What is a STROAD?

in this country we're having a huge debate over transportation spending how do we find more money to continue to do the things that we currently do we actually need to be having a conversation about how to do things differently how to take the money we have already invested and get better use out of it if you're traveling more than 20 miles an hour and less than 50 miles an hour you are on a strode haste Road tries to do two things at once and does neither them well it tries to be both street and road what's the difference a road we can think of as a replacement of the railroad which of course is a road on Rails and in a railroad you would get on at one spot and you would get off on another and there's a high-speed connection between the two we want people to get from one place to another as quickly as possible we widen out the lanes we put in sweeping forgiving geometries we're trying to move people from one productive place to another productive place when we build roadways to serve as high-speed connections and we don't encumber that with accesses and turn offs and interchanges what we see is that we can make very cost-effective investments and move a lot of people very very quickly what is a street then a street is and always has been a platform for building wealth it's a platform for creating value within a place as an engineer we design streets by the foot and what we're looking for from a financial standpoint is how much return do we get per foot that we put in in a really good street environment what we see is that the design is actually narrower streets wider sidewalks it's designed for people it's designed for people to freely flow back and forth you've got to have sidewalks you're gonna have good spacing you're gonna have slow traffic you're gonna have on street parking you're gonna have the ability of people to safely move from place to place in that environment we can effective build wealth creating streets where we embrace the complexity and we work with it to incrementally improve the place over time with the budgets that our cities have the problem comes when we try to do both when we try to both move traffic quickly and create wealth in those environments we wind up with a strode when you get into a strode environment you get these signs that are out of scale when you're driving along they're actually not big enough to work for you but when you're walking along they're way too big their way out of scale Strode are incredibly expensive to build extra lanes extra wide lanes an attempt to essentially build highway style roadways in places where we don't expect highway style speeds we put in traffic signals and put in stop signs we put in things that slow you down beyond that they're not safe so even though we've invested a lot of money to move cars quickly nobody moves very quickly these are incredibly expensive places to build and the return we get for that investment is very low as a nation what we need to do is forget about trying to create a whole bunch more money to continue building what we've already shown doesn't work we have to actually have a dialogue about how we take our existing strokes and convert them to either wealth-creating streets or high-performance roadways roadways that connect our places places that build wealth and value if we can do that we can spend less we can get more that's a strong towns approach

Channel: Strong Towns

Views: 118,014

Keywords: streets, roads, slowthecars, stroads, dangerous streets

Id: OZ1HhLq-Huo

Length: 3min 40sec (220 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2018