How do you fix a stroad? • Hacker News Board

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#381

Post by rjsw » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #354

rjsw wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak for Manchester but people here have looked at the cycle infrastructure and taken it as a signal to ride around dressed all in black with no lights. I don't think the accident rate will go down.

That means they feel safe. It's an improvement in infrastructure. The next step (Amsterdam, Copenhagen) is to ride around in black, with no lights, while drunk.

The infrastructure isn't good enough for that in the UK, they will just get squashed. I narrowly avoided hitting one head on about an hour ago.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#382

Post by renewiltord » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #328

renewiltord wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is rather suspicious. If people are so fond of this, then why the laws prohibiting the other. It sounds like there’s a pressure group distorting the market and preventing people from expressing their preferences. Fairly convincing actually.

It’s because people want to live in a specific kind of community. Many Americans want a suburban life, with a cute house on a plot of land, with neighbors also with cute houses on plots of land. Low density, low numbers of cars clogging the local roads. Introduce an apartment building and the aesthetic changes — lots more people around, more cars on the road, more congestion at the grocery store, less privacy in the…

Yeah, this makes sense. People have economic and political power. It's easier to use the economic power to buy up all the land, but if you don't have that money, collectively you can use the political power to enforce beyond your boundaries. And all you need is 50%+1, with current turnout dropping that to 33%+1. Not bad altogether.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#383

Post by TulliusCicero » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #377

TulliusCicero wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is incorrect. High speed trains and planes both have a higher top speed than cars. Does that mean trains and planes are by default a faster way to get around for all trips? No, of course not. How infrastructure is built around them matters just as much. Obviously there are trips in which they are indeed faster than cars, but plenty too where they’re impractical, or slower. Cars have a higher top speed than b…

> The thing about car dominant spaces is that they force things to spread out, which reduces efficiency. In an already built city (or neighborhood), removing space for cars isn't going to snuggle the existing buildings together. It will rarely permit another building to be built between existing buildings where that's not possible today.

Making existing buildings somehow move isn't the objective.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#384

Post by TulliusCicero » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #328

renewiltord wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is rather suspicious. If people are so fond of this, then why the laws prohibiting the other. It sounds like there’s a pressure group distorting the market and preventing people from expressing their preferences. Fairly convincing actually.

It’s because people want to live in a specific kind of community. Many Americans want a suburban life, with a cute house on a plot of land, with neighbors also with cute houses on plots of land. Low density, low numbers of cars clogging the local roads. Introduce an apartment building and the aesthetic changes — lots more people around, more cars on the road, more congestion at the grocery store, less privacy in the…

The aesthetic doesn't have to change as much as you think. It does change in the US, because apartment buildings here have largely garbage design. But there are other countries that do the blending better, like Germany.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#385

Post by bee_rider » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:01 PM UTC

takk309 wrote: post #51

bee_rider wrote: post #46

"Stroad" seems to be a recently popularized by strongtowns. I'm curious if anyone has actually managed to measure this sort of thing? My suspicion is that it "stroads" are essentially to-wide streets, and it should be possible to find research indicating that streets should be narrower, because widening them causes people to drive too fast. I was only able to find the following, coverage, though: https://usa.streetsb…

Check out: https://austroads.com.au/about-austroads https://www.ite.org/ https://www.nationalacademies.org/trb/transportation-researc... Honestly a lot of research in the transportation engineering field is paywalled. Some state DOTs have research departments that have free resources.

Thanks -- it has been neat to see some comments from somebody who knows the industry in this thread.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#386

Post by occz » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

Aloha wrote: post #359

ItsMonkk wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we need dense place for those who like living there, and suburban ones for those who don't - plus stuff in between. We agree. And this is a key point made by Not Just Bikes / StrongTowns - when you have exclusively Stroad infrastructure and Single Family Homes, even those who prefer to drive and live in those homes are worse off. You need single family homes. You need bike lanes. You need multi-family homes…

Nothing is stopping anyone from building denser infrastructure, I'm in favor of lifting the often absurd parking requirements seen. But I don't wanna see a world where density is required, because I don't want to live in a dense area.

>Nothing is stopping anyone from building denser infrastructure, I'm in favor of lifting the often absurd parking requirements seen.

That's the thing though - single-family zoning, parking minimums and highway-like standards for streets are very much stopping density from being built. What little density is attempted to be built gets killed by NIMBYism.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#387

Post by aidenn0 » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

JacobDotVI wrote: post #323

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…

> 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? Yes, but in a different way than I believe your question implies. Edward Burtynsky produced an amazing series of photographs centered around the automobile and in his words, how it "represent[ed] not only freedom, but also som…

Breezewood is the way it is for historical reasons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breezewood,_Pennsylvania#Unusu...

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#388

Post by aidenn0 » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

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…

Where I live there's a diamond interchange between two state highways controlled only by stop-signs at the end of the off-ramps towards the smaller of the two.

Near that interchange there is a neighborhood. For whatever reason, both sides of the neighborhood have traffic lights, so when traffic is heavy, if you want to go from the larger to smaller highway (particularly if you want to turn left!), it's far more expedient to cut through the neighborhood.

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#389

Post by TulliusCicero » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #306

mcv wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'd only drive there, despite it being, again, directly across the street That is just bizarre. And it's important to understand how inefficient this is to need a car to cross the street; you need parking space on this side, parking space on the other side, you need to get on and off the stroad, causing wear, interfering with and slowing down the other traffic, which is mostly through traffic that's not interested…

>And it's important to understand how inefficient this is to need a car to cross the street; you need parking space on this side, parking space on the other side, you need to get on and off the stroad, causing wear, interfering with and slowing down the other traffic, which is mostly through traffic that's not interested at all in your house or that Korean market. It's unbelievably inefficient. But is this inefficien…

> But is this inefficiency and resultant drag on prosperity balanced out by making the market more efficient to access for people up and down the road?

Nobody's saying we shouldn't have fast roads that are good for cars, just that they shouldn't be the same thing as where people go to shop. Stroads are the compromise of essentially putting businesses along the freeway.

> If he had to cross the tracks to get to the market you could basically come up with the same list of gripes.

No, this is incorrect.

There was actually a housing development I was interested in in Munich with exactly the setup you're talking about: the apartment buildings were on one side of the tracks and directly adjacent to said tracks and the train station, with two grocery stores on the other side. I would go there with my son occasionally to shop, and he and I would both easily cross under said tracks, because there was an underpass, and it's MUCH easier and cheaper to build a ped/bike underpass for two lanes of tracks than a 6+ car lane road.

Here it is on Google Maps if you're interested: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Siemenswerke/@48.0927833,1...

Re: How do you fix a stroad?

#390

Post by danny_codes » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:50 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #191

danny_codes wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I don't much care for suburbs and like cities only in moderation. I prefer the country within striking distance of a large city. I'm perfectly aware of what an urban environment is like--I've lived in both Cambridge and NYC--and while there are things I like about it (I'm staying in one this week) it's not something I want full-time.

Seeing as those are both American cities, it's not surprising you don't like it. Even our best cities are pretty disappointing when compared to what Europe and Asia have to offer.