Another article that may be useful:
> Americans do not understand the difference between a road and a street.
[...]
> The value of a road is in the speed and efficiency that it provides for movement between places. Anything that is done that reduces the speed and efficiency of a road devalues that road. If we want to maximize the value of a road, we eliminate anything that reduces the speed and efficiency of travel.
> The value of a street comes from its ability to support land use patterns that create capturable value. The street with the highest value is the one that creates the greatest amount of tax revenue with the least amount of public expense over multiple life cycles. If we want to maximize the value of a street, we design it in such a way that it supports an adjacent development pattern that is financially resilient, architecturally timeless and socially enduring.
[...]
> In the United States, weâve built a 45 mile per hour world for ourselves. It is truly the worst of all possible approaches. Our neighborhoods are filled with STROADS (a street/road hybrid) that spread investment out horizontally, making it extremely difficult to capture the amount of value necessary for the public to sustain the transportation systems that serve them.
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/11/21/a-45-mph-worl...
A thing that you can often see in the Netherlands is frontage roads. When a road with houses on it needs a speed upgrade, it gets split into a fast road and a parallel frontage/access/service road for access to the adjacent houses. Possibly even on both sides. This is something that was already being done way back early in the 20th century. (Edit: found a reference to the Dutch word, "ventweg" ("hawking/peddling road"), in 1923.)
It seems to me that in such cases the US tends to choose to expand into a stroad instead. Belgium also has quite a few stroad-like roads, but at least those tend to have usable sidewalks and fairly often even bicycle paths.
We have a major one of those in NYC, queens boulevard, and itâs a disaster. Itâs dangerous to cross, and wide enough that itâs inconvenient to get across, so it effectively divides neighborhoods in half.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110923155641/http://wiki.coe.n...
There's a picture of one here, and the main road is a single lane in both directions. Which is as far from Queens Boulevard as you can get.
The 2 lanes to be crossed makes crossing safer. Further, the side roads are differentiated to make it clear that they are primarily for biking/walking (they are a different color, and are tiled).
Also:
> Service roads are purposely constructed to be discontinuous sections of road, meaning that through traffic cannot use it to get from one main street to another. Since the only traffic on it will be cars accessing the houses or shops along the service road, traffic is substantially lower that on the main roads, and speeds are kept down due to the short segments of roadway
Queens boulevard is a highway masquerading as a road.
There's a few of these around the suburb-y metro Detroit area. They're nice to bike on, and they haven't seemed awful to drive, but they do still do "divide neighborhoods" quite well, which is unfortunate
The Dutch versions of these have elaborate systems to separate pedestrian and bike traffic that minimize the "divide neighborhoods" effect.
The first time I went to the Netherlands I walked from Schiphol airport to the center of Amsterdam and it was an easy but amazing experience. Walking from JFK to Manhattan is a completely possible walk in terms of distance (I usually do better than a 20 minute pace on the flats so it takes only half a day) but when I think of the battle with the infrastructure you'd have to do it's like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
Google the word "modal filter"
I think I've come across references that those "ventwegen" existed even back in the 19th century.
The centres of most UK towns and cities are now limited to 20mph. Although in practice that means that people drive around 25mph - i.e. just low enough not to be caught for speeding - it does make the streets less threatening for both pedestrians and bikes. The thing that would make it better for cyclists is to line up the speed limit of e-bikes (currently set at a max of 15mph) and the speed limit. Currently the 15mph / 20mph disjunction means that some idiots still try to squeeze their cars past relatively fast-moving e-bikes (which then often catch up with the car at the next set of lights...), whereas if those bikes could go at 20pmh or the speed limit was 15mph I don't think they'd bother.
Edit: Although generally once you get out of the very centre there are arterial "stroads" which have 30mph limits, but side-streets are usually still 20mph.
Counterpoint: I regularly go 40-50 km/h on my (not e-)bike on a downhill rural road (40 km/h speed limit) and drivers still feel obligated to overtake me.
I tend to overtake cyclists specifically for their safety. I figure that the farther I am from them, the lower a chance of a collision there is. If that holds true, then the only options when encountering one is to slow down and possibly impede other traffic, or speed up, overtake, and move away. This works for single cyclists. Groups would be different, but I've never encountered them.
Absolutely true, and that's happened to me plenty of times too. There's definitely a trigger in the minds of some drivers where seeing a cyclist means that they need to overtake them because the vast majority of the time the cyclist isn't going to be near the speed limit.
> Currently the 15mph / 20mph disjunction means that some idiots still try to squeeze their cars past relatively fast-moving e-bikes (which then often catch up with the car at the next set of lights...)
To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic.
Now, of course car drivers should remain vigilant and continually check their mirrors, but nobody is infallible, and I'm sure there are plenty of drivers that do not take proper care.
> To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic.
This is conflating two different activities: when a bicyclist or motorcyclist is moving in space between cars, they're using space which is already open and it doesn't impose a risk to the driver of the vehicle or require the cars to move. That's distinct from people trying to illegally pass, which creates new demands for space and frequently endangers other road users and often obstruct oncoming traffic.
The underlying issue here is that cars are the least efficient use of space by a significant margin. That means that drivers see other people taking advantage of space which they are unable to use and feel like they're losing in some way, which often leads to attempts to prevent it. When I lived in California, even though lane-splitting was legal I used to regularly see drivers move their vehicles to the edge of a lane or a few times even open their car door(!) to block motorcyclists. This was clearly because they perceived it as unfair that someone else wasn't jammed the same way they were, but misattributed the problem to the motorcylist rather than the drawbacks of their personal vehicle choices.
> To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic.
The speed is the issue. A collision at low speeds is much less likely to be fatal [0]. Being closely overtaken by a car when you're going at 20-25mph on a bicycle is 1) a scary experience and 2) unnecessarily dangerous for the cyclist (and not at all for the driver).
[0] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
With respect, this feels like whataboutery. "To be fair" makes it sound like cars speeding past cyclists is a response to cyclists whipping between lines of cars, but they're entirely separate issues and can both be wrong at the same time without needing to be compared to each other.
They should switch to kph from mph so the effective speed limit is lowered to ~15mph while being labeled as 25kph. Drivers will feel like their going '25' so less likely to feel inconvenienced :)
I rarely look at my speedometer. I set my speed almost entirely by feel, road conditions, and other cars.
Which is kind of the point of the human-scale roads movement. If you design roads that feel fast, people will drive fast.
Would only work for the current generation of drivers.
Maybe we could add a few zeroes each few years? So in some decades they'll be driving ultra fast at 25000 meters per hour? ;)
About half would just do 25 mph.
We do understand it. It's why Americans love quaint towns. There's a few in my suburbs. It's why many old towns you see a BUS sign. It's not for a bus, its' the 'business' route and the highway has been sent around them.
Doylestown PA: succesfully petitioned and built TWO of these. A 611 and 202 bypass leaving historic doylestown beautiful.
The problem is, for those suburbs that never had strong town centers, there was little objection and so as you go down 611, it's a 4 lane major travel route that passes right through a bunch of other suburbs leaving them without a downtown and a place thats not comfortable to travel.
of course, Doylestown was surrounded by farmland when this was build making it much easier to do... Good luck building a bypass through other towns
Here in the UK stroads were pretty much eliminated everywhere during the 70s and 80s by building bypasses. A bypass is a road built in an arc around a town to divert through-traffic away from the town centre, leaving only the slow street traffic (mostly people coming from outside town to shop). Larger towns have more complicated arrangements, but the pattern is the same: keep through traffic away from the streets in the business area. The business area itself is often pedestrian-only and always has restrictions to make driving through it a slow business.
Typical example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9997356,-0.9166437,14.25z?...
More complex example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1101752,-0.1713974,7297m/d... . Note the M23 on one side, Crawley Avenue on the other, and Peglar Way right in the middle. All of them serve to route traffic around the town centre instead of through it.
In many cases you can see how the original through-road (sometimes dating back to Roman times) had the bypass patched on; without the bypass the "High Street" would have been a stroad.
(Fans of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy may recall Arthur Dent's cottage being demolished to make way for a bypass. This was an issue: the nature of bypasses meant that building them often required the demolition of nice little cottages on the outskirts of small towns.)
For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend this channel's series. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...
'Not Just Bikes' has a ton of other great videos on the channel about what infrastructure makes a good city and what makes one hostile to residents.
Great channel, have been following it for some time, a few takeaways from there:
- It's the cars that make the cities undesirable
- I was shocked how the historical center of London, ON was demolished to the ground and replaced with shacks
- Kids should be able to walk to school alone in safety
- I live in Europe and I was baffled to learn that multi-purpose developments are disallowed in most of North America. This alone makes me reconsider my plans to move to the States. I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes
I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes
And even when the supermarket/mall is close by in the US, you still can't necessarily walk/bike there. I was visiting a friend who lived in the Midwest and his house was less than a mile from the mall. I asked him how to walk over there, and he admitted he'd never tried. So I set out to try, and the only way I found was by running across a busy 4 lane street without any crossings.
America is _very_ big. Bigger than Europe even. That means that there are lots of different development patterns all across the country. While it is true that most places are car dependent, there are also cities where the majority of people who live there don't even own a car. I lived in Boston/Cambridge Massachusetts for 10 years and New York for 8, and I have never owned a car (or bike). Walking and taking the subway/metro are the most convenient modes of travel in those cities, and you get all the benefits of vibrance that comes with that. For the past 18 years, I've had about 2-3 big grocery stores and too many smaller shops and fruit stands to count within a 10 minute walking radius. The same goes for bars, restaurants, book stores, coffee shops, music/dancing venues, etc. All without even needing to get on the subway.
> I was shocked how the historical center of London, ON was demolished to the ground and replaced with shacks
Does anyone have more details on this in written form? It's annoyingly difficult to google for because it's the other London.
Various British cities have been guilty of this; Bradford had a "hole" for about a decade due to an unbuilt shopping centre. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2009/08/27/b...
Everything about this channel is great except the way he leans into London so hard. Itâs his hometown and as a life long Londoner⌠I get it.
That said, I drive this mess everyday and my 25 min cross town commute makes Torontonians cry. I donât bike or bus though, so I do ultimately agree with him.
Regarding downtown. You wonât find more information on that shack thing because itâs not real. Besides a couple historic floods and fires I canât think of what he means.
> I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes
If you live in a large US city, this can still be very manageable. There are two large grocery stores and a small one as well as a Target and a metro line within a 5 minute walk of my house. Apart from the metro line, we didn't really prioritize the grocery stores, etc when looking for a house. That said, there are many downsides to living in big US cities as well.
Doesn't sound like a lot to be honest. This is what I'm used to in Germany, say around 1km radius, everything walkable:
* 1x big REWE, 3x small REWE, 1x Real, 1x Netto, 2x ALDI, 3x LIDL, 1x Turkish grocery store, 1x Asian grocery store
* Too many kiosks too count (tobacco, drinks, snacks, maybe like a convinience store)
* Too many bakeries to count
* 2 tram/metro stations, soon to be 3
* 5 bus stations (not counting the weird ones)
What they probably meant was they can hop on a bike and be in /any/ supermarket they fancy in this time.
Your city seems pretty good compared to what we're usually seeing from city planning in the US though.
Those places tend to be unafordable longterm for anyone making even twice the median salary.
Move to an older part of an urban city or small town and your experience is totally doable in the states. Just donât move to a suburb with million dollar McMansions.
Right, move to a city center with million-dollar studio apartments instead.
It's a great channel that puts words to just why American cities are so dystopic.
It really helps understand exactly what "induced demand" means. If you add another lane, some of the people on the bus will take the car, and thus the new lane is almost immediately full again. If you remove the bus lane, bike lane, sidewalk, same thing.
Adding capacity for cars actually makes travelling by car worse.
It also gives hope. Like just because a city was destroyed to make it more car centric doesn't mean it can't be fixed to be livable again.
There's more to strongtowns than this, but it's all interesting.
Induced demand is nonsense.
If people leave the bus to drive it indicates your bus system is providing bad service.
If more people drive it indicates that your city isn't filling its purpose as being a place where there are a lot of things to do.
Cities need to figure out how to get ahead of induced demand not how use it as an excuse to be a worse city.. sure, this is a hard problem, with many options that make something else work, but induced demand is still a terrible excuse to be a bad city.
Induced demand is not nonsense at all.
I don't have a car. If there were capacity to drive, I would.
If a bunch of capacity to drive was added, I'd buy a car.
So that's one data point.
> If more people drive it indicates that your city isn't filling its purpose as being a place where there are a lot of things to do.
This sounds like an argument from someone who's never heard any alternative to American status quo.
> Cities need to figure out how to get ahead of induced demand
Wait, you said it's nonsense?
I'm starting to think you're misunderstanding me. Induced demand is not an excuse, it's an antipattern no be avoided, and it's not irreversible.
It's about how adding lanes to a road doesn't help traffic (see Katy, Texas).
Or the I101. Adding a lane, or improving the Caltrain? Clearly the latter will improve 101 traffic more.
I agree with you. I think people are downvoting you because they misunderstand your first sentence. Using the concept of induced demand to justify building fewer roads is bullshit, if you don't figure out why there's so much pent up demand to begin with. The way forward should be making all the alternatives more attractive, so that the demand for cars disappears.
>Induced demand is nonsense.
It's been shown to be real in studies upon studies - what are you trying to say here?
I agree that induced demand is nonsense, but for a different reason. Demand either exists or it doesn't. It is either fulfilled or unfulfilled. Building more lanes into a road doesn't "induce" demand. It fulfills it. People use up that road space because they genuinely get a benefit from it. It's really that simple. After all, if you built 100 lanes there wouldn't magically be 100 lanes of traffic. Demand is fulfilled only up to the point that the demand exists. There's no magical induction that urbanists vaguely gesture at.
Not Just Bikes is one of my favorite channels. So happy to see recognition on HN.
Are there any rankings of US cities (not just the major ones) based on some quantitative analysis of these kinds of design principles?
Yes! The "walkability index/score" summarizes a bunch of criteria like density of groceries, retail, public transit, schools and entertainment.
It's easily accessible on real estate websites (like Redfin, https://www.redfin.com/how-walk-score-works), and now I see there's a publicly available dataset as well: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/walkability-index.
Walkability that is commonplace in many towns in Europe, roughly match up with very high 90's (98+) walkability scores in the US.
IMHO, anything below mid-90's is somewhere I would never live. The score is necessarily skewed towards US style living where walkability is relatively rare. So the difference between, say 70 and 40 is almost meaningless from the point of view of a walker.
As far as street design and urban planning goes, the key word is "complete streets" which is an umbrella term that covers rationale, design principles and practical guidance for how to implement a street layout (https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/complete-stree...). This work is based on studies and data, but I've not looked into it.
I don't think this article is making the point veey clearly, but it is a very important point: roads are for long distance connections at speed, streets are for local traffic: reaching houses, shops, people. These stroads try to do both and fail at both because the goals are contradictory; you can't have high speed traffic with lots of side streets and crossing traffic, bikes and pedestrians. It will be too slow for a road or too dangerous for a street, and probably both.
Separate traffic that requires different speeds.
Every time I end up on a five lane road with the center turning lane and tons of curb cuts and cross streets and abutting parking lots, I remind myself that it's one of the most dangerous places I am likely to be in.
Here in Austin Texas, we have lovely signs to remind you of your imminent crash!
http://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Sign%201.JP...
I love the "zero excuses" at the bottom. "now that we informed you of the danger, anything bad happening is entirely your fault and the city can't be held liable for its bad decisions"
Our equivalent in Australia is a Black Spot:
https://www.snowyvalleys.nsw.gov.au/News-Media/Brungle-Road-...
I donât remember ever seeing that sign. Where is it posted?
> one of the most dangerous places I am likely to be in.
i dont know how widely this turn of phrase is used, but where i grew up in the US, we called the middle turn lane in a 5 lane road the suicide lane.
Sounds like a derivative from a road style which has (mostly, thankfully) been abandoned: originally, âsuicide lanesâ designated the center lane of a 3-lane.
A 3-lane is a road design where youâve got one lane in each direction, and a shared passing lane in the middle.
These used to be quite popular as they were not much more expensive than a 2-lane but allowed better throughput, however as density and speeds increased they became more and more deadly as theyâd encourage trying to pass and high-speed frontal collisions.
Theyâre mostly gone now, replaced by either 2+2 or 2+1 (the latter is very popular in europe, itâs basically a 3-lane except thereâs a hard barrier which regularly swaps the center laneâs direction to allow safe passing sections â or more rarely a 1+1 with a protected turn lane).
I spent a summer in India in the late 1980s (Tamil Nadu). Going between cities, the roads were only partially paved. There were two dirt lanes, with a blacktop middle lane. The trucks would play a continuous game of "chicken", driving at each other until someone lost their nerve.
The newspaper had regular reports of truck "capsizings", where a truck would lose control and turn over. It was common for a truck to have laborers who would fill up the truck with some bulk product like dirt, then ride on the top to go to the destination, then unload it. When one of these trucks capsized, it was a major disaster.
Likewise in Ontario. Strong term, but gets the point across. I also once saw a dump truck with stickers on either side of the tailgate. On the left, "passing side." On the right, "suicide." Had a big impact on my driving habits... I never, ever pass on the right.
I wonder how much that specific road design cause FedEx to discourage left hand turns in their routes?
I had to look up a 'center turning lane'. Is this[1] it? That looks incredibly dangerous.
That's exactly it, except with businesses with parking lots on each side and lots of cars pulling in and out. Also a 55 mph speed limit that's routinely ignored unless there's enough traffic to slow everyone down.
Colloquially called a "suicide lane".
It is, but theyâre more common on one travel lane each way streets.
When evaluating the danger of such a design, you have to consider the alternatives. Youâre probably considering 3/4 head on collisions from drivers misjudging the turn. Those happen, but how many rear-end collisions are avoided?
A common thing I see drivers in my city do is pull into the center turning lane and then merge into their intended lane when doing a left turn. It's super illegal afaik, but I see it done all the time, I've even seen police do it. Of course, the alternative to this maneuver is waiting a very long time until both lanes are clear before turning because the stroad you're turning left on is extremely congested (though not extraordinarily congested in my cities case)
We have lots of slow and calm streets in American suburbia, and we love them that way. We value this calm so much that we refuse to admit shopping or even multi-family housing to them, for fear of disturbing it. These uses have to go somewhere, so they go where there is no presumption of an entitlement to low traffic, and thatâs the road.
The businesses hardly complain; they love to be where the greatest numbers of eyeballs and potential impulse shoppers are going by.
Maybe you could start with a strong street vs. road discipline, but I would predict that within 40 years any American polity will surely break it, and the stroad will re-emerge.
Mixed use medium density is my urban nirvana. Anywhere I have been with it just makes so much sense for daily life at person scale. Cars tricked us into thinking life can be comfortable spread across large distances and I think we are suffering in various ways for it.
I am reminded of that cartoon where aliens arive on earth, and assume that cars are the dominant species, since so much of our world has been dedicated to them.
Suburbanites hate cars too, and thatâs why theyâll never let you have mixed use. It would perhaps eliminate the snarl in commercial areas, but it would also bring some portion of that traffic into what are now quiet residential sanctuaries.
I don't understand how people think that cars zipping by at high speeds is particularly conductive to impulse shopping. When I'm traveling at high speeds I usually have a goal I want to reach quickly and don't have time to follow any impulses.
Exactly. These are two different types of traffic that need to be separated from each other. Maybe have fast 1+1 or 2+2 road in the center for through traffic, with the occasional connection to slow parallel streets to access the shops. Make the center road a level higher or lower so everybody can cross it everywhere without interfering with the through traffic. That way you're still serving both purposes, but a lot more safely and efficiently.
> We value this calm so much that we refuse to admit shopping or even multi-family housing to them, for fear of disturbing it.
With single-family zoning being the overwhelming norm in the U.S, it would be unfair to call this a refusal - the supply is artificially constrained. Had multi-family housing been legal to build, then it's pretty likely that people would move into them at higher rates.
This is precisely why nothing is going to change in the US in terms of urban planning: people love living in the suburbs.
I remember driving through suburbian Atlanta at night a few months back, and there was this road that was 6 lines wide through a residential area, with a speed limit of 40 mph. That road was legitimately wider and straighter than Interstate 75, which I hopped on to in a few minutes.
While driving through that stroad, I remember thinking that the only people who benefit from this planning disaster is the local PD, as every corner gas station had cop cars hidden with their lights switched off.
But this isn't how the world works. It's not Simcity where you lay down neat grids of zones and the dutiful citizens follow your orders. People will want to take advantage of cheap(er) land alongside your "road" so that they can own a house while still having reasonable access to the "street". And boom now you have a stroad.
Attempting to use zoning to stop that runs into the problem that by and large people don't want to live in dense areas. Most of them want the cheap home in the burbs. And they'll vote for those that give it to them.
This is the root problem with Strongtowns and their ilk. They love to navel gaze and contemplate the platonic ideal of how a city should be laid out. But for the most part fail to provide a viable option that people can and will choose.
What.
No, strong towns "and their ilk" (biased much?) provide an unlimited supply of solutions to a variety of problems. If you're not seeing them it's because you don't want to see them.
There isn't a "now the city is better" red button you can hit. It takes a lot of effort to get there. One of the efforts is in fact a marketing one: you need to spread awareness of where the problems actually are and why they are a problem. Stroads are a good example; I had never realized they were a problem, but since I discovered them I've been noticing them whenever traveling and thinking a lot about the implications and how they could be redesigned in that spot.
Stroads are very difficult to find in western Europe by the way, compared to the US. In some countries they're non existent. Clearly you're mistaken about how they can and will just appear out of nowhere. Maybe things are more nuanced and complex than your three second opinion lets on.
You're wrong. People want to live in walkable cities. Property prices prove this.
And the reason people often move out with kids is that it's too expensive to own a large-enough property for most people due to the high demand for walkable places.
But they choose not to. US population is roughly 1/2 suburban, 1/4 rural, and 1/4 urban. Which backs up my point.
I just watched a video in response to this story that explained how zoning in North America is actually too much like SimCity, with very restrictive homogenous zoning and no mixed zoning at all. It's mixed zoning that allows people to live closer to the shops for their daily needs, and that reduces traffic.
These shops aren't on the stroad because the US is an anarchy where everything goes, they're there because it's designed that way. But the design is inefficient and dangerous.
we do have roads where we prohibit driveways onto them. They're called Interstates. somehow we don't have massive issues with people illegally building driveways onto them.
It kills me that US road planners don't even bother putting in medium-term solutions that would fix most of the issues, like a road with separated through lanes in the middle and a one-lane service road for the driveways.
Those exist in some areas of the country. Here's an example: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.5823608,-111.9504203,3a,75y,...
Cool seeing strongtowns here. Not Just Bikes is a YouTube channel that has helped popularize them recently, and has a lot of other videos about what makes living in the Netherlands so great (i.e. itâs not just bikes, although thatâs a big part of it).
Hereâs Not Just Bikesâ video about Stroads: https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM
It really is a nice channel.
I can't find the exact video right now but I remember one where he compared a horrid stroad with a lovely Dutch street. The Dutch version contained two single lane streets, bike lanes, a lightrail line and lovely shade from all the trees. And ironically the second had a higher carrying capacity because single-occupant vehicles are just terrible at moving people.
> I can't find the exact video right now
I think that's probably because it was a Patreon exclusive ;) However, his recent video includes a similar comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-v2-qyCc8
The popularization is more likely the other way around: Strong Towns has been around 12 years, has a huge audience, and is a sponsor and promoter of Not Just Bikes.
I agree itâs an exceptional YouTube channel though. :)
> Strong Towns has been around 12 years, has a huge audience, and is a sponsor and promoter of Not Just Bikes.
St might have a huge audience amongst professional city planners, but in the âpublic consciousnessâ NJB is what popularised both STâs concepts and knowledge of ST as an organisation.
NJB is closing in on half a million subscribers and has 11 vids above a million (one above 3), by comparison STâs youtube channel is under 20k subs and their biggest video is 10 years old and has 350k views. Their 2 STROAD videos follow with 60k each, NJBâs top stroad video has 1.3m views. Hell, 3 videos of NJBâs âstrong townsâ series have more views than the entire strong towns channel.
The âbicycle dutchâ channel is larger than ST, and itâs essentially a cycling vlog.
You say that ST is a sponsor and promoter of NJB, but NJB has a much larger lay audience and regularly plugs donating to strong towns.
Posted the same on a sibling comment: I didnât mean YT audience, I meant audience across all media. ST is not active on YouTube.
On YouTube, Strong Towns has 9.7K subscribers and Not Just Bikes has 425K. NJBâs video about stroads has 1.3M views while Strong Townsâ videos about stroads have 62K and 63K and are 3 and 8 years old. Iâve only seen people talk about stroads online when NJB made his videos.
Hereâs their newer stroad video though, which is pretty good: https://youtu.be/OZ1HhLq-Huo
Since this wasnât clear: I was not referring to YouTube audience, where ST makes no effort, but to overall audience across different media. ST primary media are blog articles and podcasts, and the main social channels are Facebook and Twitter.
Anytime I leave the city and spend a few days getting around by car Iâm amazed at just how completely exhausting it is to go shopping or run errands in suburbia. I am not sure why exactly, after all Iâm just sitting there, but I think all the stop-and-go and waiting 10 minutes at lights trying to get across a stroad intersection to a shop I can see the whole time is a big contributor.
I moved recently to where everything is a car drive away. The constant in an out of the car is exhausting. Not physically but mentally. Conter-intuitively because cars are also weather proof and comfortable, I felt a lot of the inertia is actually in getting out of the car. I found myself just waiting a little while before getting out. I am a fit and healthy individual and it is draining.
I tried the ride on and it's about an hour one way to work by bike, so I think I will get an e-bike. I have other physical training to do so I don't want to completely deplete myself by riding, but I still don't want to use the car.
Driving is active. Public transport is passive. You can just sit there and read.
In a proper (that is, probably not North-American) suburb you can do errands walking or cycling.
How is that not urban?
I once had a serious learning experience driving from the suburbs into the CBD to meet friends. My attempt coincided with a Zombie Walk that bisected the city. It took me forever to reach where I was meeting friends, then another forever to find somewhere to park the car (all the paid parking was full) given I had to radiate out and cross the zombie parade again. Took 90 minutes to do what would've taken 5 minutes normally, or maybe 10 minutes on foot. All for one person in a car.
Needs a (2017) in title. This has been a very important article/concept in US planning circles. Personally I don't really like the street/stroad/road distinction but prefer the Transport for London 'movement and place' approach [0] which is clearer on necessary compromises. The end goal of both of course is to ensure traffic engineers (trained primarily in efficient car movements) take into account pedestrian considerations where pedestrians need to be, which have taken a back seat where there is any conflict with cars over the last 50 or so years.
[0] https://content.tfl.gov.uk/rtf-report-chapter-2-part-1.pdf
I couldnât agree more with the article. Unfortunately as for America I think people wouldnât be very happy with turning their stroads into streets. There is a very toxic self centered car culture here; any impediment to it real or imaginary will make people very angry.
Suburbia is a tree. The best residential property is closest to the leaf nodes, since this minimizes through traffic (think cul-de-sac). The best commercial property is closest to the root, since this maximizes it (think McDonalds). The tree empties every morning and fills every night, placing enormous demands on the edges near the root. Those are generally the stroads. Slashing the capacity of a stroad/arterial by turning it to a street would cut off the entire subtree from the world. Homeowners are right to resist that. Their property would be useless.
If weâre fighting stroads, those have to become roads. One way to get this done is simply banish the businesses. But this strains capacity on the arterials even worse, since you now need to leave the suburb to go shopping.
The other way is to push businesses down the tree, closer to houses, more decentralized. But the residents wonât abide that either, on the theory that businesses will attract traffic to their sub-trees.
To that I say: get over it. Itâs utterly insane to have a whole street for the private use of a few dozen families. Itâs literally impossible to make arterials big enough to compensate. You can have your street slow, but itâs going to be part of a network and itâs going to be used by more than just the hyper local community.
But of course they donât see this as particularly less bad than total isolation, so they wonât allow it either. The whole thing is fucked.
The takeaway here is a lesson about how we build cities, not that we should decrease the traffic capacity of some stroads and make no other changes.
In practice, new cities, when that even happens, doesn't happen out of thin air either, not in the US at least. We don't build cities (too much infrastructure investment required), but even when we do, they don't go from 0-100 mph and go from being a small sleepy town into a city overnight. History of a place thus dictates what the future of it will look like. How we build cities, effectively, involves decreasing traffic capacity in some places. Strongtowns.org has a large number of other changes, not just limiting stroads.
No, they need to move the commercial property closer to the leaves. Not at the leaves, but close enough that the distance is still walkable. That would really reduce car traffic, and therefore reduce stress on the road capacity.
It would bring mild traffic to parts of the tree that currently have almost zero, which is unacceptable to the people living on them.
The cognitive dissonance is wild.
The busiest and most economically vibrant areas in the US are the ones that deprioritize cars (main streets, downtowns, outdoor malls, bar districts).
But if you try to change an existing area into a less car friendly area people absolutely lose their heads
There's no cognitive dissonance here really. People are just self interested. They don't want a bunch of bars because that means people will drive drunk and piss and puke all over their property stumbling back after last call. They don't want fewer lanes because its just going to turn their commute from work into even more of a bottleneck. They don't want a mall built near them because of the traffic bottlenecks it would create, but they want a fast road to get to a mall at just enough distance away to not be affected by these issues themselves.
The "less lanes means bottle neck" bit is not even true due to induced demand.
If they're afraid that a mall will create traffic bottlenecks, maybe build those malls so they're easy to reach on foot, by bike, or with public transport. That way you don't get that traffic bottleneck.
You're afraid people will drive drunk, so you want people to put all the bars so far from the homes that everybody has to drive to them?
I truly believe the reason has more to do with being antisocial than anyone cares to admit. It's not always the car's mobility that people enjoy so much as the barrier it creates from the outside world.
Socialization needs norms. Itâs no accident that relatively urbanized civilizations have relatively strict codes of behavior. Americaâs wild and free frontier spirit, God bless it, is less fun in a crowded subway.
Right, but like everything else in the US right now, the split is obvious along political lines. People who like cities are left, people who like suburbs/rural living/driving everywhere are right.
Huh, guess I'm "right" then. Weird that my voting history would indicate otherwise, but I don't like city living so ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
It was interesting for me to learn how this process happened in Copenhagen and Groningen in the 1960s and 1970sâpeople were angry, they protested, made death threats.[0] So it seems like re-pedestrianising areas has always made some people very angry everywhere, and that anger may not be so unique or significant a barrier as it might initially seem.
Just a few years ago, when Paris decided to pedestrianize (or rather restrict traffic on) rue des Rosiers, a small, commercial street in a historically Jewish neighborhood, shop owners were strongly opposed to it. When the work was completed, foot traffic in the shops doubled almost overnight. You can easily tell by the fact that long queues pop up in front of fallafel shops and delis at peak business hours that overflow in the street and that wouldn't have fit before on the tiny sidewalks.
People are scared of change, even when the benefits are quite obvious. At least it was obvious to me when I was handed an hyperbolic leaflet opposing the change before it was done: I knew pedestrian streets were beneficial to shops, the area has no lack of transportation being in the center of Paris, there's no parking nearby, and you don't get in a car to go buy a damn sandwich in Paris unless you're completely fucking insane.
This is similar in the town in Germany where I grew up. When I was a kid they converted the central part of the inner city into a walking mall, no cars allowed (except for delivery traffic outside of certain hours). The shop owners were up in arms, saying it would be the death of the city, everyone would go shopping at big malls outside of town etc.. The exact opposite happened, the city is absolutely packed, people come from far to go shopping there, cafe's everywhere.
Ironically, the city is considering expanding the pedestrian zones and shop owners are bringing forth the same arguments they did 30 years ago, as if they didn't learn anything.
My favorite example of this is something I saw in a local bicycle planning study. A 4 lane stretch about 6 blocks long was converted to 2 lanes with parking and wider sidewalks (with the idea that people will naturally drive a bit slower with less of the street devoted to traffic). Someone was livid that it had happened, ranting about delays at the light on one end of the stretch. At busy times, the typical wait at the light is for the green (so not even a full cycle). Very occasionally a couple of cars don't make the busiest left on the first green.
This puts a name to something I've found very strange the few times I've visited America. Places like the "stroad" picture are everywhere and they have a strangely desolate feel to them. It's not an environment I would want to live and work in.
I have to take issue with this, though:
> We like to call them "the futon of transportation" because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street.
Futons (good ones, at least) are fantastic beds. I've been sleeping on them for over 20 years entirely by choice, having plenty of space and money for the alternatives. How anybody came to consider them a form of couch is the mysterious bit to me.
> How anybody came to consider them a form of couch is the mysterious bit to me.
Apparently someone saw a futon and figured âwe could use [cotton-filled and somewhat foldable mattresses] instead of rigid split mattresses for sofabedsâ and so âfutonâ became a style of sofabed (obviously shitty since itâs a sofabed).
I'm not a futon fan, but I did recognise this attack on futons as misguided. The article has a very important point, but addresses it poorly in my opinion. Partially because of this sort of unfair attack on something unrelated.
Hm? Futons fold up into a softish furniture for sitting on. How is that not a couch?
Mostly in that itâs not what a futon actually is, in its country of origin.
In japan, a futon is not a sofabed, it solely bedding and during the day it gets stowed into a closet (or a corner of the room).
Itâs not seating and it doesnât have a frame. Those are western âadditionsâ. But not improvements, because futons were never intended for slatted frames (or even hard surfaces). Because of this incompatibility and the desire to make them permanent the âfuton-style mattressesâ thus have to become much thicker and heavier, thereby losing the flexibility and stowability of the original, and just becoming bad mattresses (la requirement for sofabeds, really).
In essence, âfutons are shitâ is one more example of taking something which is perfectly fine, moving it completely out of its context, misusing it entirely, and then calling it bad after making it so. And the badness gets attributed to futons where itâs been a universal constant of sofabeds.
Futon-style mattresses have not made sofabeds worse, theyâve always been shit[1] theyâve just tarnished the name of futons.
[1] Which in fairness is not normally an issue, their purpose is to be an ok-at-best couch with some ad-hoc bedding so guests donât sleep on the floor.
Futon, originally, designate the japanese bed, not the weird couch bed hybrid the author is talking about. It's not meant to be used as a couch but, often, to be folded so that it can be stored while the bedroom can be used for other purposes
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