Not a street, not a road; stroads represent a continuity of overbudgetted and dangerous transportation trends in America. To better understand the detriments of such a development, it is important to define our terms:
A stroad is a hybrid thoroughfare that combines the high speed of a road, with the commercial and pedestrian potential of a street. This difference between these terms may seem like semantics to some but the distinction is crucially important.
A road is a means of efficient transportation from one place to another, it is not a destination in and of itself. Roads have high speed limits, minimal turnoffs, and separate or protected bike paths.
Conversely, streets are hubs of commerce and interaction. They are places with little to no traffic, restrictive speed limits, and excess pedestrians and window shoppers. Think Pearl or 29th street. However, when combining the qualities of these very different entities, harmful problems arise.
The central flaw of stroads is that they favor the commuter more than the pedestrian. These thoroughfares aim to improve travel efficiency by imposing high speed limits and a high number of lanes. While inflated speed limits don’t represent an intrinsic issue, the pairing of high speeds with commerce and pedestrian traffic is a dangerous combination. The proximity of commuters to fast moving traffic leads to higher rates of accidents and pedestrian fatalities. According to the Governor’s Highway Safety Association, a federally funded non profit, 60.4% of pedestrian fatalities occurred on non-highway arterials, a more formal term for stroads.
This auto-favorization represents a decades-long continuity. The needs of bikers, busers, and walkers are almost always pushed aside by city planners. This systematic fault stems from a basic misunderstanding of the function of transit infrastructure. The failure to identify the difference in function between streets and roads leads to marked losses in efficiency as well as tangible safety concerns.
Impact on pedestrians is not the only concern, though, stroads also have economic consequences. The noise and smog resulting from congested traffic drives away pedestrians and strains small businesses, decreasing local commerce. Massive corporate stores steal these necessary earnings with easily car accessible parking garages and indoor walkways, taking away from the joys and livelihood of local businesses. Additionally, the cost of constructing roads is quite high, due to their high proportion of traffic due to endless turn offs and lights, there is a pressure to add lanes. This impulse to expand requires astronomical quantities of asphalt; an expensive resource with one mile of paved road often costing more than a million dollars. Asphalt is not particularly long lasting either, with roads needing repaving every twenty years.
With stroads dominating our city infrastructure we are left with withering businesses, huge tax/budget burdens, noise, pollution, and a high risk to pedestrians. If we hold our city planners and civil engineers accountable to design our thoroughfares in a way that gives due care to the distinction between streets and roads, we are left with a happier, more efficient, and safer environment to live in. Dividing streets and roads is not some far off, conceptual idea either. Cities that are surrounded by roads with streets stretching inward towards the center, is a viable and efficient alternative. This makes longer distance commuting quick and easy, and favors businesses and commuter travel in the city center. When we remove stroads, we help both the pedestrians and the economy.
