Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Attack of the STROADS

ABOVE: On the STROAD again in Franklin, WI.

From the always-vital STRONG TOWNS blog:

The STROAD design -- a street/road hybrid -- is the futon of transportation alternatives. Where a futon is a piece of furniture that serves both as an uncomfortable couch and an uncomfortable bed, a STROAD moves cars at speeds too slow to get around efficiently but too fast to support productive private sector investment. The result is an expensive highway and a declining tax base.

Road Widening: Contemporary Blood-Letting

 

ABOVE: Rawson Avenue - non-vehicles beware. Subdivisons full of children who attend a nearby elementary school face this barrier.

 

After decades of catering to cars and the people able to drive them at the expense of people who cannot or chose not to drive (Rawson Avenue in Franklin, WI is a living monument to that vision), city planners and transportation officials are finally (slowly) starting to see the value in making communities accessable to all. However, it isn't going to be easy to convince the public at large that we needn't provide the means to travel at 60 mph through residential areas:

We have been so thorough in making cars happy for the past several decades that much of our world is designed in such a way that it is impossible to travel without a car.

Tragically, convenient, easy car travel we have bankrupted ourselves in creating is not conducive to creating safe, lovable, human-oriented, sustainable, enjoyable places that induce civic pride (indeed, it is utterly destructive of a better place to live). Those of us who have discovered this, then, are stuck with the enormous task of trying to point out that the path to a better community – to a better future – lies in doing something that at least initially, seems harmful to our happiness: inconveniencing car travel and car parking (and making car use more costly)

Read the rest at: Road Widening: Contemporary Blood-Letting | Dom’s Plan B Blog