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How do you fix a stroad?

strongtowns.org

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Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#91

Post by vegetablepotpie »

pcmoney wrote: post #79

Has anyone ever put a picture of a stroad up as art/instagram etc like you see with downtown NYC, Paris, small european villages, shanghai, rural mountain towns, old downtowns in America etc? Of course not. It is the McDonald’s of city planning. Cheap, ugly, bad for you but also shockingly expensive once the medical/infrastructure maintenance bill comes due. Its the overweight, white trash, lower back tattoo of aesth…

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

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#92

Post by rob74 »

peregren wrote: post #33
lelandbatey wrote: post #2

I love that this highlights an oft-missed truth about Urbanism and shifting our urban landscape: this is going to take a long time. It's going to take many decades, and it's going to require waiting for individual human beings to literally die before we get to start making the changes we want to make. I mean, unless we can get someone really excited about this into federal office in which case it _might_ be possible…

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

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

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#93

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

takk309 wrote: post #65
beaconstudios wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the argument is that streets and roads serve fundamentally different purposes and thus have different design goals, and stroads do both and thus fail at both. Roads are for transit, getting cars a long distance between interest points, and streets are for navigating within a point of interest like a neighbourhood. Roads want to optimise for higher cruising speed and streets are to optimise for parking, mixed-use with…

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

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

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

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#94

Post by ReaLNero »

teruakohatu wrote: post #43
jimmaswell wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Do you mean strip malls?

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#95

Post by Ericson2314 »

lelandbatey wrote: post #2

I love that this highlights an oft-missed truth about Urbanism and shifting our urban landscape: this is going to take a long time. It's going to take many decades, and it's going to require waiting for individual human beings to literally die before we get to start making the changes we want to make. I mean, unless we can get someone really excited about this into federal office in which case it _might_ be possible…

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

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

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

----

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

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

The flip side is

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

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

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

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

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#96

Post by ben-schaaf »

TravHatesMe wrote: post #74
noahtallen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#97

Post by takk309 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #93
takk309 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Generally there is a hierarchy of roads called functional class. It goes local street - collector - minor arterial - major arterial - freeway. This heirarchy seems to miss the importance distinction that Strong Towns makes between a "street" and a "road", in that "streets" are places where human life takes place, and "roads" are how vehicles move rapidly from place to place. It has only category with the word "stre…

You are correct. The old way of thinking about roads/streets (synonyms in this case) is a place to move cars. The people centric view on transportation is new enough that there isn't much traction among the old guard at state DOTs. Changing something like functional class and what it means is very hard due to decades of history. As the saying goes, old dogs can't learn new tricks. This is especially true for government agencies. I have worked with cities that have a strong desire to make their transportation network people centric but the state won't help pay for it because the concepts don't move enough cars and to them, that is all that matters.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#98

Post by rcpt »

pcmoney wrote: post #79

Has anyone ever put a picture of a stroad up as art/instagram etc like you see with downtown NYC, Paris, small european villages, shanghai, rural mountain towns, old downtowns in America etc? Of course not. It is the McDonald’s of city planning. Cheap, ugly, bad for you but also shockingly expensive once the medical/infrastructure maintenance bill comes due. Its the overweight, white trash, lower back tattoo of aesth…

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

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#99

Post by madeofpalk »

reportingsjr wrote: post #54
jimmaswell wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#100

Post by chupchap »

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