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The Stroad

strongtowns.org

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Re: The Stroad

#141

Post by masklinn »

omnicognate wrote: post #139

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 goo…

> 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).

Re: The Stroad

#142

Post by fragmede »

cozzyd wrote: post #79
woah wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong. People want to live in walkable cities. Property prices prove this.

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.

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.

Re: The Stroad

#143

Post by fragmede »

omnicognate wrote: post #139

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 goo…

Hm? Futons fold up into a softish furniture for sitting on. How is that not a couch?

Re: The Stroad

#144

Post by masklinn »

burlesona wrote: post #71
drivers99 wrote: post #8

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). Here’s Not Just Bikes’ video about Stroads: https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM

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.

Re: The Stroad

#145

Post by fragmede »

farnsworth wrote: post #83
closeparen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The takeaway here is a lesson about how we build cities, not that we should decrease the traffic capacity of some stroads and make no other changes.

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.

Re: The Stroad

#146

Post by captainmuon »

cozzyd wrote: post #85
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a very simple solution then. build more 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 n…

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.

Re: The Stroad

#147

Post by this15testing »

nemetroid wrote: post #133
gruez wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

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.

Using Los Angeles as an example:

https://ladotlivablestreets.org/programs/vision-zero

https://laist.com/news/transportation/2020-traffic-deaths-lo... for the graphic "Traffic violence in Los Angeles" showing the increase since Vision Zero was adopted.

Then you have enforcement issues like jaywalking laws, the wording and culture around collisions and referring to them as "accidents", etc.

The entire country was REbuilt (US cities were not always like this) around the car. Until that changes, no city will reach Vision Zero.

Re: The Stroad

#148

Post by boudin »

fragmede wrote: post #143
omnicognate wrote: post #139

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 goo…

Hm? Futons fold up into a softish furniture for sitting on. How is that not a couch?

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

Re: The Stroad

#149

Post by knorker »

gibolt wrote: post #57

For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend this channel's series. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN... 'Not Just Bikes' has a ton of other great videos on the channel about what infrastructure makes a good city and what makes one hostile to residents.

It's 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.

Re: The Stroad

#150

Post by masklinn »

fragmede wrote: post #143
omnicognate wrote: post #139

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 goo…

Hm? Futons fold up into a softish furniture for sitting on. How is that not a couch?

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.

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