The Stroad: A Case Study // Intended (and Unintended) Consequences of Car-Oriented Street Design

today we venture into the urban wild to study an ecosystem that's commonly found in cities across the u.s your field guide to strodes is up next this is city nerd weekly content on cities and transportation and hey i'm in las vegas this week and probably for several weeks after that and today we're doing a case study i didn't pick the street that you're probably thinking i would have picked you know in a sense the strip is the ultimate strode in fact before chuck marone coined the word strode i think strip was just the generic term for this kind of street but the las vegas strip really is one of a kind and i'll come back to it in a later video instead today we're focusing on a more typical street in las vegas and that's charleston boulevard charleston runs east-west through the city and like a lot of strodes it's a legacy urban highway in an area that urbanized in the mid to late 20th century so this isn't going to be an exhaustive description of what a stroke is and why it's bad so if you need a refresher i'd refer you to the excellent not just bikes video on this topic which honestly you've probably already seen if the algorithm sent you my way the short version is astrude is a facility that tries to fulfill all the commercial urban activities of a street while also trying to come as close as it can apparently to having the speed and throughput of like a grade separated freeway so instead today we're gonna put on our safari hats and embark on an intrepid exploration of charleston boulevard while we're there we're gonna inventory the typical characteristics of a strode and then we're going to look at indicator species the things that aren't themselves an intentional design characteristic of the strode but do tend to pop up wherever you find one so we're on charleston let's first confirm that we have at least three through lanes i mean it's not enough just to be able to facilitate u-turns what you really want is for your roadway to be wide enough where you could u-turn like one of those big tractor trailers that carries wind turbines that's how you know you're doing it right and second it's not really enough just to have a lot of travel lanes you really need your intersections to be massive check out this one at charleston and decatur it's like strode on strode violence the decatur approach is incredible just count up the approach lanes one two three four five six seven now that is quality traffic engineering and check out the charleston approach to the i-15 interchange i mean if you don't have at least seven signal heads on your mast arm then what are you even doing and not only are the intersections huge they have super long cycle lengths so if you're a pedestrian you're going to be waiting a while to use that crosswalk you know you can tell a lot about a city's priorities not just from its roadway design but from how the signals function and this one at charleston and decatur it just looks like they let some traffic intern run wild with syncro and just keep adding turn lanes and hitting the optimize button until they got the volume capacity ratio under like 0.7 or something and of course you've got super long turn lanes which you really have to have if you're gonna be able to saturate these crazy long signal phases even right turn lanes which okay it's time for a rant right turn lanes are almost always terrible unless there's some weird reason why you have some disproportionate heavy right turn volume the operational benefits are really minimal and look what you're trading off against it's like you're giving up 10 to 12 feet times however long the turn lane is that you should have had for pedestrian space and you're also making the pedestrian crossing across the leg of the intersection 10 to 12 feet longer it's kind of a transparent statement of values i mean i guess there's a safety argument you can make for needing a really long refuge lane for right turning vehicles to be able to decelerate because the prevailing speeds on the arterial are over 50 miles per hour and rear end crashes do suck but really shouldn't the takeaway be that having 50 mile per hour traffic on city streets just isn't a good idea i know it's crazy talk but just maybe you don't need to have urban arterial streets with a posted speed of 45 miles per hour amazingly there are school speed zones on charleston which seems wild but they seem to have surprisingly decent compliance although it might have helped that i probably looked like i was standing there with a speed gun when i was just shooting video anyway once you've built all the through lanes and the turn lanes you need to reach an acceptable volume to capacity ratio you're down to really just curb tight sidewalks with lots of obstructions which you might think makes for a super fun obstacle course but actually turns out not to be that great for a lot of people and have i mentioned tons and tons of driveway cuts as for pedestrian crossings well you're in luck if you happen to be where charleston intersects with another strode but if you're anywhere else in the half mile or so between signals it's kind of a crap shoot pardon the pun there might be a mid block crossing but it might just be a painted crosswalk with no other treatment on an arterial with a posted speed of 45 or you might get a ped signal which is like the happiest i ever am to see a beg button or if you show up at the right time there might even be crossing guards do you ever see crossing guards on an arterial this size it's pretty wild so we've gone through the typical characteristics of the strode ecosystem so now let's talk about indicator species just to refresh an indicator species is an organism whose presence indicates particular environmental conditions so for example if you see a lot of northern spotted owls you're probably in an old growth forest in the pacific northwest so what we're going to talk about here are things that aren't necessarily innate design attributes of strodes but rather things that you will probably find in abundance in the strode environment so first let's observe the fast food drive through in its natural habitat on a strode drive-throughs are abundant providing food sources of questionable nutritional value to the strodes apex predators this species is recognizable from its relatively small building footprint but absurdly large impervious area for vehicle cueing and parking and also really really massive signs another species you'll find out here enormously uncomfortable bus stop waiting areas the rtc buses themselves are actually pretty nice you even get double deckers on decatur and you even might get a little police action flavor on the side but as for the stops themselves look at the space they have to try to jam all the bus stop amenities into and the places where transit riders have to wait and an indicator species can also be something where its absence or scarcity can itself be an indicator of something so in that spirit behold the only staple rag i found on the entire corridor and there's something about a strode that tends to attract just flat out weird businesses anything with dinosaurs obviously but psychics casinos they're open yeah omelette houses shopping centers that spell town with an e but most importantly just auto specific businesses i don't mean auto oriented because everything here is i mean the truly staggering number of businesses that exist to sell you a new car i mean look at these extremely cool pickup trucks displayed on some faux rugged terrain who can resist that or businesses whose sole purpose is to wash your car or maintain your car or fuel your car or smog test your car so the strode really is a self-perpetuating ecosystem to the point of absurdity you have to drive on the strode to access the services that enable you to drive on this road it's kind of like the snake that beats its own tail you know the oroboros except instead of a snake it's a car swallowing its own tailpipe that was tortured okay my number one indicator species for strodes is coming up first just a reminder to drop a like if you're enjoying the video and leave a comment down below if you thought of a design characteristic or an indicator species that i didn't mention i'm sure there are lots also as of this week this channel now has enough subscribers to fill climate pledge arena which is great but kind of far from my goal of filling the indianapolis motor speedway so if you haven't already consider subscribing and we'll check back next week and see which arena we can fill how to pronounce auroboros good enough also before we get to the ultimate indicator species i don't mean to imply that all of las vegas outside of this trip looks like this eventually if you walk far enough down charleston you will reach the arts district which is kind of badass and i sincerely hope it continues to thrive because having places like that emerge in a city like las vegas really gives people a chance to vote with their feet so to speak for walkable environments but there's a lot of work to do as evidenced by my number one indicator species which is billboards for personal injury attorneys these ones are in las vegas but you do see similar things in just about any city across the u.s that has a strong heavy transportation system these are really amazing and depressing look how happy this dude is about the totaled cars next to him and i don't know who can blame him call in the big dogs check out this king an 11-time winner he's like the michael phelps of personal injury attorneys and these two guys are everywhere you need a title loan to go with your broken pelvis how about a couple char burgers and some of these are just really clever i am a friend of the latinos sweet james don't gamble with your case get it because it's las vegas and gamble also amazingly a lot of the law offices are located on charleston itself oops not this one so you can just i don't know limp directly from the crash site to the office to get the legal process started for the billboards though make sure you get them going in both directions and don't forget to put them on transit shelters too i mean that's pretty grim it's a 45 mile per hour street with curb tight sidewalks minimal pedestrian crossing infrastructure and tons of driveways everywhere do you suppose pedestrians get hit here do you suppose the people who walk on this street are disproportionately low income and or transit dependent leave your guesses down in the comments anyway the point is it's very telling that the price of billboard advertising space on these crash-prone facilities appears to be bid up by an industry that i assume makes more money when there are more crashes it really is the car eating itself that's all i'm going to do today let me know if you want me to come back with a solutions video but it's very tough places like this just discourage walking and if people aren't walking then you don't really have a natural constituency to make it more walkable so much of this is just about a vicious cycles and virtuous cycles anyway keep the great topic suggestions coming and i'll be back with a new video next week until then viva las vegas

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 183,838

Keywords: urban planning, stroad, dangerous roads, american roads, why are american roads so wide, the stroad, stroads, stroad strong towns, strong towns, stroads reaction, suburbs, charles marohn, chuck marohn, intersections cities skylines, las vegas strip, drive thru, pedestrian crossings, crosswalks, arterials, strip malls, car crashes, las vegas arts district

Id: azYHW1vXZaM

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022