4 ms·
What's really terrible about stroads is the phenomenon of the later "bypass" roads that are built long after the stroad/city center turns into a an absolute clu
by bane 5y ago
What's really terrible about stroads is the phenomenon of the later "bypass" roads that are built long after the stroad/city center turns into a an absolute clusterfuck and aren't usable for the kind of high-speed transit they're designed for. The bypass roads usually take the form of a parkway or some other roadtype with limited entrances/exits.
But then later, because the bypass road is usually built on cheap land outside of the city center, all that property gets bought up and developed as well, and the property owners will demand ingress/egress to their properties. Since the environment is nicer than the snarled up city center, people will start to favor businesses and housing in this area. Over the next 10-20 years the bypass will simply turn into another stroad. To make matters worse, the bypass and the original road will often have the same road numbers, differentiated by either "business" or "bypass", making navigation confusing.
Where I live I often see multi-million dollar homes being built right next to high-speed roads, and instead of a feeder street system taking cars to a more limited number of ingress/egress points, they simply dump the driveways out into the 60mph traffic. Total insanity.
It really does all come down to poor planning, and a lack of desire to make street planned city center grids with mixed-zone housing and municipal managed central parking areas. Instead each business sits in an island in a sea of their own giant parking lots, which often sit mostly unused which makes urban centralization impossible.
- syshum 5y agoThen if you live long enough you get to see the bypass get a bypass of its own and the entire process starts over again...