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The Stroad

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Re: The Stroad

#241

Post by throwaway894345 »

znowcone wrote: post #192
throwaway894345 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Doesn't sound like a lot to be honest. This is what I'm used to in Germany, say around 1km radius, everything walkable: * 1x big REWE, 3x small REWE, 1x Real, 1x Netto, 2x ALDI, 3x LIDL, 1x Turkish grocery store, 1x Asian grocery store * Too many kiosks too count (tobacco, drinks, snacks, maybe like a convinience store) * Too many bakeries to count * 2 tram/metro stations, soon to be 3 * 5 bus stations (not counting…

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.

Re: The Stroad

#242

Post by treis »

wilkommen wrote: post #93
treis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

>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.

Re: The Stroad

#243

Post by throwaway894345 »

x3iv130f wrote: post #138
throwaway894345 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Those places tend to be unafordable longterm for anyone making even twice the median salary.

Jobs in those places also tend to pay a lot higher than the median salary.

Re: The Stroad

#244

Post by yabones »

flycaliguy wrote: post #180
pjc50 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was shocked how the historical center of London, ON was demolished to the ground and replaced with shacks Does anyone have more details on this in written form? It's annoyingly difficult to google for because it's the other London. Various British cities have been guilty of this; Bradford had a "hole" for about a decade due to an unbuilt shopping centre. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2009/08/27/…

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…

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.

Re: The Stroad

#245

Post by PaulHoule »

cobertos wrote: post #196
gpvos wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: The Stroad

#246

Post by kortex »

itronitron wrote: post #212
frereubu wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 15m…

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 :)

I rarely look at my speedometer. I set my speed almost entirely by feel, road conditions, and other cars.

Which is kind of the point of the human-scale roads movement. If you design roads that feel fast, people will drive fast.

Re: The Stroad

#247

Post by JohnWhigham »

closeparen wrote: post #26
mcv wrote: post #3

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…

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 e…

This is precisely why nothing is going to change in the US in terms of urban planning: people love living in the suburbs.

Re: The Stroad

#248

Post by PaulHoule »

zonotope wrote: post #224
dagw wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ac…

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 subw…

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.)

Re: The Stroad

#249

Post by JohnWhigham »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #23
_robbywashere wrote: post #21

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.

The cognitive dissonance is wild. The busiest and most economically vibrant areas in the US are the ones that deprioritize cars (main streets, downtowns, outdoor malls, bar districts). But if you try to change an existing area into a less car friendly area people absolutely lose their heads

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.

Re: The Stroad

#250

Post by bee_rider »

jamincan wrote: post #236
mcv wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lan…

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.

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