We all know those four or six lane wide thoroughfares running into a town, built for high speed but also lined with retail or residential developments and all the multiple accesses and traffic signals those entail, used to knowed as "urban roads".
They are neither streets nor roads, we can call them "Stroads". In words of this neologism's inventor, Chuck Marohn:
A STROAD moves cars at speeds too slow to get around efficiently but too fast to support productive private sector investment. The result is an expensive highway and a declining tax base.
Its width induces speeding but this excessive width makes it uncrossable for pedestrians. And not only they are unsafe and unpleasant, they are economically destructive as well. They do not provide the mobility efficient to achieve flow and simultaneously fail to deliver enduring retail value.
If you want to … truly understand why our development approach is bankrupting us, just watch your speedometer. Anytime you are traveling between 30 and 50 miles per hour, you are basically in an area that is too slow to be efficient yet too fast to provide a framework for capturing a productive rate of return.
So a stroad is not always a good design for any place because it suffers from:
- Slow traffic (fails as a road).
- Low financial productivity (fails as a street).
- Poor safety records.
- Very expensive to build.
- Low financial productivity (fails as a street).
- Poor safety records.
- Very expensive to build.
In existent cases, Marohn says, you must choose between turning them into a street or into a road, while there are other multiple tools and solutions -as boulevards or avenues- with these basic points:
Stroad to Street Conversion:
- Slow traffic.
- Prioritize pedestrian, bikers and higher transit vehicles.
- Regulatory environment to encourage the use of adjacent propierties.
- Embrace complexity.
- Slow traffic.
- Prioritize pedestrian, bikers and higher transit vehicles.
- Regulatory environment to encourage the use of adjacent propierties.
- Embrace complexity.
Stroad to Road Conversion:
- Segregate traffic modes.
- Close existent accesses (and limit other new ones).
- Don't allow adjacent land uses degrade public's transportation investment.
- Simplify the roadway.
- Segregate traffic modes.
- Close existent accesses (and limit other new ones).
- Don't allow adjacent land uses degrade public's transportation investment.
- Simplify the roadway.
This is not really a rising trouble -as we saw before in this post- but the problem is not the conversion of existing stroads into another model; instead we have economically stressed communities that still keep building stroads, especially in proximity to highways searching in vain a short-term economic gain.
-via The Atlantic Cities by Sarah Goodyear.
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