A stroad is a thoroughfare that combines the features of streets and roads. Common in the United States and Canada, stroads are wide arterials that also provide access to strip malls, drive-throughs, and other automobile-oriented businesses. Stroads have been criticized by urban planners for safety issues and for inefficiencies. While streets serve as destinations and provide access to shops and residences at safe traffic speeds, roads serve as high-speed connections that efficiently move traffic at high volume, and stroads attempt to serve both purposes. Critics argue they are often an expensive, inefficient, and dangerous compromise.
Term
Etymology The word "stroad" is a portmanteau of the words street and road. It was coined in 2011 by civil engineer and urban planner Charles Marohn to describe what he considered failures in North American infrastructure development. The concept was popularized in April 2021 through a short documentary published by the urban planning YouTube channel Not Just Bikes.
Definition
A stroad is a thoroughfare which tries to serve pedestrian and vehicular traffic simultaneously, but does neither effectively. This is defined in contrast to a safely-accessible street that prioritizes pedestrians or a high-throughput road that prioritizes vehicles. Mahron describes a street as "complex environment where life in the city happens". Streets are lined with buildings, such as houses, stores, and offices, whose entrances and exits open onto the street. As such, streets must accommodate both cars and pedestrians, through-traffic and entrances/exits from adjacent buildings, and temporary parking and delivery vehicles. As this complexity greatly increases the risk of accidents, an ideal street will have low speed limits, enforced by traffic calming features such as narrow lanes. Conversely, Mahron describes roads as a "high-speed connection between two places". To mitigate traffic and reduce the risk of accidents, an ideal road will have limited entrances and exits, no parking, and strict segregation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. They also have wide lanes, and are designed to run as straight as possible, only making gentle curves where necessary. As stroads attempt to function as both a street and road, they will often combine features of both. Like a street, stroads are lined with buildings whose entrances and exits open directly onto the stroad. However, like a road, stroads permit vehicles to travel at high speeds, and will have wide lanes and be generally straight to accommodate them. In essence Marohn defines a stroad as a high-speed road with many turnoffs, and lacking in safety features.
History
Stroads began to emerge in the United States and Canada in the aftermath of World War II, as car ownership became widespread and suburbanization accelerated. Some stroads were created when streets were expanded or widened, often with the aim of improving mobility. This was often done without proper access management, and under the influence of engineering codes that emphasized speed and traffic flow over safety, resulting in the street becoming a stroad. Other stroads were created when developers began adding private accessways onto roads. As the number of accessways increased, so did congestion and collisions on the road, requiring traffic control additions such as traffic signals. Dutch urban planner Willem Zurborg argues that this conversion of streets and roads into stroads was a consequence of local governments designing their roadways to serve as flow roads, distributor roads, and access roads (i.e., streets) simultaneously. Dover and Massengale make a similar argument, noting that the general public is often not aware of the functional distinction that engineers make between streets and roads. In the English-speaking world, street names often end with 'road' and vice versa due to historical reasons; this may be misleading and not align with the current de facto traffic situation.
Disadvantages
Safety risks By combining the high speeds of roads with the complexity of streets, stroads put both pedestrians and drivers at elevated risk. A 2021 report by the Governors Highway Safety Association found that 60.4% of pedestrian fatalities from motor vehicles in the United States occurred on stroads.
Dangerously high speeds
The design of stroads encourages motorists to drive at dangerously fast speeds. Vision Zero Coalition's 2018 report explains that the wide lanes and lack of sharp turns in stroad design give drivers a false sense of safety, which subconsciously encourages them to drive at dangerously fast speeds. Stroads in the United States and Canada typically have legal speed limits between 30 and 45 miles per hour (48 and 72 km/h). But since the design speed is much higher, motorists frequently drive at up to 55 mph (89 km/h). Therefore, reducing the posted speed limit (PSL) with a traffic sign, a widely adopted strategy, will not work. "If the road [design] ... suggest[s] that the PSL is too low, drivers may simply ignore it". This is a problem because the frequent entries and exits onto stroads create many points of conflict and potential collisions for drivers to navigate. Driving at higher speeds reduces the time drivers have to react to hazards, increasing the risk of a crash. It also means any collision will have a much higher kinetic energy, increasing its severity.
Lack of protection for pedestrians
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
