It's not meant as a direct rebuttal because the article is so far off it isn't even wrong, due to a lack of context around the town's history, and it completely ignores the schooltime 20mph speed limit posted with big flashing signs and enforced by city police. Those schools were both built years or decades before the city even had its first stoplight, long before the other 90% of safe neighborhood streets even existed. There were only farms on a one-mile grid system in most of the city.
Then over time developers built neighborhoods and the population exploded, so as the population grew the roads had to be expanded. Traffic planners had to move people somewhere, and they compensated for the wide streets with 20mph school speed limits, volunteer crossing guards, extensive education of children and drivers, and regular active enforcement of the school speed.
So the article comes across as clueless, seemingly almost deliberately so to exploit a tragedy.
I used to live there. I hadn't heard about this loss, but if it's the schools I'm thinking, the open fields are either active farms, or used to have a church when those schools were built. The speed limits are reduced to 20 during school crossing hours. The schools were both built when Syracuse had fewer than 5000 residents and no need for major arteries.
The article seems to assume the reader knows about "strong towns". If they're trying to make an argument about overspending on roads it's very poorly worded and organized.
The author, along with many strongtown arguments I've read, completely misses the point. A cul-de-sac is not optimized for cost, efficiency, or anything measurable by numbers. The value is in community building - kids playing in a safe area away from a trafficked road, neighborhood BBQs, a place to learn to ride a bike, etc.
Many suburbs don't have access to a park or even parking lot right outside their door, but a cul-de-sac provides a very convenient and safe space
To counter those thinking car traffic still exists since its a road - it does not. Neighbors in a cul-de-sac see kids playing in it all the time and when turning off the main road slow down to a crawl or stop.
EDIT: My comment kind of misses the point of the article - that cul-de-sacs should maybe be taxed higher since they're inefficient from a cost perspective. Most of the article reads very negatively against them though, and the bias of strongtowns bolsters that point for me.
I'm not sold. I live on a so-called road, it's comprised of a single lane of paved dirt that stretches on for 3/4ths of a mile. On top of that, the very first line is just utterly comical:
> If we want to build towns that are financially productive, we need to identify and eliminate stroads.
You're missing the point on why they're made. They're built to facilitate expansion in confined areas. I'd argue that it's more dangerous and less financially productive to have a street there, and incredibly more dangerous to put a road there. So, what's the solution?
Only the article is incorrect as pointed out in my other comments down voted comments. And this does matter because it changes a lot of the tone and basis of the article.
Sure there was some building of some sort there back in their 1962 photo. But that isn’t Harriet Tubman school we are talking about today. The school was only opened in 1982. Built after pressure by community activists who wanted a school in their neighborhood. Further it was actually closed in 2012 and then reopened in 2018. With much written at the time of reopening about the pollution problem.
So really the “villain” (if there should be one) would have to be Portland Public Schools that built, closed, then reopened a school next to an existing traffic sewer. In 1980s it is somewhat forgivable mistake, we weren’t as aware then. But in 2018 they knew full damn well the pollution problem. Nobody can deny that.
This school shouldn't be there. Is pollution bad? Yes. Was Robert Moses and his cohorts a disaster for urban environments? Yes. Do cities need to be greener and have better transit? Yes. But still, the school simply shouldn’t be there. So the article really falls apart on a number of levels.
In this case I think people using the existence of the school to campaign against this freeway project are doing a selfish disservice to the students. I'm generally anti-freeway, very pro-transit, very pro-urban. But let's be clear: the current levels of pollution are unacceptable as is, regardless of widening. The school shouldn't stay where it is even if the freeway doesn't get widened. So the people using it as a prop in their campaign to prevent widening are essentially arguing it is fine to stay where it is. This is sad and IMO a selfish use of this bad situation for the students of this school by the anti-freeway campaigners.
> What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse
> For instance, Paris in recent decades has had a persistent policy to dramatically downsize and reduce roadways. “Driving in Paris was bad before,” said Duranton. “It’s just as bad, but it’s not much worse.”
Bigger roads are worse, and smaller roads are worse?
There's a point here somewhere but they've failed to make it.
What a terrible article. Spends half the time talking about how important it is to use data and not take a simplistic view of the issue, and the other half ignoring data and dismissing things based on a simplistic (if not strawman) view.
> That means 25 percent of the value of roads and streets is due to their ability to move freight. Yet freight is hardly considered by planners when designing their regional transportation plans. Mindless slowing of traffic by, say, 20 percent increases costs to freight companies by forcing them to buy 20 percent more trucks and hire 20 percent more drivers.
I couldn’t find anyone trying to “mindlessly slow traffic”. So this is acting as if all roads are equally used for moving freight, which they aren’t. Slowing roads with a high amount of pedestrian/car interactions doesn’t necessarily effect freight movement from industrial areas onto highways and larger arterial roads.
> vision zero is based the simplistic idea that, “people hit by fast cars are more likely to die than people hit by slow cars, so therefore slowing down traffic is the sole measure to be taken to improve safety.” Cities such as Portland have been implementing this idea for several decades, and the increase in traffic fatalities in those cities proves that it doesn’t work.
See here for an article about the data used by Vision Zero [1] and judge for yourself if it is portrayed accurately in this article. Then there is just throwing out the assertion that Portland has more traffic fatalities, therefore measures didn’t work. Did Portland increase in population over that time period? Did the actual rates go up, or just absolute numbers? Dismissing based on a single data point doesn't sound data-driven. Datum-driven, maybe.
> Safer transit means buses, not rail lines. Buses have been involved with the fewest fatalities, per billion passenger-miles, of any of the major modes of transit. Buses are also less expensive than any rail mode. Proponents of rail transit, particularly light rail and streetcars, clearly are uninterested in improving urban safety.
Again, blanket statement based on literally 1 data point. Never looks at light rail that moves people into and out of a city (hub and spoke) vs intracity light rail. Never looks at raised track vs on street. Has no interest in actual data.
> Americans are not dependent on autos: they are liberated by them, enjoying far greater mobility than anyone else, anywhere else, in the entire history of humanity. That mobility has made us wealthy and given us access to, among other things, better health care.
Yeah, citation needed. As someone who has traveled outside the US, I have seen plenty of cities where high quality public transit felt pretty liberating and mobile, and plenty of American cities where if you didn’t rent a car, you were trapped. Also, healthcare? You're really going to hang our hat on the US healthcare system?
> While programs such as complete streets call for greater mixing of bicycles, pedestrians, and motor vehicles, safety can be better improved by separating uses.
This feels deliberately false, since Complete Streets does call for separating uses, but it depends on the actual context of the situation as to what measures would work best [2].
> much of the increase in fatalities since 2014 was among pedestrians, and most of the increase in pedestrian fatalities took place at night and involved pedestrians engaging in unsafe behavior such as jaywalking. Some say this is blaming the victim, but it is important to understand the problem before trying to fix it. Most of the remedies offered by urban planners—such as traffic calming, complete streets, and vision zero—don’t address the problem of unsafe pedestrian behavior.
Like a broken record, this seems deliberately false. The entire point of those programs are to make systems where safely moving through an area, whether it is as a pedestrian or car, is safer by default. It is baffling to me how they can specifically call out jaywalking, and then spend the rest of the article deriding programs that improve safely crossing the street. They are heavily implying that it is the individual pedestrians making the “wrong” choice, instead of a system designed to provide a safe and convenient option that makes safety the default. Sounds like the opposite of data driven.
Did I miss something? I don't see anywhere where it "debunks" anything.
It has some talk about traffic accidents when you travel outside of a cul-de-sac, but doesn't talk about the increased safety inside (especially for say children who play in the area), doesn't talk about crime rates, or any of the reasons people move into suburban areas. It throws in some off the cuff comment about being more connected, but doesn't say why that would be true in a more densely populated grid layout (as opposed to knowing your neighbor more in the the suburbs).
The article seems really poor actually, rushed to meet a deadline.
right. i agree. and the original post seems to make an unjustified leap at the end. after spending the entire article discussing how traffic congestion didn't increase, they say:
...its a strong sign that more modest changes to road systems really don’t have much impact on metropolitan prosperity.
the amount of traffic congestion and the economic prosperity of the Atlanta region are not the same thing at all. where does the article support the notion that the economy was not hurt?
> At first, the state just puts random names on the streets. This helps some, but the residents still colloquially go by the old terms they know, which causes problems for dispatch. Moreover, most of those alleys are still too narrow for ambulances to get through. The state decides on a more radical project: it’s going to plow through what it can and build new, ordered streets based on a grid. While they’re at it, they decide to make one commercial district and one residential district – it’s just a better system.
Just count the absurdities. "[T]he state just puts random names on the streets." Ludicrous. I mean, we can't even talk about this because we've lumped so many different things into the term, "state." To even begin thinking about this, we have to assume, as I'll do, a first-world democracy, for the sake of having something to talk about. I'd give even odds that in no first world democracy has "the state just [put] random names" on streets, especially where the residents have "old terms they know." Even if they did, how likely is it that no dispatcher would be, or know, a resident? How likely is complete ignorance on their part.
Then, we have: "The state decides on a more radical project: it’s going to plow through what it can and build new, ordered streets based on a grid." What? Here we can go quite a ways down the scale from "enlightened democracy" down toward "tin pot dictatorship" and we still strain credulity to think of a public welfare project where "the state" whimsically decides to "plow through what they can" and rebuild "based on a grid." (As evidenced, I suppose, by all the recently reordered neighborhoods on Google Maps, and by the news stories of the brand new kind of urban displacement that would entail.)
And they just "decide," "while they're at it," to rezone? Unlikely to the point of making one angry. It shocks the intellect.
The article is pablum, meant to rehearse a mushy market ideology so that a pathetic kind of know-it-all can feel better about their vaguely held lazy beliefs.
Citation needed on what you have read as well. I too have read the same, but it conflicts with the reality that suburbs have existed for more than 100 years now, and those old ones have added and replaced infrastructure many times over their history.
That nothing i've read acknowledges that fact suggests they are cherry picking evidence instead of giving an unbiased analysis .
What the original article doesn't emphasize enough is that because the project isn't close enough to the density and viability and desirability of a vibrant and dense town center, it will not evolve into to one, but rather evolve in the other direction, toward a strip mall.
They do touch on this with a few quotes:
"As a result, these places tend not to hold their value over time, and to feel very dated after a couple decades."
"these places are also liabilities from a public-finance point of view because their drive-to, drive-away nature means that huge amounts of the land must go to roads and parking, which require maintenance but generate no direct value, and no tax revenue for the local government."
The Strong Towns website likes to emphasize urbanism from a city-accountant point of view: would you like your town/city to attract people and have a rising tax-base (aka value) so that you can afford to maintain the infrastructure, rather than lose value to the point where you can't afford to maintain it, and it deteriorates and becomes even more undesirable.
This place might be attractive for a while, but if it is only superficial with ice cream shops and brewpubs, it's just another place to drive to, not live in. When they build a Walmart and Home Depot and food court 10 miles away, people will drive there for cheaper stuff. If people live close enough to walk here, it may develop a small hardware store, some clothes shopping, and maybe a thrift store. If the people who live nearby have to get into their car anyway, it will be just a destination among many, not a livable place.
I think that is the criticism of this project: it is not good enough to become what they want you to think that it is.
While the article may have issues, I've not seen a compelling argument explaining lower suburban crime rates by their lower density instead of the huge unaddressed socioeconomic problems that in part drove suburbanization.
> Generally there is a hierarchy of roads called functional class. It goes local street - collector - minor arterial - major arterial - freeway.
This heirarchy seems to miss the importance distinction that Strong Towns makes between a "street" and a "road", in that "streets" are places where human life takes place, and "roads" are how vehicles move rapidly from place to place. It has only category with the word "street" literally present, and then moves immediately to other things whose relationship to the street/road distinction is unclear. This is a problem because streets include those that are purely residental as well as those with retail etc.
I really wish urbanists would stop blaming transportation infrastructure for poverty and racism.
The article itself mentions that this poverty is systemic to dozens of issues in the area (zoning rules, poor public transit, suburbs not having section 8 housing, loosing 10,000 jobs in three years, and many more).
Eliminating a freeway does nothing to address any of those issues.
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And everyone knows this. What "ReThink81" really wants is to take that public infrastructure land, sell it to developers for cheap so they can make a lot of profit off building luxury condos and luxury retail/commercial spaces.
It will be a happy accident when the rise in property values "just so happens" to displace a number of the existing poor residents.
> The models haven't been significantly updated or reconsidered since, even though the development patterns have been mandated by law to become much less dense, while street standards have also greatly increased, meaning much less tax base to support much more infrastructure.
This sounds like the utter lack of critical thinking which might result in a failing grade for a college term paper, so what gives? As in, what is the thinking with which sane people could justify using such models and/or approving estimates?
A lot of people simply dislike density beyond the density found in small towns and suburbs and are willing to pay a bit of a premium for that living condition. The author even "admits that the ideas of the Garden City and the Decentrists made sense on their own terms: a suburban town appealing to privacy-oriented, automobile-loving personalities should tout its green space and low-density housing. [Their] anti-orthodox frustration stems from the fact that their anti-urban biases somehow became an inextricable part of the mainstream academic and political consensus on how to design cities themselves[.]"
I noticed that the author mentions that a busier city street is safer from violent crime but doesn't acknowledge that very busy streets are also havens for pickpockets, whereas you generally get it both ways on mostly-vacant-except-cars streets in lower density areas with little to no violent crime.
I think the article was about highways specifically (the arguments do not really hold up in an urban environment), but I don't think it said so specifically.
This was a transparent attempt to use techies love of Waze to influence opinion about ultra conservative public planning ideas.
Building more roads does not make traffic better. They shit on public transit while completely ignoring any other benefits (e.g. cost efficiency, energy efficiency, safety) or the possibility of growth.
It was obvious that this article was bullshit within the first few paragraphs.
Then over time developers built neighborhoods and the population exploded, so as the population grew the roads had to be expanded. Traffic planners had to move people somewhere, and they compensated for the wide streets with 20mph school speed limits, volunteer crossing guards, extensive education of children and drivers, and regular active enforcement of the school speed.
So the article comes across as clueless, seemingly almost deliberately so to exploit a tragedy.
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