in the high property values.
Five blocks east is Mangrove Avenue, a nasty stroad that runs parallel to the Esplanade. Mangrove Avenue has the gas stations, strip malls, and other auto-oriented businesses typical of American strip development, a style not only less productive financially but far more fragile than that found along the Esplanade. In 2018, both stroads accommodated around 22,000 vehicles a day, despite the radically different design and outlook.
The Champs-Élysées and the Esplanade are exceptions to the norm, but I include them here because they are not only good models to understand, they reinforce the notion that the critical tradeoff is not between access and mobility but between street and road, between building a place and traveling between places.
Incidentally, I had the opportunity to visit Paris again in 2019. This time my wife and I were joined by our daughters. In a way that I am sure is doing long-term psychological damage to my children, I was excited to show them the layout and design of Paris, including the slip lanes along the Champs-Élysées. After building them up to my family and eagerly anticipating them myself, I could not find them anywhere. They were gone.
All the street space that was formerly used for parking and slow-speed driving has now been given over to people on foot. Parisians have wisely decided that the area surrounding the Champs-Élysées is far more valuable when a high number of people can access it on foot, as opposed a lesser number of people accessing it by automobile. Successful experiments in limiting or banning automobiles in parts of the core of Paris are extensions of this realization. The Champs-Élysées is no longer a stroad.
The idea of banning automobiles today on State Street in Springfield is an absurdity, as it is for almost all stroads within North American cities. Our neighborhoods are simply not valuable enough as places either to warrant or sustain themselves without some automobile access. Yet achieving that level of wealth and productivity must be the goal.
Building great roads and productive streets is ultimately about making the places we inhabit so prosperous, so productive, so valuable, and so inviting that they transcend the need to accommodate the automobile.
The Walt Disney Corporation would never make Cinderella's castle in the Magic Kingdom accessible by car. Whatever added value there is from being able to drive right up to the castle would be dwarfed by the lost value from individual automobiles diminishing the overall experience of the park itself. The park is such a valuable place, the streets within it have created such wealth, that it only needs roads to connect it to other places to thrive.
Springfield is not a theme park. It is a city where people live, work, and occasionally take their kids to the library. The automobile is going to be a reality along State Street for years, likely decades, to come. A reality, but not the goal.
The goal must be to turn the stroad of State Street into a wealth-producing street. That will require a shift in emphasis from moving traffic to building a productive place — one focused on the needs and experiences of the people who live there.
The Strong Towns Approach
Roads are high-speed connections between productive places. Streets are platforms for building wealth within a place. The greatest value in a transportation system is provided when building roads or streets.
A stroad is a street–road hybrid. It contains the elements of both road and street but fails to provide the benefits of either. Stroads are expensive to build and maintain and have low financial productivity. The complexity of the stroad environment combines with high traffic speeds to create environments that are extremely dangerous.
Cities must discard the hierarchical transportation networks and instead identify their streets and their roads. Where hierarchical classification is required for federal or state funding, it should be considered advisory and subordinate to a transportation map that identifies roads and streets within the community.
The decision on whether a transportation investment is a road or a street is a policy decision requiring no technical expertise. That decision must be made by elected officials, individuals who are accountable to the citizens of a community. It should not be made by technical professionals.
More information on streets, roads, and stroads is available at www.confessions.engineer.
Notes
1 1. https://www.mutcd.fhwa/dot.gov/htm/2009/part1a.htm
2 2. Nordhoff, Larry S. (2005). Motor Vehicle Collision Injuries: Biomechanics, Diagnosis, and Management (Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning), page 53.
3 3. Tefft, B.C. (2011). Impact Speed and a Pedestrian's Risk of Severe Injury or Death (Washington, D.C.: AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety).
4 4. https://gis.massdot.state.ma.us/topcrashlocations/
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