Another insightful column by Charles Marohn in Better! Cities & Towns:
A STROAD is a street/road hybrid; the futon of transportation alternatives. … they cost a ton, but financially yield very little return for the governments that must pay to maintain them.
Unfortunately, STROADS are the default design for most of our public space. … A STROAD is created when we misapply to local transportation corridors the decades of wisdom we have gained from experimentation on highway design and construction techniques. …
STROADS are dangerous, especially for the elderly … A STROAD combines the fast moving traffic of a road with the intersections and complexity of a street. Throw in someone with reflexes and vision that just aren’t what they used to be, and you get fatality crash rates that look like this:
… Highway design rests on the concept of providing an environment where drivers can make mistakes without fatal consequences. … This thinking is entirely logical when applied to highways, but it is disastrous when used on what would otherwise be local streets. …. So elderly drivers must cross lanes of fast-moving traffic and they — quite understandably — have more difficulty than the average driver (who also has difficulty, it should be noted) discerning when it is safe to go.
In a Strong Towns world, the response to this problem is clear: We need to move away from the STROAD approach and start building either streets with slow-moving traffic and shared spaces OR roads that eliminate complexity (intersections) so as to move people quickly between places. This improves safety and has the added benefit of being a financially sound approach as well.
I would say that STROADS are a direct result of the anti-freeway movement of the 1970s.
While freeways would provide intersection-free travel, their elimination has forced everyone onto the same arterial roads.
Compare driving from points east (Coquitlam or New Westminster) – on Hwy 1 or Kingsway (the old route) – on which is there more opportunity for an accident?
How many intersections do you need to traverse on Kingsway to get to or from Vancouver? How many left turns are there across your path?
Now apply those to a hypothetical north-south freeway that would take traffic off of Granville, Oak and Cambie and Main (albeit not all traffic) and remove cars from about 75 intersections (where pedestrians and cyclists also travel).
In a way, it’s similar to the subways versus LRT debate – do you segregate uses or allow them to share facilities? i.e. exclusive right-of-ways (higher cost with lower risk of accidents/interaction with other vehicles or users) or non-exclusive or even shared right-of-way (lower cost with greater risk of accidents / interaction with other vehicles or users).
With a STROAD, you have long haul, short haul, commuter, freight and local users all sharing the same facility. Of course, you’ll have conflicts. That’s a consequence of the decision for shared usage – the best you can do is live with it and adopt policies and practices to lower the risks.
Just like how transit trips include two walking trips, freeway trips include two driving trips on local streets. Even with freeways, and likely even more with freeways because of the modal shift toward driving that they encourage everyone to take, arterial streets lined with storefronts are redesigned primarily to move cars quickly.
Freeways increase mobility until they don’t, but they don’t increase access. With more driving trips on local roads resulting from the modal shift to driving, there is more perceived need to design streets for mobility over access.
Placing mobility over access may also be a function of geography (and a funnelling effect).
In the same way that the Expo Line closer to downtown carries more passengers than farther out, the demands on the road infrstructure to carry more cars are higher closer to the core – which also happen to be areas that are more likely historically built up with streetfront retail. And all of those cars aren’t full of people who want access to the local stores. They may stop off on occasion, but for many that’s not their primary reason for being on that road.
@Guest writes: “the demands on the road infrastructure to carry more cars are higher closer to the core”
I’d argue that vehicle demands in a pedestrianized mixed-use core are limited to electric delivery vehicles like this http://cleantechnica.com/2012/03/08/smith-electric-vehicles-delivers-new-electric-truck-to-fedex/
Any more than one lane each way will get you speeds over 30kph and dead bodies.