I Hate Stroads - and so do you.

Driving is frustrating. It's frustrating to try to predict unpredictable drivers, it's frustrating when you need to take four turns, cross a 5 lane road, and make a U-turn to get from the Bed Bath and Beyond to the PetSmart, and it's frustrating to need to take a car out on an large arterial road to get milk for the recipe when you run out.

As frustrating as driving in North America is, walking is often worse. I'd want to get my will and testament in order before walking from the Bed Bath and Beyond to the PetSmart on the opposite side of the road.

I hate this intersection. Especially on foot.

Having had many conversations along these lines, among the first things I hear are "the car is the ultimate form of freedom," and "North America was built with the car in mind, unlike Europe, which was built in the time of horses and carriages." These are pretty easy to dispel. Cars are an absolute necessity for anyone living outside of a city center. Saying "cars are the ultimate form of freedom" strikes me much like saying refrigerators are the ultimate form of freedom because your refrigerator allows you to keep your food at a variety of temperatures. Cars are a requirement for participation in society, there is no freedom from cars outside of city centers. They allow you go anywhere, by often it's the only form of transport available. Being able to walk, take a car, bike, bus, or catch a train is a lot more free.

As for the "European cities are built different" gambit, this is a dodge. Cities are not static, they are rebuilt year after year. A moving feast. Most US cities were incorporated before cars were mainstream, and all have been retrofitted to become more car-centric. We've surrendered more and more public space to cars as years have gone on.

Some definitions will help in moving forward. For the purposes of this post, a "road" is made for efficiently transporting cars from one place to another. A road is not a place. Roads connect places. Roads have wide lanes, few connections or distractions, high speeds, and no land access. You must leave a road to access a business. Roads are designed by the mile. If you're traveling more than 50 mph, you're on a road.

Highway 287, south of Loveland. This road leads to Longmont

Streets are places. You might go to a street to shop or run an errand, you may walk from one shop to another, have a meal, or sit on a bench. Things on streets are human scale. Small signs, sandwich boards, window displays, and wide sidewalks. Two story buildings with offices or apartments on the second floor. Streets are places of high productivity. Places like walking malls, college campuses, and Disney World are all incredibly productive, needing only slow streets to connect them; they transcend the need to accommodate cars. Streets are designed by the foot. If you're traveling less than 35 mph, you're probably on a street.

4th between Lincoln and Cleveland in Loveland, one of my local streets. 

Enter the stroad. Stroads are the futons of travel: they have two functions and perform neither well. A stroad has two lanes of travel in either direction, long turn lanes, a center turn lane, many traffic lights, and stay on one long enough and you'll find powercenters (strip malls but with big box stores) on either side. They have many entrances and exits, but do not provide access to places. Sure you can get to the Home Depot, but that's not a place. It's not human-scale, it's car-scale. Stroads are designed by the 'hundreds of feet.' If you're going between 35 and 50 mph, you're probably on a stroad. This is the worst thing traffic engineers have unleashed.

Once you learn to recognize these, you see them everywhere. I'm so sorry (I'm not), but I'm going to absolutely ruin them for you. Stroads are ugly. It's not a place anyone outside of a car wants to spend any time, and if you're in a car, you're glad the speeds are high, so you can get somewhere else quickly.

Most accidents in cities occur on stroads, not highways (look up crash rates in your city). The wide lanes and highway-like design encourages fast driving speeds, regulated by enforcement, and not by design. Combine the high speed with lots of intersections, entrances and exits, and you have the most dangerous design possible. You would be hard-pressed to to purposefully design a road more dangerous than a stroad if that was your expressed goal. The design contributes to the fact that the US has the most dangerous roads of any developed country. 10.6 deaths/100,000/year vs 3-4 across most of Europe.

During the pandemic, road usage dropped, but the fatality rate/miles driven actually increased. So the only reason these stroads weren't killing more of us is because they were too congested to get going fast enough to kill anyone. The average risk of severe bodily injury increases from 50% at 31 mph to 75% at 39 mph. The average risk of death increases from 25% at 32 mph to 50% at 42 mph (source). Bear in mind stroads exist between 35 and 50 mph.

"But stroads at least get a lot of people from one place to another, right?" Well, they get a lot cars from one place to another. Cars are the worst way to carry lots of people. It's the suburb problem all over. Cars are not dense. Most cars contain one person, take up a whole lane, and cut across two lanes of traffic because they just remembered they DO need another towel from Target.

The capacity of a single 10-foot lane (or equivalent width) by mode at peak conditions with normal operations.

Assuming peak values, stroads can move 6,400 vehicles per hour. Changing the 5 lane stroad to a single lane in each direction, a center bus lane, and a two way bike lane in each direction, assuming the lowest values on the new street, actually increases capacity from 6,400 to 12,700. And that's taking the stroad from 5 lanes to 4. Add a sidewalk, and you're at 21,700. With slower vehicle speeds, you could also eliminate the clear zones (cleared out areas along the roadside for out-of-control cars to roll on into).

"This new street would be far more expensive though! Stroads are at least cheap, right?" No. Stroads require far more space and maintenance than comparable higher-capacity roads. Long, wide, and frequent turn lanes mean more asphalt, more traffic lights add cost and maintenance, as do high speeds.

The land that is served by stroads is incredibly low productivity. Parking lots are required, take up space, make no money, and pay little taxes. The land is very low-density by design, meaning a stroad serving powercenters is a high-cost, low-payoff way to use land.

Generic, low-productivity powercenter in Anywhere, USA.

So stroads are bankrupting our cities, but at least they are ugly, inefficient, and unsafe while doing it.

While I'm at it, here's another thing that I'm sorry I'm going to ruin for you (not really). There is a better way to control speed than speed limit enforcement. Everyone hates getting a speeding ticket, but often it's not your fault. When designing environments, the designer has a duty of communication. When that fails, the designer, not you, has failed. Ever pull on a door with a vertical handle, and felt stupid when you realized it's a push door? Don't. The designer made the door with a signifier (vertical handle) that grants the affordance (ability) of pulling. You're not stupid for pulling, even if there is a sign that says "Push."

Design isn't value-free. When designing a door, the values aren't that relevant, but when designing a roadway, prioritizing things like speed or flow over safety is creating a design that comes with a value statement about human life.

Roads are designed just as much as door handles. There is a road that I drive that signifies and grants the affordance of driving 50 mph. Wide, straight lanes, no intersections or distractions signal that driving fast is okay, however the speed limit is 35. I once drove that road at 35, and felt deeply unsafe, being passed by traffic going 15-20 mph faster. Speeding on that road is the safer choice, as it was designed for a high speed. When the road design doesn't match the speed, you are left to constantly monitor your speed. Have you ever carefully monitored your speed on complex, narrow street with lots of distractions? Of course not—the road design matches the intended speed.

Future Scott here: I just got back from driving around Scotland, and the design of the roads there tell you the speed limit. Whenever I checked the speed limit, it was about the speed I was going every time. Big wide roads has higher speed limits. When the speed limit was lower, the road was narrow, curvy, and complex to navigate, naturally slowing me down. I never needed to look at a speed limit sign the whole time I was there. The car could just as well have not had a speedometer at all.

Back to Past Scott: Okay, this has been fun bit of taking down stroads and road design, but pointing out problems is always is the easy part and trying to come up with solutions is the hard part—except with these problems. The solutions can be so easy to implement. Small changes in regulations can make a HUGE difference in the livability of a city. It's almost comical how much of a problem these regulations cause, and how a few targeted changes can eliminate these problems. I find it quite heartening and a wonderful area to direct resources.

Changing the standards to which we build essentially gives us a new road system for free—it just takes a few decades. As roads are regularly updated, it doesn't cost anything more to update to different, safer standards. Many changes are as easy as literally repainting a road.

What follows are specific recommendations, targeted to fix these issues.

Simple Solution #1: Update road standards to human-centric designs.

Streets and roads should be designed with humans in mind. Currently, when designing a road, the intended speed is chosen, followed by projected volume. It is then made as safe as the speed and volume allow, and the cost falls out of the equation. Humans, when asked what they want from their streets and roads, will prioritize 1) safety, 2) cost, followed by 3) volume, then 4) speed. This is almost the exact reverse of how streets and roads are actually designed.

Currently, roads are designed for cars. Switching the standards to consider the other road users - pedestrians, bikes, people in wheelchairs, will lead to more useable, efficient, and higher capacity roads. Techniques like traffic calming can help bring the design of the road match the intended speed.

The street here is brick, signaling that the car isn't the only user. The pedestrian crossing is on the same level rather than using a street cut. A pedestrian island in the middle means the pedestrian only has to look one way before crossing.

Chicanes are used here to narrow lanes, protect turning bikes, and the mini roundabout disallows cars breezing through the intersection without looking for other users.

This area is a huge rabbit hole. If you're interested in how to change standards with better designs, please look into the extra resources below. Traffic calming is just one of many arrows in the quiver.

Simple Solution #2: When updating stroads, slowly convert to streets or roads.

Stroads are not places like streets. Nor are they efficient at moving cars, like roads. Land can be used much more efficiently by creating dense, less car centric areas of high productivity where humans may actually want to spend time, with roads connecting these areas.

Stroad-to-road conversion:

• limit access
• prioritize throughput over access
• connect productive places
• embrace simplicity

Stroad-to-street conversion:

• Slow traffic (traffic calming)
• Prioritize people over throughput
• Build a productive place
• Embrace complexity

Better use of the space that stroads take up could take many forms. You can keep high speed travel in center lanes (roads) and have 'frontage roads' separated from high speed travel that includes all the intersections and complexity of a street. (Esplanade Street in Chico, CA does this). You can cut down to one lane in each direction, and include alternate travel options like sidewalks, public transit, and bike infrastructure to make these powercenters more productive. With less car demand, parking lots can be reclaimed into walkable places.

Simple Solution #3: When implementing alternate transit options, make them more convenient than driving.

On some trips, buses, or trains need to be the faster or cheaper option. If a bus gets a dedicated lane, it will arrive before the cars stuck in traffic. If the bus is more convenient, people will take the bus. If a bus is sitting in the same traffic as the cars, the only people who will use it are the people for who it is an ethical choice or those with no other options. The same goes for biking and trains. If trips are more convenient using other modes of travel, these modes of travel will get used. In Boulder, it is difficult to bike from off campus housing, but there is a convenient bus. Most students in Boulder take the bus. In Fort Collins, there is great biking infrastructure, so students bike. People will take the most convenient mode of transport, and creating more options means no one is forced to take any particular mode of transit. If you like driving, feel free to drive on the now less congested roads.

Changing the zoning rules and standards will change our cities. Every time a road or street gets an update, it can be brought up to the new standard. Cities aren't static; think to a time when you hadn't seen a city for 5+ years, and when you come back it seems unfamiliar. We've seen this happen before.

Car centric areas can be redesigned to reclaim area surrendered to cars and car infrastructure:

Before

After

With an decreased dependence on cars, cities will become less noisy (cities aren't loud, cars are loud) and less space will need to be devoted to parking lots. To see how much space that will open up, here is a map with parking lots and garages highlighted in red of Little Rock and the area around Disneyland in CA:

Notice the sea of red around Angel stadium and the parking surrounding Disneyland in the upper left

It's been done in the past; we can reclaim bad, car-centric, dangerous, and inefficient design and replace it with good, human-scale design.

In the US, we have a car culture, and no one is proposing to take that away. None of these interventions actually force cars off roads. They simply make the roads more efficient, more pleasant, and more productive.

Cheers,

  - Scott

Email List: tinyletter.com/scottsieke

Extra resources:

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles Marohn Jr.
• Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles Marohn Jr.
• The Deadly Myth That Human Error Causes Most Car Crashes 
• City Beautiful on YouTube
• Not Just Bikes on YouTube

Suffocating Suburbs

What a cute suburban garage, it almost looks like a house

Suburbs are isolating. It's so natural to think of the suburbs as the fulfillment of the American Dream, or as the middle-class goal, but that's just familiarity. Getting into a car, driving for 12 minutes each direction onto a collector road then an arterial and back to grab more dish soap is normalized if that's the only way it's ever done. Having a few close friends in nearby houses seems like 'the way things are' until you start investigating alternatives. It's easy for confirmation bias to kick in and say "I know lots of people in my suburb, and they're some of my closest friends; I've had a wonderful time living in my suburb," but what you don't ever have is a point of comparison to something different, because all suburbs are so similar.

In this post, I'm not going to advocate for getting rid of suburbs, or single family homes on big lots, or big wide streets with lots of on-street parking. What I will advocate for is zoning laws that make other types of suburbs possible.

Currently, nearly all suburbs (any by land area, most of all cities) are zoned as single-family homes on big lots. This is Residential zoning (R), at the lowest density (1), making this a R1 zone:

A suburb in Anywhere, USA
(I zoomed into a spot on Google Maps with labels turned off, and ended up in West Des Moines)

R1 zones contain homes with no access to any retail, except by car. While parks, churches, schools, and childcare can be built in these single-family residential zones, simply having a corner market within walking distance would save many car trips, but these zones disallow even that small convenience.

A vehicle is a necessity for living in single-family R1 zones. In order to get anywhere that isn't zoned for R1, you need to get into a car, which necessitates that the people you are meeting there are less likely to be neighbors. People love a small town feel where they know their neighbors, but balk at ideas like putting a coffee shop in a suburb. R1 zones lack any third place (work and home are the first two places, the third place is where you can go to socialize), like a coffee shop, bowling alley, salon, makerspace, bookstore, arcade, lodge, social club, or coworking space. These are all destinations accessible by car only, and when you get there, it's usually full of strangers unless you've planned to meet up with friends. Part of the reason that churches are so popular in America is because they function as one of the only third places easily accessible from deep within R1 zones.

Children growing up in this environment are incredibly isolated until they get a car. That's why getting a car can seem like it has life-or-death importance to children in suburbs. Taking away the car is tantamount to trapping them in an environment that lacks any stimulation or fulfillment.

Imagine growing up here as a child with no car.

There are better ways to make suburbs.

Think of this neighborhood in your (large) city: narrow alternating one way streets, with one lane of travel and one lane of on-street parking. Small to medium houses line the street with small front yards that are right up against the sidewalk. Trees cover the sidewalk and part of the street, and there is a corner market where you can buy staples like flour, milk, and eggs. Now that you have that in mind, answer these two questions:

• How expensive are the houses?
• How old is the neighborhood?

A typical house in Capitol Hill. Bonus point for someone walking their dog.

For me, this description reminded me of Capitol Hill, Washington Park, and Central East Denver. These are old and expensive neighborhoods. Part of the reason they are so expensive is because they are rare - they are in fact illegal to build today in any zoning district. We updated the regulations to mandate things like parking minimums, wider lanes, two way traffic, no mixed-use zoning, setback requirements, minimum lot sizes, and clear zones for the fast-moving cars to roll into when they crash. These regulations make those quaint, human-scale, livable neighborhoods a thing of the past. We can regulate them back. Not only are they more livable—they are far safer than the neighborhoods built with updated road standards.

Wide residential streets with large clear zones, straight roads, lots of on-street parking, and setback houses encourage faster driving, making these roads less safe than complex narrow streets. In fact, these wide residential streets have 4x the number of accidents as narrow streets.

Again, we can fix this problem. Single Family R1 Zoning can be a thing of the past.

A note before moving on: I'm not advocating for eliminating this type of suburb. At least not for everybody. If you can live with it yourself, and can justify subjecting children to the isolation, no one will stop that from happening. Developers can (and will) still create these neighborhoods. Eliminating the zoning simply opens more options, it doesn't shut any down.

Simple Solution #1: Eliminate R1 Zoning or change the R1 zoning district for single-family homes to allow variable lot sizes, duplexes and fourplexes, and small apartment complexes in keeping with neighborhood aesthetic, as well as small commercial corner markets and third places that save car trips to commercial zoned developments.

These changes helps make these areas more walkable and less car dependent, as well as more serviceable by public transit. Duplexes, apartments, and smaller lots increase density, giving the corner markets and third places a greater customer base and public transit more justification—more density means fewer transit stops service more people.

Simple Solution #2: Change standards to increase safety by narrowing roads, reducing on-street parking and setbacks, reduce lot sizes, and make the area more difficult to navigate by car to promote slower, safer neighborhood speeds.

These changes functionally bring back the old style of neighborhood that demands such a premium nowadays. These neighborhoods experience far fewer vehicle accidents, despite being built before the new standards surrendered space to fast moving cars, presumably to keep things safer (it's actually due to an adherence to a measurement of traffic flow called "level of service" which makes things less safe in order to keep cars moving, but that's perhaps a story for another time).

Cheers,

  - Scott

Email List: tinyletter.com/scottsieke

Extras resources:

Urban Design Extras and Pics

Paved Paradise, and put up a 5 level interchange

If you've been driving for a decade or more, you've lived through this story: highway is congested, so they want to expand it. It's under construction and nearly unusable for a few years, after which traffic is better for a year or two, then its right back to square one. This problem is called 'induced demand.' People will use the infrastructure that is built. Build more lanes and more people will drive. Build a protected bus lane that goes faster than traffic, and people will take that. People just want to the most convenient mode of travel.

I don't like driving every day, so I take the bus, even though it's in the same traffic That's induced demand. <sidenote> When you think "why is there all this traffic?," you are part of that traffic. </sidenote> The state DOT's have always built and expanded highways, and they are stuck with that hammer, seeing every traffic problem as a nail. Just take a look at this page: three active projects, ALL just expansions. Adding lanes doesn't do anything, just allow more cars to create more low-density traffic. To help rethink these highway construction efforts, check out these projects: Rethink 35, Better Streets Chicago, Lid I5.

All the pictures that didn't find homes in the other two posts:

You've got to build bypasses

Didn't seem worth it

Fixed it

Yes it is

I like that the city I work in started leaving bikes around everywhere

Extra Resources: