lawn mowers, or beach toys, we would have made radical reforms decades ago. Thousands of people die each year on stroads, with countless more maimed and permanently injured. This happens for reasons that are not difficult to discern.
Stroads facilitate traffic speeds that ensure a high frequency of violent collisions. A collision with a change in speed of 30 miles per hour can result in a severe traumatic brain injury for the driver or passengers, an AIS-4 on the Abbreviated Injury Scale.2
For people outside a vehicle, the average risk of severe bodily injury (AIS-4) jumps from 50 percent at just 31 miles per hour to 75 percent at 39 miles per hour. The average risk of death for a person outside a vehicle jumps from 10 percent at an impact speed of 23 miles per hour, to 25 percent at 32 miles per hour and 50 percent at 42 miles per hour.3 Obviously, age and health impact an individual's chances of survival, but horrible injury and death are common at speeds that are routine for stroad environments.
On roads the speeds are much greater, but they are achieved in a simplified environment that generously corrects for routine human errors (see Chapter 3, “Whose Mistakes Do We Forgive?”). In contrast, stroad environments have all of the complexity of streets. There are vehicles randomly stopping. There is cross traffic. There are vehicles that make 90-degree turning movements. There are vehicles randomly entering the flow of traffic and there are others that are randomly exiting it.
In auto-based transportation systems, randomness is the enemy of safety, especially as speeds increase. With hundreds of millions of people driving through stroads each day, some of the randomness results in high-speed collisions between two or more vehicles, or between a vehicle and a person outside of a vehicle. The complexity of the stroad environment makes this kind of tragedy inevitable.
For people walking, biking, or using a wheelchair within the stroad environment, the risks are even greater. A person on a sidewalk has no defense at all if a vehicle leaves the roadway at stroad speeds. The person crossing the stroad is even more exposed and vulnerable. That is true even when they cross at designated places and at specified times.
Stroads magnify that vulnerability by making it necessary, yet difficult, to cross. When Sagrario Gonzalez left the library on the evening of December 3, 2014, it was necessary for her to cross the stroad in front of her. Her car was parked where it was supposed to be, in the designated library parking lot on the opposite side of State Street.
While State Street is a street, it is not designed like one. It is also not designed to be a road. State Street is a stroad, so it is designed primarily to facilitate traffic flow at high speeds during peak times while also providing a modest framework for places like the library to exist.
This means that there were four wide lanes to cross with no sanctuary anywhere in the middle. It also means that the traffic signals, the only place where Gonzalez could have crossed with some assistance, are spaced out and timed to keep traffic moving. All of this makes a simple thing like walking to the car frustratingly difficult.
The irony is that stroads are frustrating for everyone, including drivers. Someone driving a stroad is continually presented with mixed messages. The wide and forgiving scale of the design is throttled back artificially by speed limits and signalized intersections. The turn lanes and wide curb radii make movement easy, yet getting from one building to another often requires lengthy detours, U-turns, and delays. There is a veneer of safety that comes from having plenty of margin for error built into the design, but the complexity of the environment creates an underlying tension that randomly disrupts the comfort.
While engineers have tried, it is impossible to make a stroad safe. State Street in Springfield has one of the highest crash rates in the state of Massachusetts.4 The only way to improve safety on a stroad is to convert it into a street or a road.
Stroad Conversion
In the years following the death of Destiny Gonzalez, there have been other collisions and near-collisions in the same location on State Street. In response, neighborhood activists in Springfield requested that the city install a flashing crosswalk system, one that a person walking could activate to alert drivers that someone is crossing. I am not in favor of this approach as anything more than a temporary measure. While it may improve things somewhat, it reinforces the underlying danger created by the stroad.
To fix a stroad, there needs to be a decision on whether it should be a street or a road. Do we want this section to be about moving vehicles quickly from one place to another (road) or are we trying to build wealth and productivity within a place (street)? To get out of the stroad zone, we need to improve safety by either increasing or decreasing speed — by changing the design to function as either a street or a road.
State Street should not be converted to a road, but consider what would need to happen if that were the decision. To go from stroad to road, the first thing to be done is to remove access to State Street. That means closing all of the cross streets, dead-ending them before they reach State Street. That would reduce or even eliminate the need for signals because there would be no cross traffic.
All of the entrances to parking lots and drive-throughs that accessed State Street would also need to be closed. There could be no parking along the road, either, because that would create random start-stop conditions as people back in or pull out of open spaces, a condition that would be extremely dangerous at roadway speeds.
To make State Street a proper road, the sidewalks will need to be removed or, at the very least, a physical barrier would need to be erected between the traveled roadway and any space where people are expected to be present outside of a vehicle. There is no way to build safe space where humans are standing, completely unprotected, just feet away from tons of steel being propelled down the road at lethal speeds. The physics of this are not possible.
To protect the roadway investment, the city of Springfield would need to use their planning and zoning authority to regulate building along the corridor. Any new development should not undermine the roadway investment or degrade its capacity to move vehicles quickly from one place to another. Anything built along State Street would need to be accessible from some other side street, alley, or property.
Converting a stroad to a road is a process of simplification. Removing elements of complexity improves safety, allows higher travel speeds, and improves financial productivity by allowing the road to function as a high-speed connection between places. Every American city has miles of stroads that should be converted into roads.
State Street, especially in the vicinity of the Central Library, is not one of them. This is the core of Springfield. The library is surrounded by blocks of homes, businesses, and civic buildings. This is a place — the exact thing a framework of streets is trying to improve to grow the community's wealth.
The stroad that is State Street is undermining that wealth, not least by making the area around the library extremely dangerous. To convert State Street from a stroad to a street, the travel speed of the street needs to be reduced to compensate for the complexity of the environment. That means a human speed — something close to 15 and no more than 20 miles per hour.
The design needs to shift to prioritize people walking, those in wheelchairs, and others who are not within a vehicle. This means traffic passing through becomes a lower priority. That will change the emphasis of intersection design, walkway widths, the placement of trees and vegetation, and any number of other design items necessary to enhance the experience of being in that place.
Since
