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Yes, I've seen that video before. A really informative and interesting video. It's crazy how stroads were even a part of the planning process for many North American suburbs and how little emphasis was placed on pedestrian safety.
This is an example of safety mattering when the owners (local governments) are liable, and not mattering when they're not.
Since national codes have allowed roads like these travesties, there's only minimal liability. (I am neither a lawyer, a code expert, or a traffic planner.)
NJB is probably known to most here. I really hate stroads, there's one here that is like 85' wide but with a 40mph speed limit. Now that I live downtown, its strange to have to deal with suburban infrastructure.
So first of all, he's creating new terminology where none is needed.
His ”road” is a freeway.
It sounds like he never learned how to drive properly. Few people where I live, have any trouble driving on divided streets. Yes, the lack of sidewalks, when they're not there, is a bad idea. The solution, of course, is to put sidewalks - as are present on many, many divided streets.
And then he just makes up derogatory phrases that don't actually have any meaning ”this is just a non-place...” what is that supposed to mean?
And of course the Netherlands does it correctly and the US is all wrong.
I am very happy Mr. "Not Just Bikes" managed to flee the hellhole of Canada and especially his hometown {and mine} of London Ontario which clearly is just a notch above the slums of Calcutta. The only problem I have with him leaving our truly horrid nation is that he took his laptop with him and hence the entire Youtube world has to tolerate his condescending attitudes.
Seriously, the guy uses his hometown of London Ontario with 440,000 founded in the early 1800s and then compares it to Amsterdam, a city a founded a thousand years ago with 8 million in the entire regional population of the Randstad, that is also a capitol and world financial centre but no matter as it makes for great videos.
He laments London's urban sprawl {and not without merit} and shows the parking lots downtown. What he doesn't show you is literally one block away with the city's very nice Covenent Garden Market, the city's new downtown arena with NO surface parking, the flurry of new condo/apt towers going up densifying the core of Ontario's fastest growing city, Richmond Row which is 10 block "complete street" lined with bars, cafes, restaurants, and shopping all brought together by Canada's most beautiful downtown park, Victoria, which is surrounded by beautiful and intact Victorian and Edwardian buildings.
He doesn't show you the new Dundas Place the city has built to a "flex street". He of course also doesn't show you the new 21 km BRT system that city is building both being literally a block from his usual vantage point of the rail tracks. Obviously he also doesn't mention that London successfully fought the province in stopping an urban freeway hence it enjoys a very solid urban form of gorgeous tree lines streets with beautiful homes and churches. The new bike lanes downtown and of course the beautiful Thames Valley Parkway right downtown that goes to all quadrants of the city is also only a couple blocks away from his rail vantage point but why bother when all you have to do is engage in hyperbole? In reality, London is a very handsome and livable city and has a reputation as being such across the country.
Conversely he shows all the wonders of Amsterdam but oddly omits it's ethnic ghettos with concrete bunkers that surround it, the thousands of drug addicts that call the city home, and a parks system and city-wide tree canopy that couldn't hold a candle to London's.
Someone has a big bone to pick with this YouTuber. Seems, the problem is he might have chose the USA over Canada.... but mostly he criticizes the USA. I mean just look over his arsenal of videos.
Still in the # views and $$$ he makes from YouTube. He is NOT gonna cry if someone does not like him.
So first of all, he's creating new terminology where none is needed.
His ”road” is a freeway.
It sounds like he never learned how to drive properly. Few people where I live, have any trouble driving on divided streets. Yes, the lack of sidewalks, when they're not there, is a bad idea. The solution, of course, is to put sidewalks - as are present on many, many divided streets.
And then he just makes up derogatory phrases that don't actually have any meaning ”this is just a non-place...” what is that supposed to mean?
And of course the Netherlands does it correctly and the US is all wrong.
Where have we seen all this before?
Did you note that this video was produced in partnership with another organization?
The word "stroad" was coined there.
Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn has been campaigning against the American Way of Building Suburbs Since World War II for about two decades now. His first criticism of them, mentioned in passing in this video, is: The development it produces doesn't generate enough tax revenue to pay for the maintenance of the infrastructure needed to support it. This he called "the urban growth Ponzi scheme" because the only way out was to invite ever more suckers in. (Ultimately, the only ways to do this are: Continue to annex huge areas of undeveloped land in hopes of building more of this stuff on it, as my hometown of Kansas City did from right after World War II until around 1990. Or build more densely on the land you already have.)
That our videographer chose a freeway as his example of a "road" was unfortunate, but in terms of analyzing what makes it function well, he's on target. The reason we have "stroads" at all is because they evolved from the highways we built to connect one city to another. The main purpose of those highways was to move vehicles quickly from point A to point B — but, as the video accurately notes, the presence of abutters along the highway who can add access points to it, other roads that cross it at grade, and (if you go back to the first US-numberted highways of the 1920s) lanes too narrow to allow fast travel meant they would sooner or later cease to serve their primary function. To fix this, controlled-access highways with grade-separated interchanges, no abutting properties, and clear zones on the side of the road to allow a car to run off it without serious damage began to appear in the 1920s as well, right around the time the Ford Model T made mass auto ownership practical.
Meanwhile, we still wanted those original highways to flow faster, so we widened them, added clear zones, and built either intersections with left turn lanes and multiple signal phases, or traffic circles (the favored solution in New Jersey, and making a comeback in the form of the roundabout), or the occasional grade separation (the first of these on a non-controlled-access highway also appeared in New Jersey, in 1927), in order to allow traffic to move faster on them.
The trouble is, doing this alone makes the road either unusable or dangerous to use for anyone not in a motor vehicle. One of the solutions he describes in the video — arterial streets where the center through lanes have no abutting properties and limited or no access points, while side roads take care of access to abutting properties, parking and pedestrians — also began to make their appearance in the 1920s: the Grand Concourse in the Bronx is an example of a well-designed version of one of these, while Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia, which took its current form in the 1950s after a rebuild, is a badly designed one because the side roads were also designed for higher-speed through traffic first.
But highway engineers' conscience has been raised about the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists, so — as with the street in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kan., that he also repeatedly returns to (did you also note that he drew heavily on my hometown for his counterexamples?) — little ribbon parkways with sidewalks, or even sidewalks right next to the road itself, get added to the mix. Few people use them still because everything else that surrounds them still militate against walking.
I noted that he also threw in a street in Salt Lake City into his video. That city's a special case because when Brigham Young laid it out in the 1850s, he intentionally made the streets wide enough that a team of horses or oxen could turn around within their right-of-way. So that actually predates, and has nothing to do with, the automobile.
mooguy's points about what London has been doing to reshape its transportation infrastructure are well taken — but they actually reinforce both Strong Towns' and the videographer's point about how poorly suited for urban environments the conventionally designed streets — "stroads" — are. I could go on about Kansas City's prized boulevard system, which I maintain is as important as the freeway network* in making the city one fo the least congested large metropolises in the United States, but none of that contradicts the point Strong Towns' study of Kansas City (now available as an e-book) made, which was this: The more densely built, 61-square-mile city of 1946 (the year the city began its annexation spree) was economically stronger and more productive than the sprawling, 312-square-mile city of the present.
And — as in Amsterdam and London (UK) — we should have built the freeways so that they went around rather than through our large cities. There's actually a transcript out there that shows that President Dwight Eisenhower, the father of the Interstates, was appalled to learn that freeways were being pushed through the middle of the District of Columbia and voiced his objections to Federal Highway Administration officials.
I know some of you see this stuff as America- (and, I guess, Canada-)bashing.** IMO, we can still learn both from best practices elsewhere — and from things we knew back at the dawn of the Auto Age that we threw in the trash after World War II ended.
*The pave-the-earth crowd will tell you that KC's low traffic congestion stems from the fact that it has more freeway lane-miles per capita than any other city in the US. I managed to drive from my home on the city's east side, in the Oak Park section (not to be confused with the identically named neighborhood in Overland Park, it's a neighborhood that began as middle-class white, then turned middle-class Black in the 1950s and early 1960s, but has gone into decline since the 1980s), to the Kansas City Star offices on Grand Avenue (now Boulevard) downtown without ever getting onto a freeway, and I made the trip in about 20 minutes — using the boulevards. And when I took a friend who was familiar with KC, but not the side of it I grew up on, Back Home in 2014, the only reason we used the freeways at all was because we were staying in a hotel my brother managed out by KCI Airport. Otherwise, when we were in the older, pre-WW2 part of the city, we stayed off of them (with the exception of a stretch of Bruce Watkins Drive near where one of my cousins lived, to get downtown or back to the hotel) and got around just fine.
**Edited to add: However, given what you said, were I you, mooguy, I'd take umbrage at the videographer's constantly prefacing "London (Canada)" with "Lousy" in the video, too.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 02-26-2022 at 09:32 AM..
More silliness. Some of these pontificators ought to be made to live in an actual city and get to work every day to earn a living.
First off, it sounds like the ”stroad” is naughty, peccant, and - what was it again? - ”ugly, dangerous, and inefficient” because it's got multiple lanes, multiple at-grade crossings, and few sidewalks - but if you make the medians wide and put some sidewalks then it becomes the virtuous and beneficent ”boulevard”.
All righty then.
Second, let's talk about real life. I live in a large North American city. There's a main north-south freeway (or as the author calls it, a ”road”, and there's a main east-west freeway, and there's a ring freeway. The city's built on a grid, where there are multi-lane ”stroads” (I guess, because the medians are not wide, otherwise they'd be ”boulevards” and thus wonderful) about every mile running north-south and east-west. In between these is a network of two lane, 25 mph residential streets.
Now where I live, I'm about 3 miles from the main N-S freeway, and about 6 miles from the ring freeway. Is the author say that for me to go from my house to my company (in an industrial area about 10 miles away) I should be forced to drive the whole way on 2 lane residential streets, or alternately to drive on 2 lane residential streets for 3 or 4 miles to a freeway, then 10 miles on the freeway which doesn't actually take me to a point all that near to my job, then another 3-4 miles on 2 lane residential streets? In the real world, actual city where I live, I can take 2 of his much derided ”stroads” and go directly door to door (except for 3 blocks on the residential streets of my neighborhood). Is anyone going to tell me that doing this whole trip at 20-25 mph and cutting past people's residences the whole way, is somehow magically better than making the whole trip at 45 mph (with 3-5 traffic lights) and driving on evil ”stroads” that don't pass right in front of people's houses?
I think even the name ”stroad” was chosen because it sounds like ”toad” which the ignorant think is something contemptible whereas those of us who know something about reality know that the common toad is one of Nature's friends to humanity as it eats harmful insects and slugs and causes absolutely zero problems for us. It doesn't transmit disease, it's quiet, it just goes about its business.
More silliness. Some of these pontificators ought to be made to live in an actual city and get to work every day to earn a living.
First off, it sounds like the ”stroad” is naughty, peccant, and - what was it again? - ”ugly, dangerous, and inefficient” because it's got multiple lanes, multiple at-grade crossings, and few sidewalks - but if you make the medians wide and put some sidewalks then it becomes the virtuous and beneficent ”boulevard”.
All righty then.
Second, let's talk about real life. I live in a large North American city. There's a main north-south freeway (or as the author calls it, a ”road”, and there's a main east-west freeway, and there's a ring freeway. The city's built on a grid, where there are multi-lane ”stroads” (I guess, because the medians are not wide, otherwise they'd be ”boulevards” and thus wonderful) about every mile running north-south and east-west. In between these is a network of two lane, 25 mph residential streets.
Now where I live, I'm about 3 miles from the main N-S freeway, and about 6 miles from the ring freeway. Is the author say that for me to go from my house to my company (in an industrial area about 10 miles away) I should be forced to drive the whole way on 2 lane residential streets, or alternately to drive on 2 lane residential streets for 3 or 4 miles to a freeway, then 10 miles on the freeway which doesn't actually take me to a point all that near to my job, then another 3-4 miles on 2 lane residential streets? In the real world, actual city where I live, I can take 2 of his much derided ”stroads” and go directly door to door (except for 3 blocks on the residential streets of my neighborhood). Is anyone going to tell me that doing this whole trip at 20-25 mph and cutting past people's residences the whole way, is somehow magically better than making the whole trip at 45 mph (with 3-5 traffic lights) and driving on evil ”stroads” that don't pass right in front of people's houses?
I think even the name ”stroad” was chosen because it sounds like ”toad” which the ignorant think is something contemptible whereas those of us who know something about reality know that the common toad is one of Nature's friends to humanity as it eats harmful insects and slugs and causes absolutely zero problems for us. It doesn't transmit disease, it's quiet, it just goes about its business.
um, no; "stroad" is a concatenation of "street" and "road."
And if you can drop your condescension for a minute, you might note that both the videographer and I gave examples of an intermediate type of arterial roadway that would still enable you to travel fairly efficiently while also handling the pedestrians, bicyclists and abutters better — plus allow parking, which many "stroads" lack:
The dual-dual carriageway boulevard.
Such a street has three medians, not one. Or it could dispense with the center median and have two.
In the center are the through-traffic lanes. These lanes are relatively free of cross-street intersections and totally free of traffic of any kind from abutting properties. The lanes can be wide enough to allow travel at, say, 35 to 40 mph, and with coordinated signals (or traffic circles), users will be able to cover significant distances without stopping.
On the outward side of the center lanes (having a center median on these lanes will make it easier for pedestrians to cross this street at those infrequent intersections), there are two local-traffic lanes flanking the main travel lanes. These will have one lane for traffic and one for parking. The lane should be narrow enough that traffic will travel along it at 20 to 25 mph, slow enough for bicycles to share it without needing dedicated bike lanes (though those can be added as well). The parked cars and the narrower lanes will naturally slow down traffic, as will traffic entering from and exiting to the cross streets.
Crossovers between the through and local lanes will permit users to transfer to the lanes they need when necessary.
FWIW, "stroads" are often not terribly attractive landscapes, either. A boulevard like the one I describe can be lined with trees in the medians and along the parking strip.
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