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Another article that may be useful: > Americans do not understand the difference between a road and a street. [...] > The value of a road is in the speed and

Another article that may be useful: > Americans do not understand the difference between a road and a street. [...] > The value of a road is in the speed and efficiency that it provides for movement between places. Anything that is done that reduces the speed and efficiency of a road devalues that road. If we want to maximize the value of a road, we eliminate anything that reduces the speed and efficiency of travel. > The value of a street comes from its ability to support land use patterns that create capturable value. The street with the highest value is the one that creates the greatest amount of tax revenue with the least amount of public expense over multiple life cycles. If we want to maximize the value of a street, we design it in such a way that it supports an adjacent development pattern that is financially resilient, architecturally timeless and socially enduring. [...] > In the United States, we’ve built a 45 mile per hour world for ourselves. It is truly the worst of all possible approaches. Our neighborhoods are filled with STROADS (a street/road hybrid) that spread investment out horizontally, making it extremely difficult to capture the amount of value necessary for the public to sustain the transportation systems that serve them. * https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/11/21/a-45-mph-world.html https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/11/21/a-45-mph-worl...

frereubu 5y ago
The centres of most UK towns and cities are now limited to 20mph. Although in practice that means that people drive around 25mph - i.e. just low enough not to be caught for speeding - it does make the streets less threatening for both pedestrians and bikes. The thing that would make it better for cyclists is to line up the speed limit of e-bikes (currently set at a max of 15mph) and the speed limit. Currently the 15mph / 20mph disjunction means that some idiots still try to squeeze their cars past relatively fast-moving e-bikes (which then often catch up with the car at the next set of lights...), whereas if those bikes could go at 20pmh or the speed limit was 15mph I don't think they'd bother. Edit: Although generally once you get out of the very centre there are arterial "stroads" which have 30mph limits, but side-streets are usually still 20mph.
- GordonS 5y ago
  > Currently the 15mph / 20mph disjunction means that some idiots still try to squeeze their cars past relatively fast-moving e-bikes (which then often catch up with the car at the next set of lights...) To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic. Now, of course car drivers should remain vigilant and continually check their mirrors, but nobody is infallible, and I'm sure there are plenty of drivers that do not take proper care.
  - frereubu 5y ago
    With respect, this feels like whataboutery. "To be fair" makes it sound like cars speeding past cyclists is a response to cyclists whipping between lines of cars, but they're entirely separate issues and can both be wrong at the same time without needing to be compared to each other.
    - GordonS 5y ago
      "Whataboutery" gets banded around waaaay too much - I see nothing wrong with pointing out apparent hypocrisy and/or discussing comparable situations. Also, it was not my intention (and I honestly don't see it in my words as hard as I look) to suggest there was any kind of "tit for tat".
  - laputan_machine 5y ago
    > To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic. The speed is the issue. A collision at low speeds is much less likely to be fatal [0]. Being closely overtaken by a car when you're going at 20-25mph on a bicycle is 1) a scary experience and 2) unnecessarily dangerous for the cyclist (and not at all for the driver). [0] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_fatal_injury_pedestrians_and_car_occupants_richards.pdf https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
    - 5y ago
gpvos 5y ago
A thing that you can often see in the Netherlands is frontage roads. When a road with houses on it needs a speed upgrade, it gets split into a fast road and a parallel frontage/access/service road for access to the adjacent houses. Possibly even on both sides. This is something that was already being done way back early in the 20th century. (Edit: found a reference to the Dutch word, "ventweg" ("hawking/peddling road"), in 1923.) It seems to me that in such cases the US tends to choose to expand into a stroad instead. Belgium also has quite a few stroad-like roads, but at least those tend to have usable sidewalks and fairly often even bicycle paths.
- mattzito 5y ago
  We have a major one of those in NYC, queens boulevard, and it’s a disaster. It’s dangerous to cross, and wide enough that it’s inconvenient to get across, so it effectively divides neighborhoods in half.
  - addicted 5y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20110923155641/http://wiki.coe.neu.edu/groups/nl2011transpo/wiki/22911/7_Service_Roads.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110923155641/http://wiki.coe.n... There's a picture of one here, and the main road is a single lane in both directions. Which is as far from Queens Boulevard as you can get. The 2 lanes to be crossed makes crossing safer. Further, the side roads are differentiated to make it clear that they are primarily for biking/walking (they are a different color, and are tiled). Also: > Service roads are purposely constructed to be discontinuous sections of road, meaning that through traffic cannot use it to get from one main street to another. Since the only traffic on it will be cars accessing the houses or shops along the service road, traffic is substantially lower that on the main roads, and speeds are kept down due to the short segments of roadway Queens boulevard is a highway masquerading as a road.
- mcv 5y ago
  I think I've come across references that those "ventwegen" existed even back in the 19th century.
- 5y ago
calvinmorrison 5y ago
We do understand it. It's why Americans love quaint towns. There's a few in my suburbs. It's why many old towns you see a BUS sign. It's not for a bus, its' the 'business' route and the highway has been sent around them. Doylestown PA: succesfully petitioned and built TWO of these. A 611 and 202 bypass leaving historic doylestown beautiful. The problem is, for those suburbs that never had strong town centers, there was little objection and so as you go down 611, it's a 4 lane major travel route that passes right through a bunch of other suburbs leaving them without a downtown and a place thats not comfortable to travel. of course, Doylestown was surrounded by farmland when this was build making it much easier to do... Good luck building a bypass through other towns
hef19898 5y ago
The DDIs he mentioned had me thinking about Cloverleaf interchanges at first, the standard interchange at German Autobahn (or roads with more than one lane when round-abouts aren't feasible, incredible for that application, lots of traffic, high speeds and so on. DDIs are close enough it seems, just worse in every aspect. Both have in common that they suck for pedestrians.
PaulAJ 5y ago
Here in the UK stroads were pretty much eliminated everywhere during the 70s and 80s by building bypasses. A bypass is a road built in an arc around a town to divert through-traffic away from the town centre, leaving only the slow street traffic (mostly people coming from outside town to shop). Larger towns have more complicated arrangements, but the pattern is the same: keep through traffic away from the streets in the business area. The business area itself is often pedestrian-only and always has restrictions to make driving through it a slow business. Typical example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9997356,-0.9166437,14.25z?hl=en-GB https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9997356,-0.9166437,14.25z?... More complex example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1101752,-0.1713974,7297m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en-GB https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1101752,-0.1713974,7297m/d... . Note the M23 on one side, Crawley Avenue on the other, and Peglar Way right in the middle. All of them serve to route traffic around the town centre instead of through it. In many cases you can see how the original through-road (sometimes dating back to Roman times) had the bypass patched on; without the bypass the "High Street" would have been a stroad. (Fans of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy may recall Arthur Dent's cottage being demolished to make way for a bypass. This was an issue: the nature of bypasses meant that building them often required the demolition of nice little cottages on the outskirts of small towns.)

frereubu 5y ago

The centres of most UK towns and cities are now limited to 20mph. Although in practice that means that people drive around 25mph - i.e. just low enough not to be caught for speeding - it does make the streets less threatening for both pedestrians and bikes. The thing that would make it better for cyclists is to line up the speed limit of e-bikes (currently set at a max of 15mph) and the speed limit. Currently the 15mph / 20mph disjunction means that some idiots still try to squeeze their cars past relatively fast-moving e-bikes (which then often catch up with the car at the next set of lights...), whereas if those bikes could go at 20pmh or the speed limit was 15mph I don't think they'd bother. Edit: Although generally once you get out of the very centre there are arterial "stroads" which have 30mph limits, but side-streets are usually still 20mph.

GordonS 5y ago
> Currently the 15mph / 20mph disjunction means that some idiots still try to squeeze their cars past relatively fast-moving e-bikes (which then often catch up with the car at the next set of lights...) To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic. Now, of course car drivers should remain vigilant and continually check their mirrors, but nobody is infallible, and I'm sure there are plenty of drivers that do not take proper care.
- frereubu 5y ago
  With respect, this feels like whataboutery. "To be fair" makes it sound like cars speeding past cyclists is a response to cyclists whipping between lines of cars, but they're entirely separate issues and can both be wrong at the same time without needing to be compared to each other.
  - GordonS 5y ago
    "Whataboutery" gets banded around waaaay too much - I see nothing wrong with pointing out apparent hypocrisy and/or discussing comparable situations. Also, it was not my intention (and I honestly don't see it in my words as hard as I look) to suggest there was any kind of "tit for tat".
- laputan_machine 5y ago
  > To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic. The speed is the issue. A collision at low speeds is much less likely to be fatal [0]. Being closely overtaken by a car when you're going at 20-25mph on a bicycle is 1) a scary experience and 2) unnecessarily dangerous for the cyclist (and not at all for the driver). [0] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_fatal_injury_pedestrians_and_car_occupants_richards.pdf https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
  - 5y ago

gpvos 5y ago

A thing that you can often see in the Netherlands is frontage roads. When a road with houses on it needs a speed upgrade, it gets split into a fast road and a parallel frontage/access/service road for access to the adjacent houses. Possibly even on both sides. This is something that was already being done way back early in the 20th century. (Edit: found a reference to the Dutch word, "ventweg" ("hawking/peddling road"), in 1923.) It seems to me that in such cases the US tends to choose to expand into a stroad instead. Belgium also has quite a few stroad-like roads, but at least those tend to have usable sidewalks and fairly often even bicycle paths.

mattzito 5y ago
We have a major one of those in NYC, queens boulevard, and it’s a disaster. It’s dangerous to cross, and wide enough that it’s inconvenient to get across, so it effectively divides neighborhoods in half.
- addicted 5y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20110923155641/http://wiki.coe.neu.edu/groups/nl2011transpo/wiki/22911/7_Service_Roads.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110923155641/http://wiki.coe.n... There's a picture of one here, and the main road is a single lane in both directions. Which is as far from Queens Boulevard as you can get. The 2 lanes to be crossed makes crossing safer. Further, the side roads are differentiated to make it clear that they are primarily for biking/walking (they are a different color, and are tiled). Also: > Service roads are purposely constructed to be discontinuous sections of road, meaning that through traffic cannot use it to get from one main street to another. Since the only traffic on it will be cars accessing the houses or shops along the service road, traffic is substantially lower that on the main roads, and speeds are kept down due to the short segments of roadway Queens boulevard is a highway masquerading as a road.
mcv 5y ago
I think I've come across references that those "ventwegen" existed even back in the 19th century.
5y ago

calvinmorrison 5y ago

We do understand it. It's why Americans love quaint towns. There's a few in my suburbs. It's why many old towns you see a BUS sign. It's not for a bus, its' the 'business' route and the highway has been sent around them. Doylestown PA: succesfully petitioned and built TWO of these. A 611 and 202 bypass leaving historic doylestown beautiful. The problem is, for those suburbs that never had strong town centers, there was little objection and so as you go down 611, it's a 4 lane major travel route that passes right through a bunch of other suburbs leaving them without a downtown and a place thats not comfortable to travel. of course, Doylestown was surrounded by farmland when this was build making it much easier to do... Good luck building a bypass through other towns

hef19898 5y ago

The DDIs he mentioned had me thinking about Cloverleaf interchanges at first, the standard interchange at German Autobahn (or roads with more than one lane when round-abouts aren't feasible, incredible for that application, lots of traffic, high speeds and so on. DDIs are close enough it seems, just worse in every aspect. Both have in common that they suck for pedestrians.

PaulAJ 5y ago

Here in the UK stroads were pretty much eliminated everywhere during the 70s and 80s by building bypasses. A bypass is a road built in an arc around a town to divert through-traffic away from the town centre, leaving only the slow street traffic (mostly people coming from outside town to shop). Larger towns have more complicated arrangements, but the pattern is the same: keep through traffic away from the streets in the business area. The business area itself is often pedestrian-only and always has restrictions to make driving through it a slow business. Typical example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9997356,-0.9166437,14.25z?hl=en-GB https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9997356,-0.9166437,14.25z?... More complex example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1101752,-0.1713974,7297m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en-GB https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1101752,-0.1713974,7297m/d... . Note the M23 on one side, Crawley Avenue on the other, and Peglar Way right in the middle. All of them serve to route traffic around the town centre instead of through it. In many cases you can see how the original through-road (sometimes dating back to Roman times) had the bypass patched on; without the bypass the "High Street" would have been a stroad. (Fans of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy may recall Arthur Dent's cottage being demolished to make way for a bypass. This was an issue: the nature of bypasses meant that building them often required the demolition of nice little cottages on the outskirts of small towns.)