The Street Type that Breaks the Hierarchy
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Date: 2022-10-15
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Comments and reviews: 14
CSDragon
My only real complaint is that you go out of your way to redefine words.
Street, road, drive, avenue, boulevard, lane, place, court etc are just different words for the same thing. There is no hierarchy.
Any road of any size can have any one of those descriptors put at the end of its name.
That makes the word you popularized Stroad meaningless because half street half road is. literally any street or road, big or small, arterial or local.
You can say you don't like arterial commercial roads, but the name makes no sense. The stroad I live next to, is designated BVLD, neither street nor road, nor the type of road in this video.
Some people will say There is a difference, like a Drive is a small residential road, yet we have stroad drives too where I live, and a major Freeway designated Trail. Along with some roads that don't even have designations, like the Farm To Market 620 which is also a stroad despite not having any ST, RD, DR, BLVD, etc
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My only real complaint is that you go out of your way to redefine words.
Street, road, drive, avenue, boulevard, lane, place, court etc are just different words for the same thing. There is no hierarchy.
Any road of any size can have any one of those descriptors put at the end of its name.
That makes the word you popularized Stroad meaningless because half street half road is. literally any street or road, big or small, arterial or local.
You can say you don't like arterial commercial roads, but the name makes no sense. The stroad I live next to, is designated BVLD, neither street nor road, nor the type of road in this video.
Some people will say There is a difference, like a Drive is a small residential road, yet we have stroad drives too where I live, and a major Freeway designated Trail. Along with some roads that don't even have designations, like the Farm To Market 620 which is also a stroad despite not having any ST, RD, DR, BLVD, etc
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Michael
The problem of the suburban arterial won t be solved by boulevards with angled parking. The infamous fast food restaurants and strip malls that populate these roads aren t surrounded by parking moats because the people who built them wanted to spend lots of money buying land for surface parking. They re surrounded by parking moats because the local planning department requires them to be. If you want suburban areas to develop a pleasant and pedestrian-friendly urban form, you need to address the parking minimums that force these businesses to build these parking moats in the first place. Walking places in these areas will never be a viable option as long as everything is forced to be spread out in order to accommodate the amount of off-street parking that the planning department requires them to provide.
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The problem of the suburban arterial won t be solved by boulevards with angled parking. The infamous fast food restaurants and strip malls that populate these roads aren t surrounded by parking moats because the people who built them wanted to spend lots of money buying land for surface parking. They re surrounded by parking moats because the local planning department requires them to be. If you want suburban areas to develop a pleasant and pedestrian-friendly urban form, you need to address the parking minimums that force these businesses to build these parking moats in the first place. Walking places in these areas will never be a viable option as long as everything is forced to be spread out in order to accommodate the amount of off-street parking that the planning department requires them to provide.
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Millie
Near where I live we have a parkway lined with trees it's very shady by shady I mean tree shady I don't mean areas that are shady. But I've had people I've known that literally have died hitting trees of a course going faster than the speed limit. Parking like wouldn't quite work for it for the most part because most of it is residential. But anyways that's the only thing I find negative about tree mediums. And another thing that I do find kind of annoying is not enough mediums with sidewalks. I wish there was more but I get it I think most of the reason why you don't see them as much is the cost. And the only reason why this fancy parkway exists is due to the fact that people pay homeowners association to pay and to maintain it. The local county government and state would never.
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Near where I live we have a parkway lined with trees it's very shady by shady I mean tree shady I don't mean areas that are shady. But I've had people I've known that literally have died hitting trees of a course going faster than the speed limit. Parking like wouldn't quite work for it for the most part because most of it is residential. But anyways that's the only thing I find negative about tree mediums. And another thing that I do find kind of annoying is not enough mediums with sidewalks. I wish there was more but I get it I think most of the reason why you don't see them as much is the cost. And the only reason why this fancy parkway exists is due to the fact that people pay homeowners association to pay and to maintain it. The local county government and state would never.
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Aaron
Part of what makes Paris Paris. is not just their use of boulevards. but also their block types. In most modern western countries, the block type is a square, but in Paris triangle blocks are common. The latter has signicant advantages. it provides more surface area access to the buildings which in turn makes things like walk paths, bike paths, metro access points, and one-way roads more viable. One-way roads are a key feature of Paris and other walkable cities. They improve density, allow for synchronized stop-lights, and reduce slow/dangerous cross traffic turns. IMO. one-way roads, narrow streets, and triangular blocks are more so the reason Paris is special. and not so their overly wide boulevards.
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Part of what makes Paris Paris. is not just their use of boulevards. but also their block types. In most modern western countries, the block type is a square, but in Paris triangle blocks are common. The latter has signicant advantages. it provides more surface area access to the buildings which in turn makes things like walk paths, bike paths, metro access points, and one-way roads more viable. One-way roads are a key feature of Paris and other walkable cities. They improve density, allow for synchronized stop-lights, and reduce slow/dangerous cross traffic turns. IMO. one-way roads, narrow streets, and triangular blocks are more so the reason Paris is special. and not so their overly wide boulevards.
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oldjalopy
MnDOT in Minnesota is doing a study of I-94, the interstate highway that connects downtown Minneapolis to downtown Saint Paul to consider ways to reconstruct the freeway. We have a local compaign (which has some steam behind it) that wants MnDOT to consider tearing down the freeway between the downtowns, filling in the trench, and redeveloping the land as a multi-lane boulevard like the ones described in this video. The proposed boulevard would feature a central dedicated transit way, two lanes of thru-traffic in each direction, two medians with pedestrian walkways (or could be developed as residential or commercial buildings, and outer local-access/parking lanes.
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MnDOT in Minnesota is doing a study of I-94, the interstate highway that connects downtown Minneapolis to downtown Saint Paul to consider ways to reconstruct the freeway. We have a local compaign (which has some steam behind it) that wants MnDOT to consider tearing down the freeway between the downtowns, filling in the trench, and redeveloping the land as a multi-lane boulevard like the ones described in this video. The proposed boulevard would feature a central dedicated transit way, two lanes of thru-traffic in each direction, two medians with pedestrian walkways (or could be developed as residential or commercial buildings, and outer local-access/parking lanes.
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Paul
Tucson kind of just did this with our Broadway boulevard. It used to be a stroad that was flanked by nothing but parking lots with very limited pedestrian access. They just completely redid the road to make it more of a destination. They got rid of most of the parking lots and replaced them with wide sidewalks, renovated old buildings to make them walkable shopping destinations, added lots of plants, and added plenty of crosswalks with HAWK lights. They even moved a row of old Pueblo homes there that will be converted into shops and restaurants. It looks and feels a million times better than before. Excited to see what the future holds.
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Tucson kind of just did this with our Broadway boulevard. It used to be a stroad that was flanked by nothing but parking lots with very limited pedestrian access. They just completely redid the road to make it more of a destination. They got rid of most of the parking lots and replaced them with wide sidewalks, renovated old buildings to make them walkable shopping destinations, added lots of plants, and added plenty of crosswalks with HAWK lights. They even moved a row of old Pueblo homes there that will be converted into shops and restaurants. It looks and feels a million times better than before. Excited to see what the future holds.
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Danielle
A city I lived in had almost all of it's collectors as boulevards. Frankly, it sucked. You can mess up a good thing if you do it wrong. In the case of the city I lived in, all of the boulevards went to fronts of houses in suburbia. Normally you have the backside of houses pointing to the larger road and a wall to reduce noise. Nope, this city used boulevards to put houses on the main streets pointing at the road. Sidewalks are no better than normal, there are no bike lanes (though you can use the side one way streets when they are there as bike lanes) and because the primary road is isolated in the center people drive faster.
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A city I lived in had almost all of it's collectors as boulevards. Frankly, it sucked. You can mess up a good thing if you do it wrong. In the case of the city I lived in, all of the boulevards went to fronts of houses in suburbia. Normally you have the backside of houses pointing to the larger road and a wall to reduce noise. Nope, this city used boulevards to put houses on the main streets pointing at the road. Sidewalks are no better than normal, there are no bike lanes (though you can use the side one way streets when they are there as bike lanes) and because the primary road is isolated in the center people drive faster.
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Diego
These are extremely common in Mexico City and I absolutely loathe them. Intersections are extreme complicated and that local access pedestrian safety and slow speeds go out the window as quickly as those central lanes get congested which they often do. And worse still they still pose a HUGE barrier to pedestrian mobility. I don't think this is a good solution because they are extremely prone to becoming basically a highway in the hands of the auto lobby with the added danger of that local access clashing with the arterial movement which often gets innocents not only killed, but blamed for their own deaths.
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These are extremely common in Mexico City and I absolutely loathe them. Intersections are extreme complicated and that local access pedestrian safety and slow speeds go out the window as quickly as those central lanes get congested which they often do. And worse still they still pose a HUGE barrier to pedestrian mobility. I don't think this is a good solution because they are extremely prone to becoming basically a highway in the hands of the auto lobby with the added danger of that local access clashing with the arterial movement which often gets innocents not only killed, but blamed for their own deaths.
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Zion
New Orleans has loads and loads of boulevard style roads. I would call them the default arterial roads there. They were generally very nice, especially the ones with streetcar service. Although some of the suburban boulevards had canals in the middle of them with no pedestrian crossovers, which sometimes made crossing them completely impractical on foot. There's one particularly bad example right by a suburban park where you had to walk a quater mile in either direction to reach a crossing point just to cross a 30 foot median. Lesson of the day: boulevards should not have canals in them.
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New Orleans has loads and loads of boulevard style roads. I would call them the default arterial roads there. They were generally very nice, especially the ones with streetcar service. Although some of the suburban boulevards had canals in the middle of them with no pedestrian crossovers, which sometimes made crossing them completely impractical on foot. There's one particularly bad example right by a suburban park where you had to walk a quater mile in either direction to reach a crossing point just to cross a 30 foot median. Lesson of the day: boulevards should not have canals in them.
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Lady
1: 01 - Arterials in Brazil looks like this.
All arterials and some collectors have a strip with trees in the middle here.
All the stroads shall be transformed into this.
Remember that in Paris the boulevards had the same antisocial impact in the 19th century that the highways had in the United States in the 20th century.
7: 17 - Now you just have to swap that kind of horrible commerce for 3 to 10 story buildings with stores below and apartments above and some offices in between that you have a perfect neighborhood and enough demand for the subway.
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1: 01 - Arterials in Brazil looks like this.
All arterials and some collectors have a strip with trees in the middle here.
All the stroads shall be transformed into this.
Remember that in Paris the boulevards had the same antisocial impact in the 19th century that the highways had in the United States in the 20th century.
7: 17 - Now you just have to swap that kind of horrible commerce for 3 to 10 story buildings with stores below and apartments above and some offices in between that you have a perfect neighborhood and enough demand for the subway.
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Ben
Having grown up a few blocks from the dreaded Queens Boulevard, the aptly named boulevard of death, I've seen the evolution of traffic patterns along it. There has always been the push pull between limiting left turns, but also not diverting too much traffic to certain collector roads. Regardless of how much greenspace you add, there will always be a tear in the social fabric of a neighborhood by having large thoroughfares. Moving lots of cars is just not conducive to the other land uses going on. I always wished they turned the outer lanes into a light rail.
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Having grown up a few blocks from the dreaded Queens Boulevard, the aptly named boulevard of death, I've seen the evolution of traffic patterns along it. There has always been the push pull between limiting left turns, but also not diverting too much traffic to certain collector roads. Regardless of how much greenspace you add, there will always be a tear in the social fabric of a neighborhood by having large thoroughfares. Moving lots of cars is just not conducive to the other land uses going on. I always wished they turned the outer lanes into a light rail.
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Plangineer1
My planning team proposed the multi way boulevard concept for an 8-lane major arterial and state route (Fowler Av) in Tampa. Local government leaders and public response was very positive. But, the FDOT Environmental design manager said in an internal meeting: We're not ever building that. So the concept isn't being considered in the Phase 2 study which will recommend the Preferred alternative.
My very educated guess is this myopic and biased mindset is quite prevalent among many engineers.
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My planning team proposed the multi way boulevard concept for an 8-lane major arterial and state route (Fowler Av) in Tampa. Local government leaders and public response was very positive. But, the FDOT Environmental design manager said in an internal meeting: We're not ever building that. So the concept isn't being considered in the Phase 2 study which will recommend the Preferred alternative.
My very educated guess is this myopic and biased mindset is quite prevalent among many engineers.
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SkipPlaysCello
I live in Vancouver and these are desperately needed. Because we don t have any urban highways (great) our arterials have become huge, multi-lane stroads (not great) anywhere outside of downtown. I think turning our main arterials into these types of multi-section boulevards could really go a long way to both reactivating the streetscapes for pedestrians AND improving traffic flow for through-traffic by eliminating all the waiting for people to make turns onto side streets and businesses
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I live in Vancouver and these are desperately needed. Because we don t have any urban highways (great) our arterials have become huge, multi-lane stroads (not great) anywhere outside of downtown. I think turning our main arterials into these types of multi-section boulevards could really go a long way to both reactivating the streetscapes for pedestrians AND improving traffic flow for through-traffic by eliminating all the waiting for people to make turns onto side streets and businesses
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Stan
The Parisian boulevard looks clearly applicable to at-grade highways that run through smaller cities, a means to slow traffic down while adding efficient space for parking & nonvehicular travel. It s a tougher proposition for retrofitting large urban cores with a lot of congestion & cross traffic. For example, in Los Angeles there just isn t space along Wilshire Blvd or Vermont Ave, two heavily traveled main streets, to run local lanes alongside arterial lanes. It could be done on Van Nuys Blvd.
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The Parisian boulevard looks clearly applicable to at-grade highways that run through smaller cities, a means to slow traffic down while adding efficient space for parking & nonvehicular travel. It s a tougher proposition for retrofitting large urban cores with a lot of congestion & cross traffic. For example, in Los Angeles there just isn t space along Wilshire Blvd or Vermont Ave, two heavily traveled main streets, to run local lanes alongside arterial lanes. It could be done on Van Nuys Blvd.
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