We should rethink why people need to travel great distances on a daily basis. Work-from-home was a major one that got the shake-up and now it's not a given that we must commute up to an hour or more each way each day.
I've always owned/driven a car since graduation, up until a few years ago. Then I decided to park the vehicle and walk/transit/uber for the incidental health benefits. I'm surprised I've not had much issue with this, though if I were to add it up it's probably costing me more time and money than driving myself. I could get a small e-vehicle or live somewhere more livable to improve that if it mattered more.
That's kinda what I concluded, these guys seem to have a relatively good point but there's no practical way to action it; in the US about half the country has already been laid down according to this template. Trying to disrupt that is just disrupting the economy and will do an infinite more amount of damage to livelihoods in the short term than good in the long term.
I'm reluctant to characterise anything as a 'wrecker' movement but... I get a bit of that vibe from them. A bit like those environmentalists that use environmentalism to disguise their misanthropic tendencies.
I really don't know why I think that about this movement, though. It's weird. Just rubs me the wrong way.
i'm a misanthrope myself. ironic that you're pointing out what's wrong with the misanthropic take.
Car dependent cities are a terrible health hazard! I get it, different strokes for different folks, but iono, have car dependent owners really experienced anything else? You warn of economic damage as if that's the only Good there is.
We can't A/B tests our lives, so we're gonna bias the life we know. So it's self perpetuating. The take isn't throw up your hands because economic damage, that can't be it? Eh that's why im a misanthrope.
That is the whole point of being against stroads - they are rotten compromise between roads and streets.
They seem to be focused on aspects that are typically less important to the rest of society.
The most head-scratching example of this that I've seen was a guy saying that people should move to Chicago because it's underrated and has a decent transportation network.
Y-yeah. But that's not the only thing that people consider when they move and let's just say the city itself has a reputation.
In my corner of the world there's a lot of putting the cart before the horse in this regard - typically via closing streets for traffic without improving public transport.
Net effect is just more congestion because people have places to go regardless how much you reduce "induced demand".
At same time. I'm pretty sure sprawl would be better with more mixed zoning. Ofc, with buffers to oil refineries... If some idiots starts that argument.
An organization with a subtly culturally imperialist name ("the cities are all fine, but all small towns are all broken everywhere") is unlikely to have your best interests at heart even if its conclusions may have some validity.
The thing that this lobby group misses is that, ultimately, most smaller towns are in maintenance mode (we soft-banned most resource extraction and what is left only requires a tenth of the workforce) and that's true to a degree for smaller cities as well. This isn't something you can easily do with a major city because the infrastructure is more heavily used and won't as gracefully degrade, but you can keep rural roads serviceable for a long time with simple maintenance.
And this is why "stroads" exist in the first place- that's already the cost-optimized solution (take 2 lane road, expropriate some front yards/front parking, now you have a 4-lane road that can support through traffic and exiting traffic), and reworking them is not going to help a town that Strong Towns claims in the same article "are financially irresponsible and don't even have enough tax revenue to sustain maintenance".
Surely, if they don't have bread, perhaps they might consider cake?
Sigh. Because roads with turn lanes CAN NOT be converted into straight roads without forcing cars to take long detours through slow streets.
This will inevitably slow down the traffic, which is the goal of these propaganda outlets. They WANT traffic to become untenable. Just read their suggestions on "improving" roads with turn lanes.
So yes, this propaganda is good for the environment and the planet, good for communities and good for individuals.
You are asserting anecdotes ("it'll make driving slower for sure!"), compared to strong towns and https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes, who are professional planners and civil engineers.
They specifically address your exact points in their videos, stroads are bad for everybody, even cars.
I just tried implementing this on some random stroad and you can easily remove more than 2/3 access points without any investments.
No, you can't. Who's going to remove these access points? Like actual physical labor. Are you going to rent heavy equipment with your own money and remove them on a 5-mile stretch of a stroad?
What's so hard to understand?
"What's so hard to understand?"
No. The current model is pretty close to the perfect one. Surface roads efficiently and _flexibly_ move people. There is NOTHING else that comes even close to them.
We just need to push self-driving cars, and then start working on the REAL problem: dense cities. They should be deconstructed and un-densified, except for selected historically-significant areas.
gotta say i never met any human describe US car infrastructure as "perfect" no matter where on the car lover spectrum they fall.
disclaimer: i'm a bike bro as you call it
I loved Houston, TX. Its road system and zoning are freakishly well-designed, and it allows people to have commutes that are far more comfortable (and shorter!) than in dense cities.
In fact, Houston ("Greater Houston Area") had shorter commute time than ANY European city of a comparable size!
I moved out of there because I couldn't tolerate the climate. My second-favorite city is Salt Lake City.
> disclaimer: i'm a bike bro as you call it
Well, duh.
do you ever wonder why dense cities are dense though? we're all fooled? slaves? red pilled or whatever color the saying is
There are no conspiracies, just pure market forces. Dense cities are more efficient for _companies_ because they allow access to larger talent pools. Basically, if you are Google, it might make sense to open an office near Amazon's campus, and hire away some of Amazon's engineers.
This has an externality: more people will have to commute into that small area, resulting in longer commute time. Alternatively, they can move to live closer to that workplace, downsizing their living space and/or increasing the real estate price (more people competing for an inherently limited resource).
We also know the market way to fix that: price the externalities via taxes or cap-and-trades. In this case, the density needs to be treated in this way.
Not so much: https://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-...
I also found this[^4]: Apparently Europe's cities with the longest commute time have about the same commute time as Houston. Not to mention that Paris and Budapest have populations many times the size of Houston.
^1 https://houston.innovationmap.com/houston-worst-traffic-comm...
^2 https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/transpor...
^3 https://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/03-04-19-houst...
^4 https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and...
The average commute time for Berlin is 31 minutes, London is 47 minutes (https://www.timeout.com/london/news/london-is-only-the-sixth...), Paris area is 32 minutes, Madrid is 31 minutes.
Population: Paris area is 12 million, Berlin is 4 million, Houston Area is 7.5 million, Madrid is 6.5 million.
What am I missing?
Also, the article you linked draws from an irrelevant page on businessnamegenerator.com (???). Is this a troll?
Houston is famous for its nonsensical zoning and inefficient infrastructure. It's difficult to react to Houston being "freakishly well-designed" with a straight face.
I've been to Houston and it's just a terrible place to visit, even considering the oppressive weather.
Absolutely not.
I moved from the Midwest - small to medium sized towns (populations of 3k to 60k) - to a larger city in Northern Europe. It wasn't safe to walk in the US, and if I walked at the wrong times, there was always police presence and occasionally harassment. Things weren't close: Even in the small city, I couldn't safely walk to every store.
I never really knew freedom until I lived here without a car. I walk to the grocery store and places that are 30-50 minutes away. I use public transportation. The two of these mean I get a lot more physical activity than I ever would in the US and this is without having to do special exercise.
I'll never be stuck in the house due to poverty again. Other folks aren't as likely to get stuck in the house due to disability either. I like living in the countryside, but it is a trap unless you can travel. In general, this means you have to drive and pay for a reliable vehicle.
I disagree. The current model looks to be awful in most ways to me. I don't see how self-driving cars address most of the problems with it.