An interview on News 1130 – sourced with goodies from the Charles Marohn quotebook:
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They’re not streets and they’re not roads.
Call them “stroads”, frustrating for everyone who uses them and bad for local economies.
“They’re the futon of transportation alternatives, it doesn’t do anything well,” chuckles Gordon Price, an urban planner* with Simon Fraser University’s City Program.
The term was coined by Minnesota-based traffic engineer Charles Marohn and Price says while a futon is an uncomfortable couch and an uncomfortable bed, stroads are too slow to get around efficiently and too fast to make them a pleasant place to be.
“Remember, the best definition of a road is a place that leads somewhere but a street is somewhere. If you are a Vancouverite, think about the difference between Great Northern Way as a road versus Commercial Drive as a street,” Price tells News1130.
A stroad is a hybrid of the two, a term for four- and six-lane thoroughfares that are designed for speed but also lined with retail and residential developments. Kingsway, King George Boulevard and even parts of Granville Street are prime examples around Metro Vancouver.
“Traffic engineers want to design streets so that they are safe and so that you can drive at the posted speed limit, at least a minimum of 50 km/h, and at the same time you have things like residential driveways and access to parking and businesses. You’ve got two things that don’t go well together and in many cases we really have ended up with the worst of both.”
Price and other urban planners argue they are unsafe, expensive to build and financially unproductive.
“You lose an immense amount of economic development and property taxes, not to mention just the pleasure people have by being on a street,” he tells News1130.
“It’s not to say you can get by without roads, people do need to be able to cross the region and the ultimate expression of that is a freeway. But when you try to make something that should work better as a street, particularly to get the economic value from it, you really have to accept that the traffic is going to go slower or be congested.” Price says congestion in the context of a street is what makes it an interesting destination, a place with a high degree of economic activity.
Since Vancouver doesn’t have a freeway system, the city has had to use arterial roads such as East First Avenue to move traffic, designating routes as part of its “major road network.”
“That means it’s all the more important when you have the opportunity to do ‘streets’ that you don’t sacrifice the qualities that make them good places just so you can move traffic,” he adds.
Price points to Vancouver’s old street car routes — Robson, Denman, Davie, Commercial Drive and Fourth Avenue — as good examples of destination streets, well-served by transit and with lots of on-street parking
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* No, I’m not an urban planner, credential-wise. Honorary (thank you, PIBC) but not official.
I appreciate the sentiment here and can certainly see the value in having more less “stroads.” Curious too hear if you think that 4th Avenue is becoming, or will become a “stroad” due to the Pt. Grey Road reinvention (from a “stroad” to a street).
The city of Vancouver has very few stroads in the traditional sense. A key component of the stroad isn’t just that lots of traffic is on it, but that one is trying to force the engineering fo the street to allow unsafe speeds with lots of conflicting turns. The best example I can think of in Metro Vancouver is Lougheed Highway through Maple Meadows. Lots of turns, lots of speed.
In contrast, one might think that Knight street or 1st Ave contend. They certainly have a fair amount of fast traffic, but they are designed to keep speeds reasonable (with narrow lanes) while having few conflicting movements.
Alan – you are absolutely correct. A true stroad is like old Highway 99 through the northerly parts of Seattle. In fact, the United States is filled with these state highway corridors through their cities, generally with 100′ right of way or wider, and typically with continuous strip commercial developments with vast parking lots and little if any “urban” qualities, and widely spaced intersections. Some cities, like San Diego and Portland, have been reclaiming these streets to urban streets very successfully in recent years.
Marine Drive’s auto row and industrial area segment is perhaps our closest true stroad. Another near parallel in terms of width (100′) and traffic volumes (40-50,000vpd) if not character might be Central Broadway.Although not perfect, nobody can rightly call it a stroad. Not a surface parking lot or strip commercial in the entire stretch.
Apart from the definitions and semantics, I think that the issue is that a “one size fits all” approach does not work as it places many conflciting uses into one space.
You have long haul travellers, neighbourhood trips, pedestrians, cyclists, curbside parking – all trying to co-exist. That’s often why main street “highways” through smaller cities are eventually built around via a city centre bypass for long haul travellers.
Imagine if the TGV, RER and Metro in Paris were all forced to share the same sets of tracks.
When Charles Marohn first wrote about his Stroads, I wasn’t convinced that the concept really applied to urban situations. The problem is that his bifurcation between places you go and places you go through just isn’t true. Streets are places to go because you can go there. Access is their fundamental quality.
Everything you can say by talking about stroads, you could say better by talking just talking about street function: people traffic, car traffic, bike traffic, noise, urban place making, visual delight etc.
The Champs Elysees is probably the stroadiest stroad of all, the stroad to rule all stroads, and it has its problems, but I don’t think you can call it an urban failure. And when you think of the classic stroads in Vancouver – Granville, Marine, 12th, 1st, Knight, Cambie, King Ed, Pacific, Beach – you will have some difficulty in putting them all into one pot. The narrow parts of 1st and 12th are awful and clearly not working for many of their functions. Actually they aren’t even nice to drive on. But Cambie south of King Ed? That is a busy arterial, but it is actually quite pleasant to walk and bike on. Pacific through Yaletown? Again it has its problems, but I wish Clark Drive had those problems. And Beach Ave along English Bay is like an auto promenade, a very useful and quick auto connector, but also a great place to observe the view and to walk and to live. So when people said that the “super road” to replace the Viaducts was a “stroad”, it isn’t clear that that isn’t a compliment.
Problem streets in Vancouver like 1st and 12th are problems because the traffic crowds out all the other functions. The street just doesn’t fit the traffic, and to fix that one of those things have to give. It really isn’t about a conflict between a place designed for people to travel through and a place designed to travel to because streets can do several things at once.
Where you do see something of the Stroad concept is where highways in exurban areas become lined with highway oriented development and become extremely busy and extremely unpleasant. They are ruined as through-routes because of the many lights with very long light cycles, and they are ruined as urban streets because they are so awful. This situation describes much of Nanaimo.
I also have to comment on the on-street parking. On street parking is probably the biggest problem with 4th, Commercial, Denman, Davie and Robson. Firstly, the cars simply clutter up the place visually. They ruin the street wall effect because you can’t see it. They are also unsafe for pedestrians because they impair visibility at intersections. (It is apparently said that they make pedestrians safer by shielding them from cars that lose control on the carriageway, but that really doesn’t happen very often.) And of course they are just horrible for cyclists. And because of the poor visibility, parked cars aren’t even nice to drive beside. Getting on-street parking off major retail streets would be an absolute boon. For pedestrians, the ideal solution is to just widen the sidewalk and get rid of the rush hour lanes. But if the rush hour lanes are absolutely necessary, I wonder whether a flatter, low curb, street where a lane could be converted to sidewalk would work. The auto and pedestrian paths would be marked by bands of LED lighting on the street that would change the designations (actually a bunch of street signs and signals ought to be converted to LED lights in the pavement because the pavement is where drivers are actually supposed to be looking). I suspect that signalized intersections would also have to be converted to roundabouts, even if they were just circular dot roundabouts, to keep the traffic at a more even pace.
Vancouver rejected freeways more than 4 decades ago. We’ve patted ourselves on the back ever since, but should we? In rejecting freeways we forced many of our streets to take on a regional transportation role incompatible with successful commercial and residential development.
I know the situation first hand. I was a resident of the Knight Street corridor for several years. From a regional transportation standpoint it was the best place I ever lived. From a livability standpoint it was the worst.
So while we endeavour to “fix” stroads the big trucks still need a way to get though the city. Any solution to our urban livability problems must include efficient routes for regional traffic.
Frank and Alan raise good points about identifying Vancouver stroads. I’ve collected a few here stroadtoboulevard.tumblr.com/archive Knight, 1st, bits of Hastings for sure, and I reckon central and East Broadway. Oak. Nanamio Street.
The post-viaduct plans looked pretty stroady to me: six lanes, with fields either side like a road; yet four intersections with signals, sidewalks and an urban location like a street.
yvrleutens hints at the point that there are really two types of Stroad: 1. (what should be) roads masquerading as streets, on the edge of town, with too many curb-cuts and signals; and 2. (what should be) streets, trying to perform road-like LOS/top-speed functions. Vancouver has mostly the latter.
To yvrleutens calling the Champs Elysees a stroad, I’d disagree entirely and in fact say the French boulevard/avenue points the way to pedestrian-friendly wide streets. We need cross-town routes like arterials, of course. But they need to be especially well designed to ensure they’re great streets, not stroads. My favoured design is a tree-lined through-route, with two one-way shared-spaces on either side, where the parking happens and where pedestrians can spill over, and cyclists can move slowly and safely along, like on 10th and other bike boulevards.
The Champs Elysees is a stroad because it tries to do two things at once. It tries to be a pedestrian oriented urban space, a shopping and promenading space, and at the same time it tries to be a high volume vehicle corridor. That is the essential characteristic of a stroad. However, it is a also clearly not an urban failure and the use of the boulevards allows it to serve more than one function at a time. So it is a successful stroad. My point was that streets can combine more than one function and still be successful. If people are using the term “stroad to simply mean “bad”, the the concept contains no explanatory power. Just call the road “bad”. The viaduct replacement street exemplified the problem. Folks called it a “stroad”, but did they mean a good stroad or a bad stroad?