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How do you fix a stroad?

strongtowns.org

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Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#111

Post by ch4s3 »

dougmwne wrote: post #107
ReaLNero wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you draw the line at country, sure. But America is huge compared to European nation-states. NYC is very public transportation-oriented. The Northeast corridor Amtrak line also is a big boon!

The itty-bitty bits of America that have any kind of walkable community are incredibly expensive. It’s basically the equivalent of avoiding mediocre American factory food by doing all your shopping at Whole Foods. Why does it have to be a rare luxury to taste what the Europeans have in overflowing abundance?

Organic carrots at Whole Foods in NYC are about $1/lb which is slightly less than the average price in France. Food is VERY cheap in the US.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#112

Post by robbedpeter »

dghughes wrote: post #105

My city just installed three roundabouts each about 500m from each. Three in a row on a four land (two each way) road. I'm all for roundabouts but it looks a mess. Some of the outer lanes end too without any sign to indicate that it ends. Stroads are designed by busybodies who are given too much money. I used to be able to go over a small bridge that's over a small stream and turn left to get to my aunt's house. The…

Drive over the meridian, gouge the greenway, and leave tire streaks repeatedly. Then have a friend take pictures and start bugging your local politicians about the lack of consistent access. Have them make the point that paying to continually clean up after people will cost more than putting in a comfortable number of access openings. They'll be able to fix it and look like they're saving the city money at the same time, everybody wins.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#113

Post by athrun »

josephcsible wrote: post #60
beaconstudios wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbanists are extremely critical of the type of zoning that plonks suburbs in the middle of nowhere away from cities too. "R1 Zone" is practically a swear word. Mixed-use zoning is much more effective. We do this in Europe, it's pretty nice being able to cycle to work and walk to the shops (not that I cycle to work personally, but almost all my jobs have been within cycling range).

But those suburbs already exist. What should we do for all of the people who already live in them? (And keep in mind that there's usually a good reason that people chose to not just live in an inner city in the first place.)

Strong Town's argument is that some of these suburbs will be successful in encouraging mixed-use development and in doing so will expand their tax bases. But most of the others will fail and decline.

ST are quite explicit that they mostly don't think that retrofitting suburbs should be a focus, because they believe that most of these will go bankrupt anyway, given a sufficient amount of time (because of too much infrastructure liability compared to the tax base), and indeed this is starting to happen all across the US. Hence their focus on areas with a solid core already, that should then be strengthened and encouraged to expand organically from there.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#114

Post by Animats »

wetpaws wrote: post #106
Animats wrote: post #103

The Strong Towns people want to go back to 1950s midwestern America - small towns strung out along roads, with farms in between. What were all those small towns for ? They were built, mostly, as service centers for the surrounding farms. Today, only 1% of the workforce works on farms, and they can get their stuff from Amazon and Walmart. The need for most of those towns is gone. So they're decaying and disappearing.[…

Tokyo is not a small town by any measure, and neither is the most of Europe.

Tokyo does not look like the ideal in the article, of small towns strung out along roads.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#115

Post by arsome »

dougmwne wrote: post #107
ReaLNero wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you draw the line at country, sure. But America is huge compared to European nation-states. NYC is very public transportation-oriented. The Northeast corridor Amtrak line also is a big boon!

The itty-bitty bits of America that have any kind of walkable community are incredibly expensive. It’s basically the equivalent of avoiding mediocre American factory food by doing all your shopping at Whole Foods. Why does it have to be a rare luxury to taste what the Europeans have in overflowing abundance?

Because what they have flowing in abundance is a loss in many other ways. Public transit is a generally a worse experience in all but the most urban of places, and even then there's often enough problems that make it significantly less desirable. Biking in the winter? Doable, but also pretty miserable in much of the world.

People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards. Car-centric cities are the price we pay for these things. Personally I think it's worth the trade-off, I would have spent the same money on my 2000sqft house as a <400sqft apartment, and having kids and a dog would have been entirely impractical.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#116

Post by jquery »

rcpt wrote: post #98
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

Could you share such a picture? All the Painted Ladies photos I’ve seen feature a small community street with a top speed of 25mph.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#117

Post by danny_codes »

ghaff wrote: post #16
fennecfoxen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only our nation were able to pass some sort of "infrastructure bill". No, I mean one that actually did what it said on the tin.

It's not just (or maybe even primarily) about money. As is indicated in the first part of the OP, changing things means changing things that a lot of people are fine with, affecting many businesses, causing a lot of disruption, etc. I'd be fine with more walkable areas but it's not just about spending money.

IMO this is a question of ignorance. Most Americans simply don't understand that there are (far superior) alternatives to car-dependent suburbia. It's just not on their radar.

Hopefully channels like "Not Just Bikes" and our own social dissemination of the walk/bike/transit oriented urban development model will allow more Americans to understand what they're missing.

Once enough people in a given urban area realize what they could have, perhaps the political will to improve will materialize.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#118

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

Cultural-scale planning and prediction are hard.

Things move slowly and gradually until they suddenly don't. Much of the infrastructure presently dominant in the US dates to 1960/1970, and depending on where specifically you were in the country before then, things changed in a pretty major way with the birth of the Interstate Highway System (1960s), urban flight and suburban development (1950s), WWII (1940s), the Great Depression (1930s), and the first really big mechanisation and electrification drive (1910s--1920s).

Starting somewhere around 1960--1970, things levelled off. No major wars, no major economic disruptions, and for the most part no major new landscape-transforming technological inventions. (For those looking to criticise, note the key word major, which is not a synonym for any.)

I'd argue that things began shifting by 2001 with 9/11, the 2007--8 global financial crisis, the 2016 election, mobile + social + algorithmic Internet hitting critical mass, and since late 2019, the COVID-19 global pandemic, now entering its third year. Climate change impacts are also likely to be felt increasingly, with Blade Runner skies over much of the West Coast of the US being one interesting sign that the future has arrived.

Transformational change is a bit like going broke: it happens slowly at first, then suddenly.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#119

Post by zoe4883 »

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…

Downtown NYC and Paris are ugly, I will take our local roads anytime.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#120

Post by danny_codes »

josephcsible wrote: post #63
jcranmer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bus systems can work well to move commuters to rail-based mass-transit that bring them into the city. If the suburbs sprawl too far out, you can also plop down park-and-rides at the terminal stations of the mass transit system. Why do you specifically need to drive and park at the exact location you're going to, especially when the land cost of the storage place of your empty car is prohibitively expensive (as they t…

In places that have good mass transit for their suburbs, sure. But what about all of the places that don't? Because sometimes I have to go to work in weather conditions like hailstorms, thunderstorms, or freezing rain.

I recommend watching through the "Not Just Bikes" back catalog.

He has a bunch of videos that address common complaints that people who've only known car-dependent lifestyles bring up.

Here's a good example of how to design functional bicycle infrastructure for a seemingly hostile climate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

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