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What is a STROAD?
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- Опубликовано: 28 фев 2018
- A stroad is a street/road hybrid. Besides being a very dangerous environment (yes, it is ridiculously dangerous to mix high-speed, highway design geometry with pedestrians, bikers and turning traffic), they are enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive. If we want to build towns that are financially productive, we need to identify and eliminate stroads. Watch this video to learn why. Visit this page for more: www.strongtown...
Wow, I didn't have the vocabulary, but now I can name what is wrong with New Jersey. Basically every road is a stroad
Yes, can confirm
i hate it here
Same with greater New Orleans
Same in Georgia. Basically all over the US and Canada.
Exactly the same problem in metro-Detroit/Southeast Michigan!
This video has changed my life. I live on a stroad and couldn't pin point why I'm so miserable and never want to go anywhere. No more stroad living for me!
Same I was debating where to relocate in my town, and these videos steered me away from the stroad areas.
Same I have a stroad Main Street outside my house and it’s literally impossible to cross I have to walk to the traffic light 10 mins away just too
@@emiliofernandez7117 That fucking horrifying, and that shit is everywhere her in North America.
@@liesdamnlies3372 yup. And everyone in my city is quite anti social (I’ve been here for 10 years) I’d say mainly because of how little time they spend outside like drive to work then drive through fast food, order pizza from home and so on, I understand the worlds changing but man especially to live in a city without trams or nice public transport makes that isolation even worse. I currently can’t move out :(( maybe in the next few years. I do love the nature of my country that’s one redeeming factor that I can drive and be in semi wilderness while you cant really do that in Europe
@@emiliofernandez7117 What fascinates me about city infrastructure is how vital it is to our ability to congregate ourselves into communities. Design like this is an active impediment to social congregation and integration, so it's no wonder so many people are isolated and anti-social in these environments. The environments themselves encourage such.
I actually live on a stroad. There is no dedicated lane for me to turn into my driveway, so I have to stop in one of the two lanes and wait for a break in traffic in the oncoming two lanes before making a turn into my driveway. In order to do this safely, I have to put my turn signal on WAAAAY ahead of time and touch on my brakes two or three times briefly not only to slow down, but to signal to the cars behind me that I am going to have to low down and potentially stop. I have to do this because people don't pay attention to what they are doing when driving on stroads designed to make driving easy. It causes them to slack off behind the wheel and gives them a false sense of security. I've had people blow by me and yell "asshole" out their window as I was waiting to turn into my driveway. I mean, dude...what do you want me to do, not go home? I live here!
What the area should do is convert one of those travel lanes into a tram system that goes up and down the stroad between the towns, and another lane on the opposite side into a protected cycling lane. That leaves one lane for travel going each direction, encourages people to cycle or use the tram, and will significantly reduce not only carbon emissions from everyone's ridiculous pickups but also upkeep costs. They just paved the stroad and it will be completely jacked up by springtime, guaranteed. It always is, partly because they salt the bejeezus out of it in the winter but also because they don't use efficient or durable materials when paving. Vermont incorporates recycled rubber into their pavement so it is able to expand when freezing, which prevents cracking and potholes, but that's a different discussion entirely.
Not unless the stroad is actually used a lot. Remember induced demand would go on another road nearby if they did what you say. Then that road and this road would both be backed up with traffic. This may not be your case but in chicago doing this would be a horrible idea.
Yeah I get pissed at people like you (not saying it’s right) stopping all the traffic to make a left turn off a stroad. Frankly I still think “go to the next intersection and U-Turn so you can do a right turn rather than cause a traffic jam with a left” but car life creates this sense of independence and entitlement that doesn’t really exist where you going where you want to go exactly when you want to do it is what matters most. That goes for the people screaming at you and the people insisting on blocking rush hour traffic to make a left.
I think we’d have a less toxic culture with strong compact communities vs suburban sprawl.
My drive home goes down a stroad. 2 lanes each way, turn lanes part of the way depending on the block. It's attempting to connect a residential area to the highway and the mall, and it's all low density business. Narrow sidewalks, no bike lane at all. 50 kmh/30 mph.
It's mostly businesses in this stretch and it has too many interchanges. So there's lots of people doing slow downs like you describe. In one particular bad block on the way home, you have a major intersection with a yield right turn lane trying to turn right onto it. As soon as that merge is complete you have take out heavy restaurants in strip malls on both sides and no turn lanes. The ones to the left can cause a backup into the major intersection. Then you have a stretch of tightly packed single business drive ways (one with a drive through that can back up into stopped traffic on the road).
As a through driver for this business area, I'm encouraged to stay left through the intersection to get by people turning right, immediately change to the right lane to avoid the people turning left into the strip mall, and then changing back to the left to avoid traffic having to slow to a crawl for people to enter this single business drive ways. I need to do all these lane changes within 140m/450ft, while traffic in both lanes wants to accelerate and stay at the speed limit above.
What they should do is disconnect these businesses off the major road, and connect from the side roads. Traffic goes through to intersections and people make their appropriate turns from there.
I never had the language to communicate what was so wrong with the roadways in my city. Now it makes sense. We have several roadways where people go 50+ MPH and there are tons of businesses on the side. We have constant wrecks as a result. Even getting into my apartment is terrifying. Many people are going close to 60+ around a curve while I am trying to pull out to get on the road. Now I know the term for this nightmare - stroad.
Exactly! Thank you for pointing out what this nightmare is. I have always felt this way and I didn’t know why, what it is. I just pinned it to America. But it’s Strodes!!!
Well… It is America. Thanks for this video.
LA is a massive surface area covered with stroads. "Nobody walks in LA" as the 80's song says.
@@Yavin4 lmaoooooooooooo
Same with the entire state of Florida
@@airtrafficman972 Same with the entire south east.
I grew up in upstate NY but spent my summers in the south east. I could never put my finger on what I didn't like about it but this is a big part of it. In NY around where I live cities/towns are DISTINCT, with stretches of forest between them. It's obvious when you transition from one to the other. Where I lived in the south that was not the case, it was one giant suburban hell-hole with nothing but stripmall-lined stroads. You could not tell where one city started and another ended. The entire landscape looked the same... and it looked bad.
"In Detroit everybody drives cars, nobody walks, nobody talks"
(Derrick May - Techno Originator)
@@Chris-xo2rq completely agree. Suburbia is a soulless construct.
An American stroad (property-sidewalk-seven car lanes-sidewalk-property) redesigned the Dutch way:
property-sidewalk-bike lane-green strip-parking-two car lanes, including speed bumps, roundabouts and crossings-parking-green strip-bike lane-sidewalk-property.
And one of those seven lanes is the "chicken" lane cause you have to play chicken with oncoming traffic to make your left turn
@@edwardmiessner6502 Just use the roundabout ;-)
Goed idee!
@@edwardmiessner6502 no, you don't turn left in a roundabout, that's the idea of it.
Don’t forget the street car on every street wide enough for one
There is a well known stroad near where I live, it's a street and a road, it's called Street Road, it's the stroadiest stroad ever and it's a mess.
OK, that funny.
Boy am I happy living in Germany where you don't have stroads. And the closest thing I know does both good:
It transports people out of the city center and bikes an public tranport connect the center to small shops and big housing areas
Feasterville?
@@bobby_greene Yes sir.
Chester County, PA? We have one there, too!
Detroit, a vast city of bombed out ghetto stroads, is actually making good progress in dieting certain commercial corridors by widening sidewalks, reducing lanes, adding bicycle and turn lanes, planting trees, etc. and in a few spots (most notably the Livernois Avenue of Fashion) it has done complete wonders. No carving up of the city or home and business demolishing necessary.
I was just thinking a couple days ago how since a lot of Detroit is being rebuilt anyways, it might be a good place to try out different ways of building American cities. I guess that's already kind of happening, good on them!
Detroit can do this because few people left in the city to oppose the plan. Also, budget restrictions are forcing them to think.
They may look around in 30 years and wonder, how did we get so prosperous?
guys this is the first productive discussion I've seen about Detroit on the internet! We did it!
Every time I go back to my hometown a new stroad has appeared. Traffic hasn't changed, nothing has gotten better for it, just stroads constricting small towns.
While I do generally agree with the points made here, I don't like it when the efficiency of the streets is judged solely base on money the space generates. The streets are for living, not money only. It's a place for street art, museums, libraries and more places that don't necessarily generate cash, but make it a better place for people.
the money angle is a hood argument to get citys to build better places, but youre right, cities are places where people just are, no money needed for it to be ppl place
Not Just Bikes brought me here and I'm glad I found this video. You could easily say that all major cities have this problem. But even small towns that are growing are modeling themselves the same way like the town I'm visiting, McAllen, TX. Stroads are being built everywhere! I don't ever see any public transportation, so it must really suck to be a pedestrian and not own a car.
Also everyone drives in McAllen, TX. And we wonder why most of their residents are obese.
My mom used to work at Toys r us in 2001 in a stroad infested place called Langley Park MD. Sometimes I would go with her and yes having your mom work at Toys R Us when you're a kid amazing as it sounds and made being poor suck less. Back then, a crosswalk in-between a stroad was unheard of and would of been a God send. Instead people had to literally risk their lives to get to and from work. It may sound like nothing but for the working class using public transit, every minute counts, they don't exactly have leverage at their jobs to arrive whenever. The only reason why I am leaving a comment is because I still remember the stress of just trying to cross 3 stroads with my mother to reach our destination. I'm 30 years old, that was more than 20 years ago and memories of that awful experience are still very vivid in my mind.
Now that I can put a name to the thing that has caused so much stress I feel like I have closure. Thank you.
Unfortunatly, it's still very much a reality for most cities in North America. I myself, in Canada, will have to cross one tommorow to go see the doctor which is like, 5 mins on foot from my apartment. If only we had better streets.
Greetings from the Netherlands where every road has a separated cycle road, and every street is safe to cycle on.
And stroads ara outlawed!
You don't have to flex on us man 😭😭
@@aprilshowers3008That's the cold truth because North America has been doing urban planning wrong for decades now, and it's going to take an eternity to clean all of it up.
This is a good idea. If you want to be two things at the same time, mostly you will become neither of those.
“Jack of all trades, master of none” as the saying goes.
Like trans ?
San 三 Pavements and asphalt aren’t human beings. That’s like comparing an apple to an office building.
@@theemaxwilson In this case, jack of no trades. Stroads don't benefit from any strong point of roads or streets.
Watched Not Just Bikes video on this half an hour ago and now this gets recommanded. More bashing of North American roads here I come!
Also check out Rob the Road Guy's vid on Two Way Left Turn Lanes a.k.a. chicken lanes or suicide lanes. Turns out he hates stroads too, from a highway engineering and traffic safety viewpoint!
lol just North America? Come here in Europe you'll see there is no difference for the majority of our countries
Oh for sure but they are an exception not the rule, especially rare find here in beautiful dutchland. (Just in case, last part is a bit sarcastic)
Orlando, FL is literally one large conglomerations of Stroads.
Yes it is. Need to turn into a small parking lot from a 50mph with no light? Cross your fingers and hope the person behind you isnt texting and there are no pedestrians in the way.
When I visited Orlando, the approach to our accommodation really terrified me. A six lane road, same size as the highways at home, a speed limit close to 90 km/h, and to get to the hotel we had to make a 90-degree left turn crossing the three oncoming lanes. That's madness.
@@Alexrocksdude_ god i hate that shit, theyll have the tiniest driveway entrances and expect me to initial d my ass from 70 into a dirt lot
Orlando FL sucks
I've lived in South Florida and the Tampa Bay Area and those two agglomerations are the same: nearly every major artery was a stroad
Yesterday, I got a good reminder of just how pleasant and delightful it is to walk down a stroad, and that reminded me that there were RUclips videos on the subject. I live in an apartment complex that is located at the intersection of two stroads. They aren't the world's widest stroads, but they are big enough. Fortunately, they have sidewalks. There is a small shopping center on the opposite corner of the intersection. The apartment complex was resurfacing parts of the parking lot, so parking was tight and I worried that if I went out, I might have a hard time finding a place to park upon returning, so I decided to brave the stroads and walk the short distance to the shopping center. The apartment complex is entirely car focused, and there are very few sidewalks or paths leading from the parking lot to the sidewalk beside the stroad, so it is necessary to walk through dog poop-infested grass and dirt to even get to the stroad's sidewalk. Then, it is necessary to make two crossings of the intersection, while watching out for cars that might make right turns or run red lights (which happens more often than it should). And then the sidewalk goes down an uninviting path between the barren side of a big box store and the busy stroad. Once past the side of the store, a huge and majestic parking lot (which is never anywhere near full) opens up, providing an endless sea of dull gray to walk across to the ultimate destination. It is no wonder that I drive to this shopping center even though it should be no problem to walk there. What makes it even more depressing is that this is a coastal community, and the downtown area next to the coast is quite nice and walkable, but one has to be filthy rich to live there - the rest of us have to live some distance inland, surrounded by stroads and parking lots, and we must drive to visit the downtown area and clutter up the streets with our cars.
Sounds like Australia
Just for the algorithm boost. More people need to see this
I grew up on a strode with a bunch aligned apartment complexes. A small business owner decided to open a tiny grocery store across the strode but the environment was so hostile that nobody ever went there and the guy went out of business.
That is sad. It's a good point that this type of road design make it near impossible for small businesses to thrive. I imagine only big box stores and fast food chains can afford to open a stroad premises with a huge parking lot and enough instant name recognition to get people turning off the stroad just to go there. Small businesses need human-scale people-friendly areas.
@@amyjelacic909And "the suburban experiment" and big oil killed the idea of walkability and public transit.
"You're gonna have on-street parking"
immediately shows a picture of Japan, where there is no on-street parking
Japan has on-street parking
Like every country, street parking is a thing in Japan, just not everywhere
Aside from creating "wealth", streets create communities, which improves quality of life. Increased civic engagement leads to happier people and keeps centralized government small.
If we 'trick' the government into thinking that we are very profit driven then we will get all of the quality of life improvements also. Of course we aren't really tricking them at all because this also is way better in terms of creating wealth.
Wealth is needed to fund infrastructure and services. Otherwise, all we do is borrow money and taxes vanish in interest payments, thus, reducing the quality of life for residents as there is no money left for services.
@@loup9003 I see wealth as a natural byproduct of strong communities.
Getting recommended for this 30 hrs after watching Rob the Road Guy's vid. Saw Not Just Bike's vid a few weeks before. When a woke expat, a highway enthusiast, and a conservative engineer all agree that our typical highways that are lined with strip malls just plain suck, you know that they ... suck!
Except a lot of stroads here in chicago are actually used a lot.
Then they should be converted into roads with service streets on either side like the A3 in south-west London (view on Google Maps).
Phoenix is just one big f**king stroad!
stroads are just STupid ROADS
We have stroads because of Minimum parking requirements. These rules favor low rise buildings with lots of surface parking. If there is convenient parking everywhere, driving is encouraged. If lots of people are driving, let’s make the streets wider or else there will be congestion.
The streets then become stroads. Daily destinations become too far to walk. Walking becomes time consuming, uncomfortable, unsafe, and uninteresting. Since walking is impractical, public transit has low ridership, because of low ridership, frequency drops.
It’s whole viscous cycle of government mandated car dependence.
The nice streets of old lined with interesting shops, those places are difficult to build with minimum parking requirements.
And those places are the most expensive and popular places to live. Go figure
That is basically EVERY major US city with a population greater than 100 000 inhabitants.
Stroads are a direct off-shoot of the dystopia of suburbia. In an environment where no-one is able to shop for the necessities of life by walking or biking you need a car.
It is a self-perpetuating cycle.
Huge box malls popping up OUTSIDE of living areas, but certainly not in down-town, as the surface area required is far too expensive down-town. So they pop up far outside suburbia and down-town where acerage is still fairly cheap.
Thus they are far out of reach of any walking or bicycling distance, requiring people to own AND use a car for everyday needs.
By getting into a car and driving for many miles before reaching those shopping possibilities for groceries and other everyday necessities, stroads are the (failed) attempt at getting people to those huge box malls as conveniently as possible without using actual highways.
Stroads are dangerous to anyone even attempting to live in close proximity due to the high speeds, as well as air and noise polution.
Walking or biking along a stroad is incredibly dangerous because of the huge amount of cars going at high speeds, as well as the number of accidents happening on stroads due to their poor design. The stroad inherently has NO safety or run-off zones like highways, nor does it have central or side guard rails.
This FORCES people into ever bigger cars, believing themselves to be safer in bigger vehicles, claiming a better view over the street. But any vehicle of the same size blocks the line-of-sight at LEAST as effectively as smaller vehicles directly ahead, but they cut off a much bigger angular field of view when compared to smaller vehicles. Smaller vehicles on the other hand, are cut off even worse. So people driving smaller vehicles slowly but surely are forced into bigger vehicles to even out the playing field.
Bigger vehicles need bigger lanes.
Bigger lanes means wider stroads.
Bigger vehicles mean even less visibility due to blocked lines-of-sight.
Blocked lines-of-sight means higher danger of accidents.
Meaning even more turn-off lanes on stroads.
Making stroads even wider.
But crossing not one or two, but possibly three or four lanes of stroad takes a LOT of time to get reasonable line-of-sight to ALL lanes of stroad, as well as requires ALL lanes to come to a complete stop for safe crossing of those lanes.
Or you take the risk of trying to cross one or two lanes that have already stopped and the crossing driver has line-of-sight to, then gunning it across another one or two lanes in the hopes no-one else is coming because you simply can't get line-of-sight to them due to HUGE vehicles blocking those lines-of-sight.
Which then often results in high speed crashes in a quasi-urban environment WITHOUT the safety measures implicitly built into actual highways. This actually throws high-tonnage vehicles into each other, as well as into stationary vehicles both ON or OFF the stroad, because the stroad REQUIRES access to the huge parking lots of box malls.
Thus making side-walks or bike lanes even MORE dangerous, if they exist in any case.
This does not even consider that stroads are incredibly ugly places where no-one WANTS to live.
They are the opposite of what the American dream sub-urbia looks like: huge swaths of paved over areas, with horribly ugly, blocky, un-windowed concrete buildings, separated by HUGE parking areas, directly next to a honking, roaring multi-lane nightmare traffic blocked in by street signals.
But they are also the opposite of what office and financial buildings in down-town intend to be:
representative glittering company headquarters, or financial office buildings, built with the specific purpose of generating the greatest amount of wealth in as small an area as possible.
Stroad-side buildings are neither aesthetically pleasing, nor do they generate enough income per square foot area to support themselves and their required infrastructure from a communal point-of-view.
Thus stroads and their economies fail at everything they aspire to be, forcing towns into ever more debt trying to support an unsupportive design.
The whole stroad concept is inherently flawed and combines the worst aspects of both street and road, without ANY of the benefits of either.
North America, get rid of this BS.
Because you are wasting lives, safety, money, beauty, livability, diversity, economic and societal stability.
Get mixed zoning, get middle housing back.
Not the dichotomy of either one-family homes in suburbia, or high-rise appartments in down-towns, separated by huge swathes of stroad or highways.
Get people living above offices, stores, and restaurants again.
In small, communal appartment blocks above those stores, where you actually KNOW your neighbors personally. Where you participate in everyday lives of everyone around you.
No more than four or five floors. Where everything is again within a walkable distance. Grocery shopping, doctors, pharmacies, everything in a micro-cosm of society.
Separating neighborhoods by these divisive stroads into "us and them" forces people into dividing into small groups thinking in "us vs them" terms, instead of "us together".
Competition among highly individualized tiny groups isn't working out when it is applied to everything.
Cooperation works a lot better when done in sufficiently large groups but not overdone.
Moderation in everything.
Greetz from Europe and Germany. We do have a pretty long tradition and knowledge of why building cities a different way is better for human life in general.
Also mixed usage zoning is highly resistant to urban decay, while big box stores, strip malls and big honking standalone malls are practically impossible to revitalise once their respective life cycles are up. Trying to get new tenants for them is an exercise in futility, while mixed use has the flexibility to change what it needs to be to fit various communities needs
Thank you for your thorough, thoughtful commentary. "Stroad culture" with its far too often ugly development, ubiquitous cars, and endless car parks serves only to isolate and depress human beings. There is nothing remotely charming nor inviting in this failed approach to developing cities and towns. The New Urbanists have gotten it right.
I want to go back to board walk days :_:
Note: buildings can be taller to improve transit efficiency (increased population density), especially closer to the CBD(s).
Thank you for sharing your wisdom and knowledge. I appreciate you!
The biggest issue with stroads is that so many collisions involved pedestrians and cyclists. I grew up with stroads in a small town and always hated them. I still hate them now. I've had so many near-misses on them.
A highlight of this is the absolute focus on money rather than people.
and yet, they hemorrhage money like no other type of infrastructure could even begin to dream of
SUPERBLOCKS! Take a commercial core square, surround it with high-density residential and wrap that with arterials and strategic parking to allow people who want to visit the commercial core the ability to walk reasonable distances to visit any of the commercial walk-up buildings.
Get out of your car and put in some steps with all the other walkers. Cover the walkways if needed and watch as the superblock brings back life and vibrancy to your city.
Bulldoze the dead cores of failed superstores or malls and build a superblock where it was. Many of them are big enough to fit a whole superblock on the footprint.
That would be awesome
@@zUJ7EjVD Why not accessory commercial units in single-family zoning?
@@zUJ7EjVD Exactly. Strict zoning rules are the worst. A lot of European cities have the same problems as North-American ones (car centric planning, sprawl, pollution) but at least it's possible for the free market to sort things out. Without any planning higher density bulindings pop up near transit stops since there's demand for it. Plus, it's easily possible to walk to the grocery store reducing car usage.
@@zUJ7EjVD Here in Europe everything is mixed-zoned. You usually have shops, bakeries, caffes, public transport in the range of 5 minutes of walking, banks and ATMs in about 10. You can get everything basic you need in your neighbourhood.
Ahh, the ol' "we'll FORCE you to be healthy!" argument. Works sooooo well for the disabled. *eyeroll*
Literally every arterial "road" in Southern California is like this
Ditto suburban New Orleans and surroundings
Stop doing what we know doesn't work?!?!?!?! Dude, I was with you 100% up until that. Doing what we know doesn't work over and over again is the American Way! Hahahahahahahahaha
The problem is both the dominance of the car, the lack of public transportation, and the demands of capitalism (and businesses). All businesses will fight to maintain "access" to their business, even if reducing that access would result in more safety for their customers - and more customers actually pulling in because they aren't afraid of getting in an accident.
@@SadisticSenpai61 there's also the problem that it is practically illegal to create new suburbs that aren't car-dependent.. legislated minimum street widths, minimum lot area, minimum distance between house and street, minimum lot width, etc.
@@devnekoboi7812 And that's basically a large part of the problem - suburbs are not good things. And I say that as someone that has lived and worked in suburbs. They also tend to be pretty damn racist thanks to the white flight that created them.
You know what's funny/revealing? Most "idiots in cars videos" segments (not that I ever watch them...) take place on stroads. More costs...lives and trauma and damage and insurance and others I'm sure.
On a motorcycle stroads are also a nightmare for everything this guy said. You have some dude or girl laughing at a tik tok their watching while they're going 50 in a 40 and the light up ahead turns red and if they just glance foreward they're not going to see you if you hit the brakes. I've been told by local police that they let motorcycles run red lights for a few seconds after the light because of how common rear end collisions like this happen and the parts of town with memorial flowers in the median are all on stroads.
In NZ, we have a few more (unofficial) types of streets and roads. I give them the nicknames "streed" and "stread".
My "streed" is an unusually wide street. Generally, parking is not allowed, or the travel lanes are much wider. "Streeds" also allow higher speeds and are paved with smoother asphalt than streets. Normal streets have very rough asphalt that generates a lot of noise in the cabin of the car, thus making you drive slower.
My "stread" is a stroad, but closer to a street. It has many of the same features as the stroad, with the zoning on either side and many lanes, but the speeds are slightly lower (50 km/h compared to 60 km/h on major roads) and there is a painted median.
I live on a stroad, and the county has proposed some "multimodal improvements" that in actuality make it somewhat stroadier by removing a traffic signal. Traffic already goes over 35 MPH limit, so even if bike lanes are added they wind up making people who live on it walk an unreasonable distance to get to businesses directly across the street.
This explains why I fucking HATE trying to go literally anywhere. It's stroad after stroad. All the main shopping centers are off of an insanely dangerous stroad where I had one of my cars totaled years ago at an intersection. You can't efficiently or safely walk it and driving through it is a nightmare. The US blows.
Thanks so much ST. I have a huge stroad in my town, which despite being 6 lanes is pretty tolerable because the plazas which exist on either side of it are pretty walkable despite it. It's basically this big thing that cuts the town in half where both halves of the stroad are relatively walkable with crossing it being the only significant bottle neck.
Now I see why I hate walking in Detroit (and some Californian cities I once walked in throughout my childhood) was horrible
That would be ILLEGAL here in Germany. We like to drive fast. So you can only enter driveways from streets, not from roads.
watching this and realizing that this is, like, every interstate and retail shopping area i've been to! down with stroads!! they're inefficient, plus they just look so ugly lol
"they just look so ugly"
It's true. Compare European cities and American cities and you notice the difference. European cities are far more beautiful.
Your solution can be found in Dutch (The Netherlands) cities
And Spanish cities too. Dutch is my native language btw, but Spain does it even better than the Netherlands except for the bicycle infrastructure though that is improving too.
Here in the Bahamas we have the opposite of Stroads. We have narrow two way roads, with no side walks or parking spaces or anything on the other side to create wealth, with roundabouts and traffic signals that I still can't figure out to slow people down. I call them Reets.
The solution to this is the same as with so many other things, end lobbying.
Does anyone have any links to youtube videos or articles of stroad or road conversions?
To fix a stroad, seperate the high speed from access. You remove the direct access to the road (it is why it IS a stroad in the first place, and the biggest reason for ineffectiveness). Taking the separation inspiration from the feeder roads of interstates, you have businesses along the feeder streets. To get on the feeder streets, you will have on and off ramps, though they cant be too common (since the road section is for higher speeds). Of course, we arent converting the road into a full on interstate highway. Doing so would worsen taffic. On top of that, there will still be intersections, but these will be made fewer, wnd very rarely should small 2 lane local streets intersect directly with the 6 lane center road. Connector roads (4 lanes usually) should be the ones having that direct connection. As well as other arterials. The only exception to this would be a 4 lane connector that intersects with the road, but turns into a two lane local or "mini collector" road. A term i coin for 2 lane streets thst are effectively small connectors, since alot of two lane asphalt roads in my city do function mostly as connectors, Hence the term "mini collector". Once done, yes, you will still have the wide Turn lanes, but much less of them, and all of them will be on the intersections, none inbetween. Furtherly, there shouldnt AT ALL be any more than six lanes in the suburban arterials. (Unless the population has gotten well into the hundreds of thousands). There should also be a decent ammount of space between the road and the feeder street. If you want to go further, perhaps put a light rail or tram line in thst space to serve the shops.
All of the entries to the city I live in are stroads. They originally were highways or the territorial road to the next city.
Exactly. Nobody does that by design, but it's the way cities grow, organically. I think it's foolish to try to defeat this human tendency.
@@goodmaro most cities throughout history have not grown organically around stroads, they are a bi product of suburbia, and are largely found only in the United States and Canada
@@spikethompson2000 And what's suburbia a product of? It's growth as a product of large numbers of people cooperating independently according to their desires. By "cities" I didn't mean just areas within a municipal boundary, I was including the suburbs.
I definitely live on a stroad. I was even hit around the corner from my home crossing on foot with the right of way, with the light green, by some idiot late for work with no time to worry about someone's safety or following the laws. People get in car accidents all the time, and on the sidewalk, you regularly see parts of rims, shattered glass and pieces of bumper.
Stroads are a example that some things just shouldn't be combined
2:58 Virginia Street is exactly what I was thinking about as I was watching this video lmao. Funny to see it pop up here. Terrible, terrible stroad.
Long Island, NY has entered the chat.
And the lone cyclist has to ride on the sidewalk cause he knows that dangerous platoons of traffic that can kill him will soon be unleashed by the nearest traffic light. But because he's a minority, he also has to worry about being stopped and brutalised and jailed or even killed by some pig tyrant that goes by the job description of "peace officer". Hahahaha almost everything in America is a cruel, sick joke
It's because the developers fight tooth and nail to build neighborhoods that force you to take cars to escape them. But hey, people seem to like living in subdivisions...
They don't. They'd rather not because dense housing makes more money, but automobile companies want more sales so force governments to make these types of places
Id personally rather have high speed roads, and then have parking garages and then no cars within the city itself. I feel like slow speed streets that cars share with people is stressful for both
I live right outside a city where i feel quite unsafe crossing the road but whenever I go into town to these streets that are majorly for pedestrians, i find it way easier to get around. Because cars yield to pedestrians and travel under 20, there are very few cars and there are lots of people walking. There are still parking garages in the city and still cars but the only people driving either live really close or have a good reason to waste their time driving into the city with their car very slowly. I think slow speed streets feel way safer for people and more stressful for drivers by design
You know what, I'm done, done, done
Yeah, I'm gonna take my bike
To the Strong Town stroad
I'm gonna ride 'til I can't no more
you want to see a STROAD in Canada ? Go to Vaughan, in Ontario. Every time I went to work there I was scared I was going to get rammed from behind by an 18-Wheeler. You've never felt so insignificant in your life when walking on Hwy 7.
I think you need to address how you are going to deal with lack of incoming traffic/visitors and efficiency of travel when making these changes. If you build bypass highway and make the town road into a street, travelers will stop at big chains at the highway exits and no one will go to downtown.
If a town is built on the inefficiency of slowing down travelers enough to get them to stop there, the world is better off to just bypass the town entirely. The town should survive on merit of services and quality of life.
In most places in Europe we don't have that problem. Maybe make better cities that people want to visit? Creating highway-esque street network is a recipe against walkability and dense urban centers, which leads to less income for local businesses, because people on foot tend to bring more money than people in cars, partly because of their sheer volume per sq m. Also, who would want to live in or visit a city which is not walkable?
@@KartonRealista2 I think the problem of US is that they just have too much space and people are so spread out that they don't really make sense to sustain those little towns.
@@211teitake As this series talks about, having these small towns be super spread out also doesn't make sense. It leads to bad financials, and bad quality of life. People have just dealt with it so long in the US they don't understand what is lost by defaulting to this car mandatory for everything design. This is not to say that everyone should live without a car. This is to say that there should be a variety of things you can do without getting into your car. This is only feasible if people live closer together.
@@211teitake Space is part of the American culture. It was one of the biggest reasons for people to immigrate here from Europe - they wanted to get away from dense cities and tiny villages. They wanted elbow room. That’s why they did the Louisiana purchase, why they took away Indian country, why thousands of wagons ride west with signs saying “Oregon or Bust”. Any time the population got too big, people moved to a new frontier and built news towns. The problem is that they stopped building small towns, and started building suburbs around cities instead.
in Australia we have stroads, which is really stupid, they are changing them to "expressways" which is technically how a road should be designed...
A street that is duplicated on the side that has a much lower speed limit with an exit and entrance every other intersection with low priority on the lights and down below is a road with no lights whatsoever that is supposed to be free flowing but someone decided to build this "freeway" in chunks where for 6 intersections they make it but they stop for a while then for another 2 they make it, for another 3 it's a tight street and it's just a real mess.
In 2005-6 I lived in the Tampa Bay Area in Florida and Route 19 in Pinellas County was like that. Stretches that are basically interstates with frontage roads literally dumping into six-lane dual highway stroads
Yeah, I like to ride bike but it’s dangerous to do so on one of these stroads, especially one that lacks service roads. Sometimes they have ridiculously high and dangerous speed limits such as 80, yet they have shops and businesses along the sides and a lot of driveways. The bike infrastructure is also terrible here. Who says that stroads are only in America?
0:25 didn't expect this picture to appear in a 3 year old video
why not?
I’d imagine this might be where the image was originally from before it spread across the internet
Striads can be made safer by putting up no right turn on red signs. I never turn right on red onto or off any st any stroad
If other drivers behind me do not like that, too bad
I am absolutely flabbergasted that I live a few feet away from 2:00
I know *exactly* where the street scene at 2:02 is, and I'm not even from there!
I know where it is too!
Saying streets exist to generate wealth may be true at the state level in terms of investment, but to say it has "always" been that way is to put the cart before the horse. Streets connect communities first and foremost: Commerce is a _product_ of that societal arrangement. To argue otherwise is to evince a worldview that fundamentally treats people as a mere form of capital
Thank you for your comment; the distinctions between roads, streets and stroads are a common topic of conversation in Strong Towns content. You may be interested in a more in-depth explanation of why Strong Towns uses this particular description for streets: www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/6/20/streets-are-for-building-community-wealth-heres-why-thats-so-important
I hate going to a neighboring town of mine Belen New Mexico, not because it's ugly, but because I can look at it and see just how easily it could be converted into a street, there are barely any strip malls at this time (this won't stand true car centric infrastructure is like a horrible disease), it would be so easy to convert belen intro a street
Road diets are necessary in all american cities and towns. Get back to the old main street feel.
Ah, so all the streets where I live are stroads.... Great...
It's most of the roads in the US in parts of towns that were built (or re-designed) post 1950. It's the dominance of the car that's to blame for how our cities have grown and developed. It's also why so many of our cities and newer developments are a pedestrian nightmare.
To get to any shop in my town you have to drive 20 minutes to get on a giant stroad and it's very annoying. Same thing in my college hometown.
0:21 Sorry, but can you please put an overlay text converting MPH to KPH for us Canadians (and the rest of the world)? Thanks! It's inconvenient to pause the video and do the conversion.
I always called them "strighways."
Sexually Transmitted Road
Kenmount Road in St John's newfoundland is a stroad, these days. From Freshwater Road, outwards, historically, was the trans-canada highway. During the 90s, the provincial government used money that they got from the Fed for ripping up all of our railway to build the outer ring road in St John's. In doing so, Kenmount Road was changed to be the first highway-to-road interchange in the city, directly before the new interchange with topsail Road. These days it's a 5 lane road through forest and then through the centre of a massive commercial area where the road is still designed exactly like it was when it was a highway, save for more lanes, including massive signs and those overhead gantries with exit signs for topsail Road, which was Newfoundland's first (really bad) interchange.
That's a shame, because much of St. John's seems really walkable (I only spent a week there) maybe because it's naturally set up around the harbour.
ill be honest, I look at youtube video, see a social dilemma and quite literally paste the link in a document along with all the rest of the links related to that
The best roadway is metal and the vehicle has steel wheels!
One problem in the US is that people want to get to their shopping, jobs, and activities as quickly as possible and not have to walk more than a few steps from their parking spot which is impossible in malls or the small walkable streets model. So the stroads become littered with strip malls and big box stores. Some of the larger strip malls have huge parking lots also. We are paving over our land, causing flooding and destroying the climate with exhaust fumes. In the process killing ourselves with inactivity. City planners seem oblivious to the obvious.
Where would you ever want a road speed less than 32kph? 60kph seems to work fine. 80kph is more of a highway speed though. We don't have anything other than highways that have an 80kph limit. The bigger ones go to 100kph and the largest are 120kph. But actually this differentiation between a road and a street is something I've never encountered before. We use the terms interchangeably.
What is the difference between a stroad and boulevard?
A stroad with pedestrian and trees
Las Vegas traffic is dominated by stroads.
Long Island, NY... It should be called "Stroad Island, NY". Where I live in Nassau County, which is on Long Island. Is entirely infested with stroads. Neighboring Suffolk County ain't any better.
Thank you!
I wish more people would realize this
While I agree with the sentiment and the arguments proposed, I don’t see how it scales. In a big, sprawling place like LA, having roads wherever you need them is impossible. There would simply be too many, and there’s no way you can make them without stop lights unless you want an overpass, which is pedestrian unfriendly and expensive, every half a mile.
How would you get from a road to a street far in the interior, where there are no local roads? Doesn’t density become a big problem here? What about public transportation? Does that help here? Wouldn’t buses run into similar problems as cars?
So many questions!! Guess I gotta join a local chapter :)
HALP!! I live on the corner of two AVENUES 🤯😳
Agree with most of that, but on street parking is not something to build into an urban street. The space is better used for segregated cycle tracks or wider pavements (sidewalks). We're slowly learning this over here in the UK. Encouraging people to cycle increases shop takings way more than on street parking.
Reading UK newspapers and listen to the radio really doesn't seem like encouragement to 'go out and cycle'.
@@BreadAccountant Sadly we have a conservative government. Thigs are changing though.
@@NR23derek i hope england can realise how bad the tories are soon! best of luck from Ireland! (our political situation isn't great either right now)
Houston needs to declare a war on stroads
Well, that’s just too logical and sensible for urban planners in the USA. More so than that, it seems no one in the USA wants to admit their plan was not well designed or executed. It’s like they know there’s an issue but no one wants to admit what the issue is. The result: Paralysis through ineffective analysis.
Informative video
All focused on money, while safety comes last.
except they aren't focused on money, because they almost never create a meaningful return on the resources we invest into them - it seems their primary purpose is to hemorrhage money from already financially limited cities and towns.
What would the opposite of a stroad be?
The opposite effect would really be safer roads/streets. You wouldn't cross a highway without a traffic light, but you might not drive through towns with slower roads. An analogy might be similar to a pressure washer and just the garden hose. Thus you're more likely to get hurt by being in front of a pressure washer than the garden hose.
try roundabouts...
If you're gonna do a plaid suit, and you shouldn't, you certainly can't have a patterned tie with it. Way too much going on.
This is good advice for new development, but in dense environments where you don’t have space to easily separate streets and roads (such as the endless sprawl of LA) how do you convert a stroad into a street without ruining traffic, or into a road without demolishing all the businesses?
Convert most to streets and leave some as roads. Sure, traffic might suffer in the short-term. But if people don't have to drive to get a coffee, it might (with some luck and rebalancing) sort itself out. But yeah, basically you have to be willing to suffer in the short-term.
Driving cars in a narrow spaced road in a car centric place is already very stressful, just offer other modes of transport into there and have parking off the nearest decent street.
provide high quality alternatives for driving
If you turn some of the space used for extra lanes of traffic into bike lanes, tram lines or bus lanes then the wide streets should over time stop being so congested by people using alternative modes of transport which are way higher density. Its feels like a much safer place to spend time if you only have to walk across 2 lanes of traffic and bike lanes or bus lanes or tram lines
It would be cool to see a videogame set in a stroad
It's called Grand Theft Auto
Frogger
The cities of the old world took centuries to evolve, and have disadvantages in addition to charms. It will be a long time before our typical American municipal layout comes to resemble theirs, if that ever happens at all under the unique conditions which prevail here. In the meantime, we should be proud to be ourselves, and not foolishy try to ape the world we fled. Nor should we make up words ("stroads") specifically designed to sound unappealing and manipulate minds so as to advance our social agendas.
So you want to feel unsafe while walking across a stroad?
A couple pedestrian bridges alone would have improved things a lot. Then again, when the whole area is so pedestrian-unfriendly, I don't know if anyone would use them.
@Descriptor nobody I know has any desire to walk ever.
ya'll just gotta look at dutch road design
Who came here from notjustbikes
1:19 aaaaaaah people from the US....a street is a place for folk to live...not a """"""""wealth maker"""""""""" by defaut. See? That's the problem you never consider people and families 🤦🏻♀️
The city government needs money to build people friendly streets. Strong Town try to focus on the wealth aspect to influence government in changing their ways of doing things. Right now, cities in North America are very broke and very dependant on higher levels of governments, so the global needs are prioritized over the local needs of the residents.
@@loup9003 that's problematic bc if their gov wants money , that's supposed to be the purpose of taxes
Is that why the US has a higher fertility rate than the EU?
Lol where I live there are few streets, roads, or straods outside of the downtown core. 90% of my surrounding area are avenues. Way nicer and liveable.
Sounds like Boston
In Phoenix Streets are on the East side and Avenues are on the West. Most people agree the Streets are nicer.
@@danieldaniels7571 Must be a difference in definitions or just made up facts, because the avenues I am talking about are lined with grass and big trees, while the streets I am speaking of are lined with fat sidewalks and parking meters, posts etc
2:20 aviation school in the middle of town? yikes
Can you guys come to my town? Please!
I disagree with the assertion. It's new city neighborhood/suburb vs old city/euro city. A large percent of the American population does not want to walk or wants to maintain their suburban neighborhood and has actually moved to places like this on purpose. Then they drive there trucks and large SUVs blocking everyone.
And their driving habits on the highways are atrocious! Check out the RUclips video Why American Highways Are So Slow And Dangerous
You know why a lot of Americans don't want to walk, because it's not safe. And Americans live in suburbs, because no other options exist.
@@jaspboynl8094 and exactly where did you come up with this? Nearly every medium and large city has walkable areas that are very safe. Most people move to suburbs and exurbs bc they want that lifestyle. Otherwise, you make the compromises to live in a walkable area.
@@shahmask because they were sold on that idea by the media not something they decided for themselves and which is further reinforced by the perception that walkable places are dangerous because of crime.
@@benjaminparent4115 I don't disagree with your assertion. But in Dallas and Houston and San Antonio (and to an extent Austin), 250k-500k buys you a really nice multi bedroom townhouse in a walkable neighborhood. However, people are choosing to buy larger houses with giant yards in neighborhoods outside of town for the same price. Because that is what they want. Everyday I am stuck driving from my nice walkable area out to where I unfortunately work and stuck behind behind people driving giant Rams and f250s just enjoying their slow drives way out where they live. Because that's what they chose to buy. The city where I work has a median selling price less than 10% lower than the City of Austin. And they chose that.
Is this why places started charing for street parking? To make up for the loss of money that these stroads create?
Trains good, cars bad
Does the functional difference between streets and roads also tie into the idea of Superblocks?
This guy watches "Not Just Bikes".
Other way around.
If you watched the "Not Just Bikes" video about stroads, you should have been able to know it's the other way around.
Not just bikes made his video because of strong towns (aka the organization that made this video)