Stroad
A stroad is a thoroughfare that combines the features of streets and roads. Common in the United States and Canada, stroads are wide arterials that also provide access to strip malls, drive-throughs, and other automobile-oriented businesses. Stroads have been criticized by urban planners for safety issues and for inefficiencies. While streets serve as a destination and provide access to shops and residences at safe traffic speeds, and roads serve as a high-speed connection that can efficiently move traffic at high volume, stroads attempt to serve both purposes. They are often an expensive, inefficient, and dangerous compromise.
Etymology
In 2011, the American civil engineer and urban planner Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, coined the word "stroad" as a blend of the words street and road to illustrate what he characterized as failures in the North American pattern of development''.''Criticisms
Poor mix of street and road functions
According to Charles Marohn, a stroad is a bad combination of two types of vehicular pathways: it is part street—which he describes as a "complex environment where life in the city happens", with pedestrians, cars, buildings close to the sidewalk for easy accessibility, with many entrances / exits to and from the street, and with spaces for temporary parking and delivery vehicles—and part road, which he describes as a "high-speed connection between two places" with wide lanes and limited entrances and exits, and which are generally straight or have gentle curves.In essence Marohn defines a stroad as a high-speed road with many turnoffs, and lacking in safety features. In his commentary, Marohn states that stroads do not function well as either a street or a road. According to Marohn, the problem with stroads is that engineering codes tend to emphasize speed and traffic flow rather than safety, so that stroads try to be "all things to all people" but end up failing in every way as a result.
Dover and Massengale stated that the design of roads as highways/motorways was originally modelled on the railroad, namely an efficient connection between two populated places with a car, while streets formed networks inside a place to move around that place with numerous different modes of transportation to make it financially productive; these two systems functioned well as long they were kept separated,
But when we reconfigure our streets to have the characteristics of roads—as stroads—we are no longer able to capture the value of shar the space. A modern stroad... is about the least safe traffic environment you could be in, too, with high-speed designs mashed up with turning traffic, stop-and-go traffic, sudden lane changes, and obnoxious signage. This ridiculously unsafe design is accepted as "normal" just because it was allowed to become ubiquitous.They noted that the general public is often not aware of the functional distinction that engineers make between streets and roads, that street names ending with 'street' or 'road' may be misleading and not align with the current de facto traffic situation, and that mixing up the functions of streets and roads causes numerous problems.
The concept of the stroad was popularized in large part as a result of an April 2021 short documentary by the Canadian-born Amsterdam-based Jason Slaughter of the urban planning YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, which went viral, and stated that stroads in North America are "ugly, dangerous, and inefficient", as well as more expensive, contrasting them with road design in the Netherlands, where clear functional distinctions between motorways, roads, and streets were introduced in the 1990s. These measures were aimed at increasing safety, traffic flow, and cost-effectiveness, while also having the effect of reducing car dependency, increasing walkability, cycleability, and general livability. Unlike the two functions proposed by Marohn's foundation Strong Towns, the Dutch Institute for Road Safety Research identified three functions for roadways in 1994: flow, distribution, and access.
- Flow roads are designed to transport lots of people at high speeds. These have been compared to the European and Commonwealth English "motorways" and the U.S. "interstate highways".
- Distributor roads are designed to connect flow roads and access roads. They are not meant to give direct access to private property, and roundabouts are the preferred traffic control option rather than traffic lights.
- Access roads are designed to provide access to private property, such as 'homes, offices, industry, farms, shopping centers, and other similar destinations.' According to William Zurborg, access roads 'only connect to distributor roads, and access roads should be positioned to ensure that they are unattractive to through traffic. Access roads are meant to be characterized by their surroundings, and the road itself is meant to harbor people, not deter them.' The design speed on access roads is 30 kilometres per hour, or lower. The main road users of access roads are pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport travellers; motorists are made aware of these more vulnerable other road users, to better interact with them, and to take a greater responsibility by slowing down. To aid in keeping vehicular speeds relatively safe, physical forms of traffic calming such as narrowing the streets for motor vehicles may also be employed.
In some cases, roads become stroads due to a lack of access management implementation when facilities are expanded or widened, often with the aim of improving mobility. The road becomes a stroad over time from development adding private accessways onto the main road, increasing congestion and collisions, which thus requires traffic control additions such as traffic signals. This degrades the roadway quality in terms of mobility.
Champs-Élysées comparison
According to Charles Marohn, the famous Champs-Élysées in Paris was effectively a stroad as recently as 2001. In the middle of the avenue were three automobile traffic lanes in either direction, ostensibly fulfilling the function of a road. A wide buffer of trees existed on either side of the road area, separating the roadway from slip lanes for slow-driving traffic. These slip lanes fulfilled the function of streets, providing access to parking, sidewalks, shops and restaurants. Because the street and road areas of the Champs-Élysées were physically separated, this stroad environment actually managed some success in allowing both safe high-speed traffic in the center roadway and a productive street environment on the sides. however, the slip lanes are fully pedestrianized, while the center roadway functions as a true road.The Esplanade in Chico, California is, according to Marohn, a rare example of a successful 'stroad' akin to the 2001 version of the Parisian Champs-Élysées in that buffers of trees physically separate the high-speed 'road' part in the middle from the two low-speed productive 'streets' on the sides. He contrasted the Esplanade to Mangrove Avenue, a stroad just five blocks to the east in Chico that runs parallel to the Esplanade, but which he claims has the typical issues of a stroad, in that the street and road functions are not physically separated, and the environment is low-density and much less productive, with gas stations, strip malls and other car-oriented businesses.
Unlike Marohn, however, Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes does not categorize such traffic situations as a "stroad", but as "a road with streets on either side to access houses". Taking the Nieuwe Dedemsvaartweg outside Nieuwleusen and the in Amstelveen in the Netherlands as examples, he used the fact that access from the middle to the sides is very restricted to argue that they are three separate ways: the middle is a road, the sides are streets; there is no "stroad".
Lack of traffic calming
Stroads do not account for human psychology. Vision Zero Coalition's 2018 report explained that since the stroad has a false sense of safety, drivers subconsciously drive at dangerously fast speeds. Stroads in the United States and Canada typically have legal speed limits between. But since the speed limit usually does not match the design speed, motorists usually drive on stroads. Therefore, simply reducing the posted speed limit with a traffic sign, a widely adopted strategy, will not work. "If the road ... suggest that the PSL is too low, drivers may simply ignore it".To help people comply with the legal speed limit, traffic engineers need to design roads, and streets so that they are self-explanatory. This is called traffic calming. Roads and streets that implement traffic calming measures may use physical and perceptual cues to subconsciously trigger drivers to drive slower and more cautiously due to perceived danger. Examples include "narrower lanes, tighter corner radii, gateway treatments, changed roadway surface materials and appearance, mini roundabouts and other speed management techniques" such as speed bumps. The typical lack of these cues on stroads causes motorists to drive much faster than is safe to do in the environment they are in, with many entries and exits creating points of conflict and potential collisions, especially at higher speeds.
Traffic engineers in cities around North America are reshaping their fundamental street design so that safety is prioritized., the city of Boston is studying how to minimize pedestrian traffic deaths by lowering speed limits with traffic calming using road diets. After several stroads were replaced by more efficient roadways in Boston, vehicular fatalities fell from 21 in 2016 to 10 in 2018; simultaneously, pedestrian fatalities halved from 14 to 7. This partial success motivated Bostonian locals to demand the complete elimination of the remaining stroads by implementing better road design.