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September 20 - October 1, 2021
A stroad is a street/road hybrid. It is the futon of the transportation system. A futon is an uncomfortable couch that converts into an uncomfortable bed, something that performs two functions but does neither well.
When a licensed engineer references Level of Service for a local street, especially one at the very core of their community, it is a tell. It is an indication of a broad misunderstanding of the difference between a road and street, of deep confusion over what it means to build a place and how that is at odds with a driver's level of comfort. We would expect such professionals, if they are intellectually consistent, to live in a home built almost exclusively of hallways.
If the city council wants people to drive 25 miles per hour or less on their streets, there has never been anything inhibiting them from designing their streets for slower speeds. The city has always been free, on streets it controls, to implement a design where measured speeds would be as low as 15 mph or even 10 mph. What the city is not allowed to do, without an engineering study, is to enforce a speed limit below 30 miles per hour.
Some people unfamiliar with our anatomy might think of it as “efficient,” yet in an accounting of resources, it is rather inefficient. Humans have two lungs with excess capacity in each. We have two kidneys, yet we only need one. We use a small fraction of our total brain capacity at any one time. Having all of these spare parts and needing to consume the resources to sustain them is grossly inefficient. Yet, obviously, spare parts are necessary for our survival.
The concept of excess wealth is a difficult one for modern Americans to grasp because we live in a society where success at the community level is measured more by the velocity of money than by the accumulation of wealth. Gross Domestic Product is often referred to as the “size of the economy,” but it is merely a measurement of the number of transactions that take place in a country. That is different than net worth, which is an accounting of assets and liabilities.
This is not an argument for density, a coarse metric that, at best, correlates with productive patterns of development. Some of the worst-performing projects I have ever seen were done in the pursuit of density. Cities will not build themselves to prosperity by tearing down single-family homes in poor neighborhoods and replacing them with apartments or condominium units. Density is never the cause of financial productivity, but it is sometimes the result. Building stable, long-term wealth requires an ongoing, incremental renewal process driven by positive feedback loops. Neighborhoods need to
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A strategy to increase land values on that street is essentially a strategy of making that street a better place to live. Make it a better place and more people will want to be there. As more people want to be there, the land values go up. As land values go up, accommodate the people who want to be there, and accumulate greater community wealth, by allowing incremental redevelopment.
Freeze neighborhoods in place with zoning and regulation, and rising land values will merely displace existing residents, creating pockets of affluence in a pool of stagnation and decline. Grow neighborhoods in large leaps instead of incrementally and it will crowd out most investments, causing the same mix of dislocation, stagnation, and decline, while landowners and speculators wait for the big payoff from the out-of-town developer.
Therefore, in the third step, we do not form a committee. We do not hire a consultant. We do not pause 18 months while our grant application is processed. We have humbly identified a struggle and then identified the next smallest thing that we can do about it, so we just go out and do that thing. We make things better right now with the resources that we have available to us.
We will not build great streets, places that produce wealth and improve quality of life, by allowing people to comment on three variations of a bad design.
In the work that Urban3 has done modeling the financial productivity of different places, there is one correlation that stands out above all others. Wherever development patterns are most productive, wherever the highest value per acre is measured, those are the places where people will be found outside of a motor vehicle.
In practice, Complete Streets has taken on an Oprah-like quality where, to the delight of her audience, she starts handing out something for everyone. Automobile drivers get their own lane. Transit gets its own lane. People riding bikes get their own lane. People walking get their own lane. Just open the envelope under your chair and discover that you get a lane, and you get a lane, and you get a lane.…
Complete Streets accommodate pedestrians and an auto-dominated realm. Strong Towns accommodate automobiles in an environment dominated by people.
Traffic congestion is a sign of a public policy failure, yet the absence of congestion is also an indication that things are not working quite as anticipated. For a city, especially in its economic centers, the only thing worse than having traffic congestion is not having traffic congestion.
we should recognize that the hierarchical networks used in traffic engineering manufacture congestion everywhere they are deployed.
A gridded street system will provide a driver more options for responding to congestion than a hierarchical network where all drivers are funneled to the same location. Congestion dynamics transcend the rote variables of speed and volume. Smaller buses with greater frequency provide less-congested, more dynamic service than one large, infrequent bus, even if the volume of passengers is the same. Each street in a gridded network may have less capacity than a major arterial, but the options given to drivers by a grid means that there will be less congestion and fewer delays, even with the same
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The goal of traffic modeling is not to be right; it is to create a plausible narrative as to why more construction is both needed and helpful.
What ramp meters also increase is vehicle miles traveled. The engineer's approach of making better use of highway capacity through ramp meters simply allows people to migrate to farther reaches of the system.
The only way to deal with congestion is to allow congestion to drive demand for local alternatives to auto trips.
There are others who want to address congestion by overlaying a commuter transit system on top of the dysfunctional hierarchical road network. Advocates for this approach typically argue that switching people from automobiles to transit during peak times will alleviate congestion by reducing the number of cars on the road, a phenomenon never once observed in the real world. When you make it easier to drive, people will drive more. Commuter-based transit does not change that fundamental truth.
That is not to say that shifting people from single-occupancy motor vehicles to carpools or transit has no impact. Quite the opposite: If given priority in the system, such as their own dedicated lane, these systems can make far more efficient use of the road, moving higher volumes of people from one place to another in less time than any auto-based system possibly could. They will move more people, more quickly, and generally at lower cost, but they will not reduce congestion.
Cities that deny requests to build a new duplex or corner store because of concerns with traffic have things backward. Local leaders should never deny a new apartment building or a new neighborhood restaurant because they may increase traffic congestion. It is traffic congestion that requires us to build more and more local destinations.
There were fewer people driving, but those who were traveling on the country's roads, streets, and stroads were dying at higher rates. In fact, the rate of crashes and deaths exploded, especially during months with the least amount of traffic. During the first three quarters of 2020, the traffic fatality rate jumped to 1.25 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, up from 1.06 during the same period in 2019. In the second quarter, during the initial pandemic lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, the fatality rate hit 1.42, a terrible rate of carnage.12
America is suffering from a public health crisis, with obesity and lack of exercise being primary health risks. The city could support a culture of health by striping existing streets for bike lanes, creating a farmer's market, and loosening restrictions on walkable, neighborhood businesses. These are low-cost responses that can be done quickly and have other positive benefits beyond health. Instead, they are more likely to seek state assistance for a recreational trail or maybe a federal safe-routes-to-school grant to add a few blocks of sidewalk around a school.
Many believe that climate change is an existential threat to humanity — one that should prompt the nation to take aggressive action to curtail carbon emissions. Local politicians sharing this concern have all the tools they need to be leaders in carbon reduction. They can shift their local transportation investments from supporting automobiles to focusing on walking and biking. They could also loosen development regulations to allow the evolution of more walkable neighborhoods — places that could support financially viable transit. Instead, they are more likely to spend their time applying for
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For example, in 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act introduced Americans to the concept of a “shovel-ready project.” These projects, which had completed all of the planning, environmental reviews, and design work and were stalled merely from a lack of funding, were presented as the best hope for quickly getting money flowing and people back to work. In my experience, these were not the best projects; they were the worst. Having gone through the lengthy process of planning and design, when the moment of decision came, local leaders opted to accept their sunk costs and table the
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I remember thinking that this could not possibly be the story. The federal government was paying to run a highway through a poor, disadvantaged, and almost exclusively black neighborhood? The plan would kick these families out of their homes, destroying whatever wealth they had built, tearing apart a tight-knit community? The project was being pushed by a group of local insiders calling themselves the Committee of One Hundred, a name that would only work in a large and smoke-filled room?
If I were the sole decision maker, I would rescind the national gas tax, close the U.S. Department of Transportation, and end the federal role in transportation spending. That would make me as radical as Canada, a country where one can safely and comfortably drive across an entire continent despite the lack of a federal transportation department.
a progressive mindset, which tends to focus on the excesses of highway funding while being far less rigorous about similar financial frauds committed in pursuit of transit, sidewalks, trails, and other projects that they prefer. They make fickle allies from a Strong Towns standpoint because, when forced to choose, they tend to be willing to tolerate a lot of terrible transportation spending so long as their priorities are also funded.
Connected to reducing congestion, it is often put forth that public transit is necessary because it reduces carbon emissions by moving people from single-occupancy vehicles into transit. While I grasp the argument that twenty people riding together on a bus potentially emits less carbon than twenty people riding in individual automobiles, I am skeptical of the overall claim. I have never seen a study that credibly correlates increases in transit use with an overall reduction in carbon emissions, largely for the same reasons that increasing transit use, or building more road capacity, does not
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The current narrative of this boom is that it built the middle class. The less common, but more accurate, insight is that government investments in transportation made many holders of formerly worthless land into instant millionaires while creating a way for communities to experience growth quickly and the macro economy to generate lots of financial transactions.
It did not take long for transit projects to fall into the same false internal narratives that plague automobile projects, using phony numbers and specious correlations to justify massive investments designed to induce growth. Unlike auto projects, however, which have the ongoing backing of dedicated state revenues, the local match for transit projects was most often municipal debt backed by projected fare receipts. This made false projections extra harmful as shortages at the farebox had to be made up with service cuts, further undermining the entire model.
Either as a charitable overlay or a lifestyle option for the rich and middle class, our approach to transit is incoherent, providing often intolerably poor levels of service at ridiculously high cost. Transit antagonists can rightly point out that, in most instances, it would be cheaper to buy every transit rider a car than to build and operate transit systems the way we currently do. Proponents then rightly point out that auto-based transportation systems are heavily subsidized and do not pay their own way, either, as if somehow pointing out that hypocrisy makes the case for more unproductive
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The difficult thing for American transit advocates, who have been conditioned by current transit funding models to think only in terms of large projects, is to accept is that transit systems must be scaled to the intensity of the places being served. Rail lines to corn fields and commuter lots make great applications for federal funding in the current paradigm but produce systems that underperform and are expensive to maintain. A high-frequency bus loop is less glamorous and fundable but can reinforce a development pattern that drives investment.
To achieve a 10-minute interval will mean more buses, but it will also mean dedicating space on the streets for buses, giving them priority at intersections and making bus stops convenient and easily accessible.
It is important to pause here and point out that transit is the only way to overcome the geometric space limitations of the street while still building wealth. In an auto-oriented model, the more cars that are there, the more space that must be given over to accommodating those vehicles. That means parking lots instead of destinations, driving lanes instead of sidewalks, which is the opposite of wealth-building. Auto-based development effectively puts a cap on the success of a place, a physical limitation for how many people can be in one place at one time and, subsequently, how much
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Because a Strong Towns approach is both scaled to a place and designed to build wealth within there, capital costs should always be paid by capturing part of the wealth being created.
The goal of transit as wealth accelerator is to create feedback loops where a successful place creates demand for transit, which creates more demand for development, which creates demand for more intense transit, and on and on and on. The intensity of the place and the intensity of the transit should grow together so they will both always be viable.
I am certain that our descendants will be bewildered by the fact that modern Americans accept a lot of unnecessary suffering, injury, and death as part of a normal life. That we do it in service of an approach that gains us so little for all our efforts will only add to their puzzlement. Vehicle speed and traffic volume are not values that transcend time. We abhor the slavery and inhumane conditions of ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome, but appreciate that their sacrifices were made producing timeless pyramids, monuments, and temples. For what particular greatness are we sacrificing our people?
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My confession is that, for many years, I was one of them. Not only was I one of them; I was very good at it. I designed and built dangerous stroads, all while convincing myself that I was making things safer. I pushed politicians to spend more, using my insider knowledge to limit their options and force their hand in pursuit of what I felt was the greater good. I allied with those who wanted wider streets, faster speeds, and greater volume because we had shared interests that I believed were enlightened.
