of the street is to build the community's wealth, the city of Springfield will need to use its community development tools to facilitate investment in the neighborhoods around State Street. The objective is to continually improve the wealth there, a condition closely correlated with the value of the underlying land. As that land value increases, as the place becomes more valuable, a natural redevelopment pressure emerges that attracts investment and generates leaps in financial productivity.
This is an exercise in adding complexity, something I discussed at length in my book Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019). Allowing neighborhoods to respond, incrementally, to stress and opportunity is the path to building broad-based, long-term strength and prosperity. Here's what I wrote in Chapter 8 of Strong Towns, “Making Strong Investments”:
To remove as many distortions as possible, to give neighborhoods a chance to evolve, to build wealth in neighborhoods that is not merely transactional but reflected in the net worth of the people living there, cities must allow, by right, the next increment of intensity throughout all neighborhoods, and they must limit by-right development to only the next increment.
The goal is to thicken up neighborhoods, to create feedback loops that allow emergent prosperity to build on itself. No neighborhood can be exempt from change, but no neighborhood should experience radical change all at once. This is the prudent discipline we must impose on ourselves.
Complex systems overwhelmed with resources stop behaving in complex ways. They become merely complicated, losing the feedback mechanisms that drive adaptation. The temptation to work only in bold ways, to embrace instant and comprehensive transformation as a strategy, guarantees eventual atrophy and decline. If our cities are to be truly strong, they must resist the easy path and dedicate themselves to the work.
Cities can and should grow rapidly where that option is available to them, but that growth needs to be one step at a time, not huge leaps in the dark.
The environment around State Street is perfectly situated for such a bottom-up revolution. The buildings are underutilized and atrophied, but quite salvageable. The population trends towardimpoverished, but with a high capacity for ingenuity and entrepreneurship. By making State Street a street for the people of Springfield instead of a stroad for commuters, the city can unleash the productive capacity of its citizens and build a prosperous place.
Whether street or road, the city must abandon the stroad approach on State Street and throughout the community. The hierarchical classification system needs to be retired and replaced with an updated understanding of how to make productive transportation investments, as illustrated in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Stroad Conversion
| Stroad to Street | Stroad to Road |
|---|---|
| Slow traffic | Limit access |
| Prioritize people over throughput | Prioritize throughput over access |
| Build a productive place | Connect productive places |
| Embrace complexity | Embrace simplicity |
Note that the decision on whether a transportation investment is a street or a road is not a technical one. It requires knowledge of the community's goals and objectives, but no technical expertise regarding engineering or design. This is a decision that must be made by an elected body — one directly accountable to the people of the community. It should never be made by technical professionals.
If we leave this decision to traffic engineers and transportation planners, the result will almost certainly reflect the embedded values of their professions. An emphasis on speed and volume creates tradeoffs between mobility and access, a tension that technical professionals inherently address by prioritizing speed. It does not take much in terms of added speed to make a street into a dangerous and unproductive stroad.
If State Street were designed to be a street and not a stroad, it is very likely that Destiny Gonzalez would still be alive.
Productive Stroads
I started to develop my understanding of the difference between a street and a road as a teenager visiting Disneyworld. The theme parks and resorts are fantastic places. People pay thousands of dollars to spend time in them. If you stay in one of their resorts, you can walk to everything you want or need, including shops, restaurants, and recreation. The attention to detail in designing those human spaces impressed me as a young man and continues to do so today. These are great places that create enormous wealth for the Walt Disney Corporation.
If you are in Disneyworld in one place and want to visit another place — say a theme park, one of their shopping districts, or another resort — you can quickly drive there on roads that are unencumbered by excessive amounts of traffic, despite the incredible number of people being transported on them. Part of this is because there are almost no stops along the way. All of the complexity has been removed and what is left is high speed and simple to navigate.
Another reason for the productivity of the roads is that most people do not drive but instead take another form of transit. This could be a bus, monorail, boat, or even an aerial gondola. These systems carry huge numbers of people between productive places, quickly and efficiently, where those people then exit the transportation system and immerse themselves in their place of destination. It is not lost on me that the most successful pre-automobile cities were built in this way, with the roads connecting them being waterways and railroad lines.
It was on my first trip to Paris in 2001 that I experienced a different kind of stroad than what I had come to know from living in North America. One of the most iconic streets in the world, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, was a stroad back then. It combined the function of both street and road, building wealth and moving traffic, but it did both exceptionally well. The Champs-Élysées is one of the wealthiest and most exclusive streets in all the world.
This productive stroad trick was accomplished with what an engineer would call a slip lane. The outside lanes of the Champs-Élysées, those closest to the buildings, were designed to be streets. There were slow speeds, parking, street trees, and an emphasis on people. In fact, people walked back and forth across these lanes all the time, an indication to me that Parisians and the tourists flooding their city felt secure in this space.
The middle lanes of the Champs-Élysées, the road portion of the stroad, were separated from the slip lanes by wide, tree-lined boulevards. There was physical separation between the street portion and the road portion. This allowed the traffic in the middle to operate safely at relatively higher speeds. (The Champs-Élysées was no highway, but it would not surprise me if traffic safely reached speeds of 45 miles per hour on the road portion.)
The ability to cross the Champs-Élysées was the only real impairment, something for which long delays in signal timing could somewhat compensate. When it was time for people to walk across, they were given a fairly long time to make that crossing. When it was time for drivers to operate their vehicles, they were likewise given a long turn at dominating the space. I was deeply impressed.
Years later, I visited the great incremental developer R. John Anderson when he was living in Chico, California. There he introduced me to the Esplanade,
