The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all over the US & Canada [ST05]

this is the fifth video in my strong town series you don't need to watch the others to understand this one but it might provide some context if you live in the us or canada then this will certainly look familiar to you multiple lanes of car traffic wide highway-sized lanes giant signs traffic lights parking lots lots of driveways and side streets with traffic merging in and out and a place that's nearly impossible to cross as a pedestrian there isn't even a sidewalk here these are what strong towns refers to as strodes which is a horrible name and that's intentional because these are horrible places strodes are a street road hybrid and they are dangerous expensive and ineffective i'll get to those issues in a moment but first let's talk about the difference between a street and a road according to strong towns this is a road it is a high-speed connection between two places because of the high speeds involved there are several safety features the lanes are wide and forgiving so that vehicles do not bump into each other the road is as straight as possible and when curves are necessary they're designed to be gentle making it easy to drive along the area next to the road called the clear zone is free of any obstacles that could be hit just in case a vehicle runs off the road the signs are very large designed to be read from a distance and at high speeds and entrances and exits are few and far between because the road is designed to keep vehicles at a high speed for as long as possible to minimize travel times roads are important we need roads though i personally prefer my roads to have rails this is a street it is a complex environment where life in the city happens buildings are placed right next to the sidewalk to be easily accessible by people walking and it gives a sense of space almost like an outdoor room this is a place that feels comfortable to be in so you find people here there are many entrances and exits to and from the street and there may also be street parking for vehicles and deliveries this is an environment meant for slow speeds because this is a destination not a through fair high speed traffic is not compatible with lots of human activity so vehicle speeds are reduced everything on the street is at a human scale it's designed to be inviting encouraging people to walk to window shop or to just sit and watch the world go by the street is designed to get the most value out of the space available streets are very important and we definitely need streets a strode on the other hand is neither of these things just like how a futon converts from a terrible uncomfortable couch to a terrible uncomfortable bed the strode is the futon of transportation it is a street that is designed like a road and in doing so it fails at being good at either one the strode fails it being a street there are many driveways to businesses and homes like you'd find on a street but mixed with multiple highway sized lanes this mixes high speeds with many points of conflict watch over this white car turning and this cyclist are there any cars coming out of these driveways unlike a street strodes are hostile to people outside of a car there are lots of motor vehicles and speeds are high so walking or cycling feels uncomfortable and dangerous there are long distances between places and there are often large parking lots that need to be crossed before getting anywhere and it's basically impossible to cross the strode except by walking to a traffic signal and waiting the signs are large and meant to be read while driving which feels really out of scale if you're walking there and often trees have been removed from the clear zone making the environment even more uninviting if you're not in a car somehow though painted bicycle gutters are still okay in the clear zone traffic engineers are concerned about drivers hitting a tree hitting a cyclist is expected this is clearly a place for cars so it's unsurprising that pretty much everyone drives here trust me it sucks to walk down this strode but these environments are ugly anyway nobody cares about these places and nobody wants to spend any time here cities in the us and canada are covered in terrible non-places like this places you go because you have to not because you want to nobody actually sits and watches the world go by on this bench but the strode fails it being a road too the lanes are wide and there are a lot of them you're surrounded by asphalt but you can't actually get anywhere quickly like you can with a road there are cars constantly changing lanes and going in and out of the strode slowing down traffic and introducing many points of conflict that require drivers to constantly slow down to avoid a collision traffic volumes can be quite high on strodes because there are no viable alternatives to driving distances are too far to walk and it's too unsafe to cycle and since public transit gets stuck in traffic anyway only the poor and the desperate will take the bus so everyone drives but because there are so many crossroads entrances and exits to the strode traffic lights are required meaning drivers are constantly stopping at red lights and because speeds are high light timings need to be very long leading to traffic signal-induced congestion nobody is getting anywhere quickly on a strode all of these elements make strodes unsafe as well and the majority of fatal crashes within cities happen on strodes they are especially dangerous to people walking and cycling the wide and straight design of highways were designed that way to make them safe for high-speed traffic but the strobe to hell is paved with good intentions on a strode these wide highway-like designs encourage drivers to drive quickly but combining that with traffic turning in and out of driveways and lots of four-way junctions makes this the most dangerous type of urban driving possible this is an inherently unsafe way to design a road and is part of the reason why the us has the most dangerous roads of any developed country for example during the coronavirus lockdowns in the first nine months of 2020 car volumes in the us dropped significantly but despite an estimated 355 billion fewer miles driven fatal crashes per mile actually increased by up to 34 percent this brings us to the sad truth that the only reason these unsafe american strodes aren't killing even more people regularly is because they're usually so jammed up with traffic that drivers can't get going fast enough to kill each other and finally strodes are really expensive because strodes are built to a highway standard their lanes are very wide and there are never less than four lanes plus there's normally extra space for shoulders and clear zones at the side of the road too because strodes try to be streets there are many entrances and exits so many turning lanes are required but because the high speeds turning lanes are much longer than on a street taking up even more space and as traffic increases even more due to traffic entering and exiting the strode the city will install another traffic signal for three quarters of a million dollars all of this means that a strode is much bigger than a road that would carry the same amount of traffic and significantly larger than a street that would have the same number of businesses and houses along it as the size of the strode increases there are several other costs incurred high-speed strodes need to be flat so the area that needs to be graded increases land may need to be purchased from residents to widen the strode and destroy their property values by the way do you think this girl is waiting to cross this five lane strode flood protection infrastructure becomes much more expensive due to the impermeable surfaces and there's a huge amount of asphalt and traffic control systems to maintain and of course because everyone drives large parts of the landscape need to be dedicated to parking lots meaning everything is inherently spread out in low density parking lots don't employ anyone and they don't earn much tax revenue either a strode environment is significantly less financially productive than a street but with significantly more infrastructure the result is a mix of high cost per area maintenance expenses combined with low value per acre tax revenue which makes these strode environments a net negative for cities these places are literally putting american cities on the strode to financial ruin and they're doing it while being dangerous ugly and ultimately ineffective at actually moving people the strode fails at every metric but it's the default setting for transportation design almost everywhere in the us and canada so what's the alternative well strong towns advocates for one of two things first you can convert a strode into a road this means limiting access to the strode accessing businesses and neighborhoods from side streets painted bicycle gutters need to be removed because moving vehicles is the primary objective of a road people can still walk or cycle but these paths need to be completely separated from the flow of traffic in this way the strode becomes a road a high-speed connection between two places the other alternative is to turn the strode into a street for this the lanes need to be narrowed and parking needs to be moved to the curb or behind buildings and the buildings themselves need to be built closer to the street everything needs to be brought down to a human scale making it inviting to people and getting more value from the space available this isn't a hypothetical and we don't have to imagine what this would look like because the netherlands has already done it just with three types of infrastructure instead of the two proposed by strong towns you will almost never find a strode here because in the 1990s the dutch adopted the concept of sustainable traffic safety and one of the key pillars of this program was that every road and street in the netherlands has to be classified and designated as one of the following three options the first is a stromwech which is pretty straight forward it is a motorway or highway i think everyone is familiar with these so i won't spend too much time on it but the important thing here is that there are no traffic controls cars enter and exit through merge lanes and you will never find a traffic light or roundabout on a stormwatch highways should also go around cities and never through cities i'm looking at you cincinnati actually that's not fair because basically all american cities did this thankfully the plan to do this to amsterdam was unsuccessful moving one level down is the uh the distributor road these are the connectors between highways and streets there may be entrances and exits to other streets and roads but driveways to houses or businesses are avoided as much as possible and if traffic controls are necessary then roundabouts are preferred unless traffic volumes require a traffic light i'm going to refer to these as roads finally there's the airftuchongswech the neighborhood access street these are the end destinations for journeys the places where people live work shop relax and so on i'm going to refer to these as streets streets are designed to be low speed with a speed limit of no more than 30 kilometers per hour and they almost never have more than one motor vehicle lane per direction in many cases vehicle speeds are slow enough that separated bicycle infrastructure is not required though bicycle pass may still be used to purposefully narrow the street constraining the space available for motor vehicles the street network is designed to discourage through traffic by cars either through traffic calming or by explicitly blocking cars while still allowing walking cycling and public transit to take the most direct route i've talked about this before in my invisible infrastructure video where i show a typical trip by bicycle through the street network compared to the very different route by road that is taken when driving once you learn about these three types of road in the netherlands what i'm unofficially calling highways roads and streets it's really interesting to drive around and see which type you're on this is a street this is a road this is a street this is a road this is a road with streets on either side to access houses since this is a relatively recent concept only implemented about 30 years ago the best place to see this in action is in newer developments here we are driving on a road outside the town of newlawsen this road is designed to move vehicles so there is no direct access to adjacent properties the homes and businesses are accessed by streets on the right and left side and the road is mostly accessed by roundabout as we exit the roundabout into this industrial park the road turns into a street where cars and trucks can access the warehouses and industrial facilities safely and efficiently without disrupting traffic on the road it's also very interesting to see where one type turns into another this is clearly a street a residential street in amsterdam there is parking on either side and there are many side streets branching off there are no traffic lights or stop signs speeds are low here so intersections are unmarked and you give priority to any vehicle coming from the right i've talked about this before in my video about stop signs this street has a brick road surface speed bumps and other traffic calming measures to slow down traffic the speed limit is 30 kilometers an hour and bicycle and motor vehicle traffic is mixed but as we travel down this street we come to a set of traffic lights and here is where this street becomes a road the bicycle path becomes totally separated from motor vehicle traffic there's no more street parking the road surface is made of smooth asphalt and there's a median separating the traffic lanes there are buildings on either side but crucially they cannot be accessed by this road because turning traffic would be inefficient and unsafe as we travel down this road a little farther we can see here it turns back into a street here's another example in the suburb of amstelveen the right of way is about 22 meters which in the u.s or canada would be at least a four lane road with center turning lane but despite the space available there's only one lane of motor vehicle traffic in each direction here and the lanes are narrow which encourages drivers to drive slower single lane roads are much safer because cars changing lanes introduces points of conflict between vehicles and they are easier for pedestrians to cross this also frees up space on both sides for car parking a bicycle path and a sidewalk there are multiple other streets intersecting with this one bringing traffic in and out of the street a few meters along this street starts to turn into a road here you can see that access to the houses and parking on the right hand side are provided by a small side street running parallel to the road so that through traffic does not compete with drivers going in and out of parking spaces travel along this road a little farther and the street has completely turned into a road there is a stoplight multiple lanes of motor vehicle traffic and an entrance to a highway the bicycle path is two-way and isolated completely from the road a little farther along this road becomes quite interesting here there are several houses but instead of being accessed directly as they would be on a strode they're accessible by a two-way side street which was made purposefully narrow to slow down drivers this also provides a safe alternative for people cycling the road itself is only two lanes for car traffic with turning lanes when necessary one lane has been reserved as a bus lane and there is a two-way cycling path as well it's also interesting to note that because dedicated bus lanes and bicycle paths are much more efficient at moving people than car lanes this road configuration can actually transport more people than a typical strode the netherlands didn't change this overnight and this transition to roads and streets is not totally complete there are still some streets here that carry too much through traffic for example but at least they're usually only two lanes wide this change has happened slowly with street and road redesigns spread out over the past 30 years the first step though was identifying that there was a problem with road safety and road productivity and changing the design standards to match it's time to face the fact that designing strodes as both a high speed through affair and a destination simply doesn't work strodes are dangerous and expensive they destroy walkability they make cycling dangerous and infeasible and they don't work for drivers either the us and canada need to rethink the traffic engineering manuals that define urban spaces and start building productive streets and efficient roads then they can get on the road to recovery and benefit from fewer traffic deaths more viable alternatives to driving less traffic and more financially productive cities it's the end of the road for strodes good riddance i'd like to thank my supporters on patreon who pay me to get this show on the strode if you'd like to support the channel and get access to bonus videos visit patreon.com not just bikes you

Channel: Not Just Bikes

Views: 2,035,074

Keywords: urban planning, stroad, dangerous roads, american roads, canadian roads, why are american roads so wide, netherlands, sustainable saftey, Duurzaam Veilig, Duurzaam Veilig Verkeer, Dutch roads, the stroad, stroads, stroad strong towns, dutch roads best in the world, american roads vs dutch roads, canadian roads vs dutch roads

Id: ORzNZUeUHAM

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Sssnaaake]

Oh no, my Sim City cities are full of stroads. Shit.

[u/Agent451]

And now I have a word and explanation for why I hate 16th and 17th Avenues (and similar stroads) here in Calgary.

[u/chacaranda]

Not Just Bikes is one of the most fantastic channels I’ve ever found. If you want concise, simple to understand explanations of urbanism concepts and critiques, you need to watch more. This is part 5 of their series with Strong Towns on suburbia. I highly recommend the first 4 parts as well, they are honestly the videos I would recommend most to someone trying to understand why American style development is bad.

I’ve found that they have a video that appeals to almost anyone’s area of interest, and that once you show them that video the floodgates are open and they’re onboard with new urbanism concepts. Have kids and wish they could walk places and be more independent? There’s a video on that. Like to bike places but feel unsafe and want to know how it could be better? Many on that. Don’t like suburbia but also don’t like big US style downtowns? There’s a whole series on what makes a good human scale environment.

[u/Odie_Odie]

The thumbnail to this video is of Colerain Ave a few minutes north of Cincinnati Ohio, I used to walk this stretch everyday to work, school and the mall as a teenager.

It's technically illegal to ride your bike on the sidewalk but you would be completely insane not to and everyone who bikes in the area does it and the local police encourage it.

I've only been hit by one car here. I was walking on the sidewalk and a guy pulling out scooped me onto the hood and dumped me into the street. He threw his arms up and yelled something at me before speeding off, like it was my fault.

[u/bunnyrut]

this really explains why i hate these roadways so much.

i have lived in areas with 'stroads' where you were allowed to (sometimes had to) cross all 4 lanes without any traffic lights. whoever designed this was an idiot.

[u/GiveMeNews]

Heh, his comment on Stroads not killing more people only because traffic flow is halted by traffic jams is spot on. In my town, two big stroads merge. The main stroad heading downtown is usually so overloaded that it is stop and go traffic all day, and major accidents almost never happen there. The stroad that merges into it is coming in from the country, but is packed full of businesses, cross streets, and homes. Traffic is lower once you get on the stroad heading off the main stroad, and assholes speed through at 60 in a 45 zone, jumping lanes and tailgating. Every fucking day there is a major crash on that road. Just yesterday, I checked traffic (because accidents are so common there), everything was green, got on the stroad and traffic was stopped in all 4 lanes going both ways. In the 5 minutes it took me to get on the stroad, three cars had obliterated each other.

[u/suffertunity]

This is pretty much all of suburban Philly. Can't walk hardly anywhere, bicycling is suicide, and driving isn't much faster than walking.

[u/HelenEk7]

"0.6% of all workers in the United States, bike to work." Source

[u/monkeypowah]

As a Brit that us my single biggest observation of America and Canada, lots of empty space no one cares about, uninviting, no pedestrians..no comunity feel.

Huge signs and lots of no man land.

I know youve got the space, but it makes everywhere feel like its a mass of cars driving through a disused movie set.