Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
CityBeautiful recently released a great video about how to fix stroads.
It's accurate, and lines up exactly with the advocacy that my wife and I were doing 10 years ago, right down to using StreetMix to redesign streets.
It's also extremely depressing and makes me glad I don't live in North America anymore.
Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
Do this to every traditional neighbourhood that hasn't been bulldozed.
Relaxing zoning laws in these places to allow mixed-use development.
Add protected bicycle lanes connecting these places.
Increase transit service (even buses) to every 10 minutes between these neighbourhoods and to popular office parks.
Turn old malls into mixed-use developments with high-quality transit connections to those traditional neighbourhoods.
Build great places where people actually want to be.
Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
Strong Towns advocates for incremental improvements.
Fundamentally, it makes more sense to focus on "downtown", or whatever traditional development still exists in your town.
Making a small change to rejuvenate a traditional walkable neighbourhood will always result in better payoffs than any stroad repair.
See Dundas Street in Fake London.
This cost less than any stroad repair, but will do way more to improve your city than adding bike lanes to 5 lane stroad.
Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
This is why Strong Towns does NOT advocate for redesigning stroads like this. There's no point.
It will cost a bunch of money and political capital and those "bike lanes" will be used by only a handful of people (just like on Wonderland Road), which will only serve as something to point to and say, "see? nobody bikes here!"
Chuck's article, "How do you actually fix a stroad?" is useful here.
The answer: you shouldn't.
So what should you do?
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/12/2/how-do-you-actually-fix-a-stroad
Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
Dave mentions some typical improvements that can be made to a stroad like this, given the political constraints.
The end result of this kind of redesign looks something like this photo.
This is Wonderland Road in Fake London.
Is this better than the stroad in the post above? Yes.
Is it good? Absolutely not.
And the problem is, streets and roads are only redesigned about every 30 years.
So this is it. This is all you're getting for at least a generation.
Lipstick on a pig.
Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
None of the following is critical of City Beautiful: he is a great guy and his video is completely accurate, as usual.
In fact, there are several things in his video that are just *too* accurate.
When redesigning a stroad, you can't take space from cars (except in rare situations), you can't change intersections, and you can't move any utilities.
You need to plan around the scraps left over on a stroad designed for drivers.
So the ultimately, the solution will be a big compromise.
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