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The Stroad

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Re: The Stroad

#271

Post by [deleted] »

thesuitonym wrote: post #268
zonotope wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Stroad

#272

Post by timwaagh »

Vinnl wrote: post #262
TrispusAttucks wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have great respect for your optimism.

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. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restor...

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.

Re: The Stroad

#273

Post by PaulAJ »

throw0101a wrote: post #15

Another article that may be useful: > 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.…

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.

Typical example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9997356,-0.9166437,14.25z?...

More complex example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1101752,-0.1713974,7297m/d... . Note the M23 on one side, Crawley Avenue on the other, and Peglar Way right in the middle. All of them serve to route traffic around the town centre instead of through it.

In many cases you can see how the original through-road (sometimes dating back to Roman times) had the bypass patched on; without the bypass the "High Street" would have been a stroad.

(Fans of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy may recall Arthur Dent's cottage being demolished to make way for a bypass. This was an issue: the nature of bypasses meant that building them often required the demolition of nice little cottages on the outskirts of small towns.)

Re: The Stroad

#274

Post by jeffbee »

PaulHoule wrote: post #257
jeffbee wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've wondered for a while how you would do that. 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. ignor…

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.

Re: The Stroad

#275

Post by treis »

kortex wrote: post #270
treis wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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.

The services (schools, police, fire) aren't better in a city. They're more expensive and usually significantly worse.

Re: The Stroad

#276

Post by eyabs »

PaulHoule wrote: post #245
cobertos wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

Re: The Stroad

#277

Post by PaulHoule »

eyabs wrote: post #276
PaulHoule wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

I've never run a marathon and probably never will but I've walked 20 miles several times at a slow pace and never thought it was that hard.

Re: The Stroad

#278

Post by artisanspam »

refurb wrote: post #52
_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 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 t…

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.

[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/26/more-americ...

Re: The Stroad

#279

Post by closeparen »

mcv wrote: post #156
closeparen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: The Stroad

#280

Post by closeparen »

mcv wrote: post #213
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…

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.

It would bring mild traffic to parts of the tree that currently have almost zero, which is unacceptable to the people living on them.
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