 60-40 due to the pandemic. I would bet that it goes back to 50-50 in a few years once the pandemic slows down.
So yes, there's almost an equal amount of demand for this type of housing.
If you have the average 2 children with the average ~ 3 years between children, then these concerns are only relevant for roughly 21 years of life. If the average person lives to 80 and becomes an adult at 18, then you have 62 years as an adult. Only about a third of that time is spent caring for your children. That's still 40 years remaining. None of that has to happen on a place with large lot sizes and good schools for the kids, even if you concede that having kids requires large lot sizes and good schools.
Sure and plenty of them live in the city as well. Many of my friends' parents moved back to cities a decade or so ago when my cohort was going to college. I'm merely saying that having kids may increase demand for suburban housing by folks who otherwise would be interested in urban housing, but that doesn't permanently shift demand toward suburban housing.
No need to bring race into this - people into calling out car culture want to build and upgrade cities to make things better for everybody wherever they live. Bikes are obviously a lot cheaper than cars too, so better bike infrastructure everywhere reduces inequality in a way.
Anyway, as to your other points - firstly, changing or building cities in a way that is not car centric doesn't mean there are no cars and nobody drives - obviously people still have to and will. Actually, building cities in a way that is not car-centric is safer for people who still drive, and there's a lot less traffic, so that's good. It's just even better for people who don't or can't drive (think of people under 16 years old, who have little independence to travel living in suburbs).
It should be noted too that non car-centric cities are much better for e.g. elderly people to live in, because everything is much closer, and good cycle and walking paths are much better to ride mobility scooters on. Things being in walkable distance also helps people age better, because the exercise means you retain your mobility longer. It's pretty scary how as people age, you get to a point where if you're not staying active, you really quickly start to lose the ability to be active, which is a unfortunate spiral.
The last thing - it's not just bikes (look up the YouTube channel with the same name, by the way - it's awesome). Improving zoning laws and building good public transport is also a key part of the puzzle, and helps solve lot of the issues as well.
> Not everyone is young, healthy and rich enough to bike.
Bikes are orders of magnitude cheaper than a car. Both in terms of the infrastructure needed as well as the individual cost of bicycles. Good bicycle infrastructure also improves accessibility for those using mobility scooters, and a bicycle culture has hugely beneficial health benefits to individuals and society - not to mention the awful health effects of cars.
> Not everyone is young, healthy and rich enough to bike.
In the same way curb cuts improved the well being of way more than people in wheelchair, good, grade-separated walking and biking infrastructure makes moving around much easier and safer for way more than just cyclists.
Not everyone is young, healthy, and rich enough to be able to own and operate a 2.5t vehicle at high speed. And where walkers, wheelchairs, and other assisting devices can mix with little difficulty with bike traffic, that’s not the case with high-speed road traffic.
Did you know, that the Netherlands is rated higher than the US for car friendliness?
Making biking, public transport and walking more attractive also improves the experience for the few that still need to use a car.
Cars have a really low capacity. If you reserve the fastest route for biking or public transport and force cars to take a longer route then you will still be faster by car over the longer route than you would over the shorter route if cars where allowed there.
Not just bikes did a video on just that and explains it much better than I have:
As a Dutch person: everybody bikes here. Young people, old people (sometimes with electrical assist bikes), women, men, people with and without an immigration background.
It's the money sink that is a car that's the real privilege.
Not everyone is young enough (or old enough!) or healthy enough or rich enough to drive a car either. That's exactly the point of people advocating for less car-centric infrastructure. Walkable neighborhoods and public transit are much more inclusive.
>Not everyone is young, healthy and rich enough to bike.
This is such an alien attitude to me. Why would you need to be young or rich to ride a bike? Then I remember that American cities are so hostile to cyclists that, of course, only the young and rich would be able to do it there. Then this inequality is somehow taken to be a problem with the _bikes themselves_ rather than the cities that made cycling so dangerous. It's maddening to see.
And cars are not cheap either, you know.
Go to a European metropolis, you will see cyclists young and old, rich and poor, black and white.
Is there a name for the following fallacy:
"X is good, we should have more of X and make X available for more people."
"No we can't do that, X is only for rich white people and therefore bad."
Luckily, basically everyone who advocates for bicycle infrastructure also advocates for public transportation, which as I understand it in the U.S is more utilized by less privileged groups.
I find it hilarious that anyone would ever try to start a debate making the standpoint that car-oriented development would be the less racist alternative, what with highways inside cities having been used to absolutely ravage areas where non-whites have lived, and suburbs basically having entirely excluded non-whites, by both economic and non-economic means. Not to mention the added economic strain of owning a car, making it even worse for those who are less well off economically.
In what way do you need to be young and rich to ride a bike? Cars are significantly more expensive than bikes by almost 2 orders of magnitude. And people can ride bikes well into their 60s. In the Netherlands, old and disabled people are allowed to use small single passenger electric vehicles in the bike lanes. Meanwhile you can't drive a car until you're 16 which seems like a bigger problem for child development. The restrictions you've listed are only problems in the US because of how exclusive riding bikes is in the US. It's too dangerous to be used for anything other than leisure or exercise for most people.
This puts a name to something I've found very strange the few times I've visited America. Places like the "stroad" picture are everywhere and they have a strangely desolate feel to them. It's not an environment I would want to live and work in.
I have to take issue with this, though:
> We like to call them "the futon of transportation" because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street.
Futons (good ones, at least) are fantastic beds. I've been sleeping on them for over 20 years entirely by choice, having plenty of space and money for the alternatives. How anybody came to consider them a form of couch is the mysterious bit to me.
> How anybody came to consider them a form of couch is the mysterious bit to me.
Apparently someone saw a futon and figured “we could use [cotton-filled and somewhat foldable mattresses] instead of rigid split mattresses for sofabeds” and so “futon” became a style of sofabed (obviously shitty since it’s a sofabed).
I'm not a futon fan, but I did recognise this attack on futons as misguided. The article has a very important point, but addresses it poorly in my opinion. Partially because of this sort of unfair attack on something unrelated.
Mostly in that it’s not what a futon actually is, in its country of origin.
In japan, a futon is not a sofabed, it solely bedding and during the day it gets stowed into a closet (or a corner of the room).
It’s not seating and it doesn’t have a frame. Those are western “additions”. But not improvements, because futons were never intended for slatted frames (or even hard surfaces). Because of this incompatibility and the desire to make them permanent the “futon-style mattresses” thus have to become much thicker and heavier, thereby losing the flexibility and stowability of the original, and just becoming bad mattresses (la requirement for sofabeds, really).
In essence, “futons are shit” is one more example of taking something which is perfectly fine, moving it completely out of its context, misusing it entirely, and then calling it bad after making it so. And the badness gets attributed to futons where it’s been a universal constant of sofabeds.
Futon-style mattresses have not made sofabeds worse, they’ve always been shit[1] they’ve just tarnished the name of futons.
[1] Which in fairness is not normally an issue, their purpose is to be an ok-at-best couch with some ad-hoc bedding so guests don’t sleep on the floor.
Futon, originally, designate the japanese bed, not the weird couch bed hybrid the author is talking about.
It's not meant to be used as a couch but, often, to be folded so that it can be stored while the bedroom can be used for other purposes
When I first read this it was a revelation of vocabulary, but also helped me solidify a bunch of nebulous discontent for infrastructure in my city. Why did it suck quite so much? How could a simple 4 lane road be implemented so poorly as to cause -this-? Because it was trying to wear two hats. A main artery, and a commerce precinct. As the article points out, they are incompatible without huge compromises.
Wow, that's a really weird coincidence, I was literally watching (listening) to this video on youtube when I saw this pop up.
One thing strikes me though: there's network effects to "Stroads"; in the USA if you designed a shopping district or neighbourhood as being "roads to streets" with limited parking (as is suggested) then the people operating businesses or living in that neighbourhood would be worse off... because everyone judges things in ability to get to it by car. It's almost a culture of cars and it's probably impossible to remove, but first movers in this space will be the losers, even if in the long run everyone wins.
It's game theory at a national scale; and we're all losing.
Also sadly the moment all the parking is removed from businesses and concentrated in public lots do you really believe it will be free to park? If you’ve ever been to a town like Gatlinburg, Tennessee you’d understand just how nerve-wracking it is to feel comfortable parking on the edge of town. “Oh this is 3 hour parking will we make it back in time”, “oh this lot is $7/hr wow”…
Parking is a limited resource and probably should be expensive if we want to limit the number of cars on the road.
Parking can be free if the citizens of said city decide to issue a bond and build a bigger garage. But there’s no free lunch, you pay for it one way or another.
In order to de-car American life, it’s going to take some frustration with this situation to drive people and businesses to locations better suited for fewer cars. Driving is only going to keep getting more expensive until this happens.
I hate driving to the city because I loathe these stroads but I don't see a way out. The ship has sailed, the roads are built. I don't think there is enough money to build ourselves out of this. This is the problem I see with most infrastructure in US. We overshot so much that the burden of maintenance is too great. It's easier to build once than maintain indefinitely.
The ship hasn't sailed. Yes, the roads are built, but they can be changed. New roads are constructed every day, and they could be better. And better roads will eventually save money, because of less accidents and more efficient land use. And they will bring in more money because they attract and enable more businesses and increase the value of land. It's still a good investment to look for improvement.
The good news is that the Netherlands has come a long way too. It used to be far more car-centric, but over the years has steadily made improvements as part of ongoing maintenance. And now we're at the point where we're even re-digging canals that had been paved over for a 12-lane motorway [1] in the 70s.
That road was a failed experiment. There's no parking space in the center. there aren't any big access roads towards it. There was little logic supporting a broad, short road to nowhere.
Yeah of course, but it does demonstrate how much of a U-turn infrastructure thinking in the Netherlands has made. We came from thinking such a road was a good idea (and paving that canal was a big offer to make for such an experiment), to creating the infrastructure we have today.
I've been following along and donating since Chuck was on EconTalk in 2014, and the answer seems to be a clear 'yes'. Chuck sometimes says that the goal, other than to disappear because they're no longer needed, is to ensure that no city council or planning commission can ever make one of these really stupid developments without the opposition of people who buy into Strong Towns ideals, so it has been about fighting for mindshare. To that effect, their ~hundredfold increase in meetup attendance and the repeating of their message on huge channels like Not Just Bikes are both indicators of success.
They're trying to overthrow the design vernacular of an entire society, and that's necessarily hard despite that vernacular being dangerous, dehumanizing, and expensive. It's a team effort, but I think they're pulling their weight.
If you're (reasonably) wondering what they, as a particular organization, bring to the table, look at Chuck. He's a conservative Catholic engineer from a small Midwest town, which is significant both because that's a rare voice in this space, and because his broad appeal indicates something the organization is doing well so that it can reach a group that doesn't jump for 'Vision Zero', 'look at Europe', etc.
In his recent announcement that the fatal library crossing from his second book just brought about another death, Chuck is as feisty as I've ever heard him; he's out for blood. I think he might be on to something with the goal of bringing crippling lawsuits against city engineers who have been sheltering from responsibility by hiding behind MUTCD.
Or more specifically, are there any towns out there that have gone all-in on this mindset?
For example, there's lot of housing developers out there that build "eco-villages" housing developments -- the houses have solar or are well-insulated or there's a community garden or something else cute like that.
But a real "eco village" isn't a housing development with a gate or two onto the local stroad, it's a walkable/bikable/mixed-development town where you don't need a car to go grab a cup of coffee. Outside of the old pre-car suburbs like Cambridge/Somerville, are there any towns that are actively all-in on these ideas?
Absolutely. Those of us who have been fighting for better downtowns and doing away with zoning problems and flawed arguments ad business development have so much more ammunition thanks to Strong Towns, and our opponents haven't for several years been able to pretend we're crazy or advancing unexamined novel ideas.
Transportation and housing are intrinsically linked with affordability and quality of life. For North American society to improve we need to address these issues.
Lots of people are recommending Not Just Bikes on YouTube in this thread, which is great. In my mind, walkable urban design is a super important topic that people need to be on board with if we're to get ourselves out of this climate crisis. So here are a few related YouTube recommendations I've come across:
Where are the details to back up this call to action? I want to see how much more financially productive it is to replace a stroad with a separate street and road. I see these commercial through roads all over, they handle so much traffic compared to streets, it's hard to believe they decrease value in medium density population areas.
Interestingly, consider the late victoria period. Here there were no problems distinguishing between Road and Street because the vehicles involved were quite different. A steam train did not drive to your house or shop, and a horse and carriage would not make a cross country freight (well it did happen ...)
StrongTowns and Not Just Bikes, and similar sites are 100% nothing but anti-car activism. They will never, ever suggest something that isn’t specifically targeted to reduce car ownership and usage. It’s dressed up in all kinds of other rhetoric but at the end of the day they start with the idea that cars are terrible and everything (literally, everything) they publish or create exists to try to demonstrate it. If you’re bought into that idea already it’s fine, but nobody should pretend they exist for any other purpose than to push that singular agenda.
This feels like saying that we should only have supercomputers and low-power embedded devices, and nothing in between such as regular desktop computers.
No, its like saying that a kitchen surface should have clear femarcation between a stove for cooking and a prep surface, and wen you mix them you get molten chopping board and house fires
Desktops are still a decent means to some ends. The argument made by Strong Towns is that the stroad is not a good means to it's ends.
It serves both it's ends badly.
It's saying that currently only desktop computers are being built, and they're being shoehorned into both supercomputer applications (modelling weather) and embedded areas (controlling a lightbulb via a Dell OptiPlex).
Having two classes of devices would be an improvement of the current situation.
But it's not the case that only stroads are being built. There's plenty of things that are unambiguously streets and plenty of things that are unambiguously roads. If the argument were "not everything should be a stroad", I'd agree, but they're saying they want to eradicate all stroads.
You're correct, they are advocating that stroads be removed. The difference is that in your comparison to computers you assume that roads, like computers, have a quasi-linear trade-off between performance and power (ie: alpha x performance - beta x power = 0, obviously a simplification, but I hope it gets my point across) and thus a middle-ground between the extremes represents a good compromise for a variety of applications.
Strong Towns appears to be arguing that the trade-off between movement (roads) and value (streets) is highly non-linear, and that the middle-ground's combined performance is so much worse than either a street or road that it's not worth building. See the comment below about counter-tops vs. stoves for an example of an extreme binary case.
Because there are very few situations where a stroad is actually appropriate.
If your goal is to move people, a limited access high speed road is the right way to do it.
If your goal is to support commerce, a low speed, mixed traffic street that can support a lot of homes an businesses in a small area is the right way to do it.
The high speed and land use of stroads makes them inefficient and dangerous for commerce, and the fact that there's so much on-and-off traffic makes them slow and dangerous for transit. They are the worst of both worlds.
> […] but they're saying they want to eradicate all stroads.
Correct. Because as a sibling comment notes, they are a "compromise" that serves neither purpose very well. See the Not Just Bikes video referenced elsewhere in this discussion for a fuller treatment.
No, a stroad is more like trying to do supercomputing tasks on a Raspberry Pi. Except you also expect it to get ridiculous perf/watt despite running at it's highest performance band all of the time. Oh, and you're also overclocking the Pi to the point that it explodes.
The point they're trying to make isn't "you should only have tiny side streets and massive highways, with nothing in between". It's "don't build roads that require you go from a driveway or parking lot straight into high speed six-lane traffic". Drivers need reserved space for speeding up and slowing down, something that stroads do not provide.
The other point that’s being missed here is that pedestrians need a bunch of stuff that’s ignored:
* to be able to walk from business to business in minutes or seconds
* to feel safe walking across the street
* to be able to have conversations with other people outside without having to yell over traffic.
The stroad is also really bad at providing these needs because pedestrians are not considered at all in US roadway design.
No, it's saying that we need to use the right tool for the right job. It's about kind, not degree. When you lay asphalt on the ground there should be clear purpose - am I making a place for people to live and for commerce to occur or am I making a way for people to travel from one place to another place? If the latter, allow no intersections and allow for high speed vehicular travel. If the former, prioritize making the place that you're creating a nice place to be - things like wide sidewalks, tree cover, easy to walk around, low speed vehicular traffic for pedestrian safety and comfort, etc. If you are unclear about for which purpose you're laying asphalt, you end up creating something that is a sucky place to be and also moves traffic really slowly. You get something that sucks at everything.
I can't think of a really good computer analogy to explain stroads, but if I were to attempt it I would say that it's analogous to forcing everyone to use a CLI, for _everything_.
Roads can move a lot of people and material long-distances, quickly. CLIs are powerful, but I've never seen an e-commerce application with a command-line interface. It'd be the wrong tool for the job.
Similarly, you shouldn't build multi-lane roads with wide lanes (which is all a great fit for highways) in places where you expect a lot of people to be, especially if they're shopping.
I'm not sold. I live on a so-called road, it's comprised of a single lane of paved dirt that stretches on for 3/4ths of a mile. On top of that, the very first line is just utterly comical:
> If we want to build towns that are financially productive, we need to identify and eliminate stroads.
You're missing the point on why they're made. They're built to facilitate expansion in confined areas. I'd argue that it's more dangerous and less financially productive to have a street there, and incredibly more dangerous to put a road there. So, what's the solution?
> so-called road, it's comprised of a single lane of paved dirt
Note the verbiage on road from the article:
> […] where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two.
See specifically "high speed connection". I have a hard time believing that a paved dirt 'road' would allow for a "high speed connection".
There is the colloquial use of the word, and the 'technical' distinction that the article is trying to make between different types of way that vehicles can travel on.
You don't live on a road, you either live on a street or stroad. A road by definition does not have building access. Maybe your backyard faces a road, but you couldn't drive onto it with a car from there.
From the link, there is a visible laneway near the end of the merge land on the right in the picture it presents as a road.
While the cropping of the image obscures what is at the end of the laneway, it most likely does have a building. As you can see there is a 911 number plate, which usually don't get issued in Ontario unless there is a building on the property. Additionally, it appears to be a recycling bin at the end of the lane under the Canadian flag, which further indicates that a building is present.
Moreover, we can find plenty of examples of buildings, including houses, that have direct access to that road.
Take that up with the city authority. The stretch leading up to my house is labelled as a road, and barring any radical legislation it will probably stay that way until the day I die.
these aren't simple absolute definitions; go around determining what is what, and you bump into reality. There are definite roads that have a few businesses and homes on them, particularly rural roads. They are still roads. It becomes a stroad when it's trying to still be for distance-travel but has constant homes/businesses/intersections. Between that and limited-access freeways, there's a fuzzy middle that is road-enough without being a stroad yet.
Barely (it doesn't say anything about no building access).
In any case, if that is the point, it's better to say it that way, to talk about the distinction the article is making (like the sibling comment to the one I replied to) rather than saying "by definition" with some expectation that the conversation is being carried out with whatever precise set of definitions you've chosen.
Okay, great, we've really moved the conversation forward here.
The vague implication, that 2-lane state and federal highways shouldn't have driveways on them, is not and will not be the situation for the foreseeable future, so there's a pretty good case for using some nuance instead of insisting on some particular technical definition.
> The function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth
> the function of a road is to connect productive places
Is your house located on a street or a road? If it's on a street... how is wealth being built? And how is it not connecting productive places (your home to your office) ? And how is connecting productive places not building wealth?
This concept just doesn't make sense. Roads and streets are synonyms. Yes, I get that they have different definitions, but separating their usage actually leads to more problems than solutions.
"Make sure you look both ways when you cross the street." - So, I don't need to look both ways before crossing the road?
"There are so many potholes on the road." - So, are there none on the street?
"I think I will be late to work because of all the road works on the way." - So there's no works being done on the street?
"Kids, don't play in the street!" - Gotcha, we will just play in the road.
"No street level parking." - OK, but can I park on the road?
> If it's on a street... how is wealth being built?
It's tax revenue, aka wealth, for the city. That counts for homes and businesses.
> And how is it not connecting productive places (your home to your office)?
The main purpose of a street is access to the productive places which is different from a road. The main purpose of a road is connecting two areas with productive places, usually attached to streets. A street has businesses or homes lining it, a road should not.
> but separating their usage actually leads to more problems than solutions.
No it doesn't. You want transportation to be fast and efficient and you want streets to be safe and accessible.
> Roads and streets are synonyms.
No, they're similar but are designed for different things. My smartphone and my laptop are both computers but we call them different things because their uses are different.
> Americans do not understand the difference between a road and a street.
[...]
> The value of a road is in the speed and efficiency that it provides for movement between places. Anything that is done that reduces the speed and efficiency of a road devalues that road. If we want to maximize the value of a road, we eliminate anything that reduces the speed and efficiency of travel.
> The value of a street comes from its ability to support land use patterns that create capturable value. The street with the highest value is the one that creates the greatest amount of tax revenue with the least amount of public expense over multiple life cycles. If we want to maximize the value of a street, we design it in such a way that it supports an adjacent development pattern that is financially resilient, architecturally timeless and socially enduring.
[...]
> In the United States, we’ve built a 45 mile per hour world for ourselves. It is truly the worst of all possible approaches. Our neighborhoods are filled with STROADS (a street/road hybrid) that spread investment out horizontally, making it extremely difficult to capture the amount of value necessary for the public to sustain the transportation systems that serve them.
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/11/21/a-45-mph-worl...