In suburbs, those stroads are essential to get people from place to place. IMO that "essential" ends at the edge of a city -- at high density, cars selfishly dominate public spaces, and actually detract from that environment's utility. It's a scalability problem; single occupancy cars can only move so much meat. Walking + biking + transit can move a lot more meat in a dense space.
I think a lot of people do want those suburban environments even today. I'm not sure many people want today's US city center environment that has been compromised by the car.
If there's a stroad, it's a suburban society, not an urban society.
Urban societies have existed for millennia, and before cars, people weren't all riding around on horses to accomplish their daily life. Personal transport was the exception, not the rule.
People in the US think that stroads and roads and cars are the only way to live, because we have outlawed other forms of living. Our lack of low-car city designs isn't because people don't want them, or because they aren't conducive to modern life, they simply don't exist because they have been banned from the marketplace.
That is certainly true. But the problem with stroads isn't merely one of esthetics; they're expensive and inefficient, and they exist primarily because everything is designed around suburban car owners who want to do everything by car. They're completely inaccessible to anyone who can't afford a car. Stroads are themselves elitists because they exist for people who don't live there, don't care about the neighbourhood, about accessibility for others, or how much economic or environmental damage it does, as long as they're not inconvenienced by it.
Old city centers turned into massive thoroughfares destroy the communities that live there. Whole communities get sacrificed for affluent car owners from the suburbs. But this is not just harmful for poor people, it's also bad for the economy in general; they're inefficient, cost too much money to maintain, don't make enough money, so they require constant influx of subsidies, and this sort of development has lead to the bankruptcy of several US cities. It's not sustainable from any perspective.
And, before people start saying "you don't understand, America is so big, we need cars," well, that's only true when you're talking about farmers and rural residents.
In reality, most Americans live in cities and suburbs, concentrated on the costs and in the Midwest, with urbanization only increasing over time.
In other words, most people in the US already live in areas where there is sufficient density and short enough distances to live in a place where maybe you need to own a car but you shouldn't necessarily need to use the car for every type of trip.
There are suburban designs emphasizing single family homes that can still accommodate a lifestyle that isn't using a car for every type of trip, but North America has simply not developed that way.
Development in North America goes wildly beyond just accommodating cars, it instead actively designs in hostility toward pedestrians, cyclists, and generally having the chance of using anything but a car for getting around. Features like:
- Winding suburban developments separate themselves from the main street grid to eliminate thru traffic, but that also makes walking/cycling out of the development impractical by extending travel distance
- Stroads [1] and big box developments make it unsafe/impossible/impractical to walk to businesses that are right next door or otherwise in the same development, never mind crossing the actual street.
- Transit system design and schedules that emphasize downtown travel during bankers hours.
There are a few American suburbs that are well-walkable and still support automobile transport. They're just not engineered to _only_ support automotive transport. We've had them, then destroyed them.
It's because a lot of the problem has to do with how Car centric the US is and Suburbs in particular are extremely car dependent. It's not super clear you can change that without massively rebuilding them.
So take an example: let's say you want to go grocery shopping from your home in a walk-able urban center, it could be a 10 minute walk to get that done.
In my suburban neighborhood a 6 minute drive to the nearest grocery store becomes a 50 minute walk along 3 lane highways.
I get it’s the practical answer given the state of how things are, but wanting to change the car instead of the infrastructure that forces the use of the car betrays a lack of imagination for how things could be.
I own a car, I’m not a “destroy all cars” guy. I just don’t want it to be the only option. The American suburban experiment has resulted in the least active, the least healthy, the most indebted, the most isolated, and the loneliest generation. Yes, of course there’s many other factors. But when you look at the studies of where people know the fewest neighbors by name, it’s in the little boxes on the hillside. Sprawl ain’t helping.
I get it, we all want plentiful cheap land after we’re done living with roommates. I do too. But there’s gotta be a better way than strip malls nestled between HOA-gated subdivisions, connected only by 45mph 6-lane stroads. There’s gotta be a way to build human-centric. Let’s talk about what the next suburban experiment will look like instead of perpetually adding more lanes, always straining to connect our increasingly disconnected subdivisions.
In large parts of the US, this isn't necessarily true. Our cities and suburbs are designed around individual auto use. Re-designing these areas to be more pedestrian and mass-transit oriented would likely be a quality-of-life increase for most people.
One of the interesting points is that there is a commonality between those suburbans and people who want walkable urban areas: few of us want to deal with the problems of lots of cars driving around us.
Population density is misleading. Vast majority live in urban and suburban areas. Urban areas can handle things just fine without cars (and really they need to stop catering to car transit, remove highways that go through downtowns, and eliminate parking options), suburbs just need to have zoning fixed so there are things like convenience stores or a local doctors office in your neighborhood. If you live in a rural area and want to drive a car everywhere that's perfectly fine, but we need to move away from focusing on what a small percentage of people do and focus on serving most people instead.
Suburbanites will certainly oppose this as well, but eventually economic physics will force them to change their habits regardless of what they want.
> We can barely maintain our existing infrastructure in too many cases, let alone rebuild it all.
Right, which is why doubling down on cars is bananas. We already can't afford to maintain all of these roads, let alone build new ones or expand. Fortunately, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. Repurposing existing highways to initially allow for bus rapid transit alongside personal automobile transit, for example, can help. We probably need a nationwide moratorium on new road construction for 20-50 years to really get things back in a good state.
The thing is that this is really only true for people in dense urban environments. For instance, parking is not an issue in suburbia. There are use cases, like getting from your home to the train station, but it's not nearly as universal as it is for people who can currently get by with no car at all.
Cars aren't the terrible thing that many pro urban folk here seem to make them out to be, and I suspect most people prefer driving them to cycling or using public transport.
Similarly, the whole idea of automated driving becoming the default and humans not being able to drive is something I'm 100% against, since it'd be both a privacy nightmare and take away a lot of people's freedom.
The problem is really more that some places are designed to only be usable in a car, and that's what's poorly designed.
Speaking of which, also that suburbs aren't a bad thing. Again, it feels like people take the car focused design common in the US, and assume that's how these have to be. Thousands of identical houses in the middle of nowhere with everything interesting a 30 minute drive away.
But that's not necessarily true, and (as seen in most of the world), suburbs can be quite nice places to live in. A walkable one (like many in Europe) can be just as valid a place to live as a dense city neighborhood or rural area.
I agree with most of this. Maybe the problem is with how people write about the issue coupled with the modern social media driven need to edgelord it. I often see this stuff in the form of “fuck cars” type opinions that sound clueless and one sided. Of course the pro-car counter also ends up sounding clueless and one sided.
I’ve spent much of my life in dense cities and currently live in suburb (with an EV). There are things I like and dislike about both settings, and I don’t really want either to disappear. In the US we could definitely use more walkable towns and I totally support zoning reform. I also think some suburbs could be retrofitted into walkable town designs over time and I’d be down with this.
I live in the suburbs. And I’m anti-car in as much as we can and should do more to make cars less necessary for day-to-day life. Make schools walkable. Make basic shopping walkable. Build mix-use town centers instead of strip malls with acres of parking.
Doing these things frees up space for other things. That could be housing or green space.
And if there’s less traffic overall, it becomes easier to get out to the mountains/forest/etc.
I don’t disagree that true nature is different than groomed parks. And I like nature. But I’d rather not spend 3 hours in suburban traffic to get to the mountains that are 40 miles away.
Do you live in the USA? We don’t “prefer” cars. Cars are the only way to get around in this country. There are no options for a majority of people.
It’s not a preference. It’s a choice shoved down our throats by decades of destroying urban cores, bulldozing poor communities/neighborhoods in favor of massive highway projects, and removing bustling streets of human activity with useles parking lots.
The suburban experiment is a massive failure on all levels. It’s not scalable. It’s incredibly wasteful. Federal/state/local governments dump trillions of dollars on maintenance of this fucking mess.
I think many American cities are in a sort of local optima with regard to cars. Any change that makes walking more viable will reduce the utility of everyone using cars. Converting the freeway right-of-way to rail would take a long time and make lots of people mad in the meantime.
A car can get you places, yes. But it also requires money to purchase, maintain, insure, and fuel. Many people are not great at driving them, killing people in the process. People get fat because they never have to walk anywhere. There is a cost for this convenience.
> Zoning is a choice by a community to preserve the lifestyle and neighborhood character they have built, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Sure, in isolation it makes sense. But then almost every city says the same thing. Then sprawl is the only choice for new people. And the “neighbor character” you have preserved is “only rich people are allowed to move in here”.
I don't think car haters deny that cars can be useful, particularly in the environment we've constructed here in the USA. Hell, I own (half of) a car, because I want to visit family and friends who live a couple of hours away, and there's no train or even bus that could bring me to them.
> The suburbs were built for people driving cars. Not just cars. People getting rides in cars, avoiding weather, sitting comfortably, transporting the handicapped and the infirm and the older folks.
No, they were built for cars. Giant 4-lane 45 MPH stroads with no sidewalks that "connect" neighborhoods for cars, but isolate anyone without a car... those are built for cars. Driveways are built for people to get to cars, and some cul-de-sacs are built for children to play (but not teenagers to do anything interesting outside the yard -- they might get in trouble).
A lot of us just want SOMEPLACE in the USA where we can live without a car. NYC is the only place I can think of that accomplishes that, but with median rent hitting 3-4k/mo, that's out of reach for all but the highest earners. There are some cities and towns where you can occasionally do things outside of a car if you're willing to pay a premium and deal with poor infrastructure, but it all feels very fringe -- as if you're doing something you shouldn't.
Remember that wanting places without cars does not mean we want to ban cars, or stop people from using them in rural areas, or blow up the suburbs, or anything that wild. We just want to de-emphasize cars in dense environments so we can walk around!
Do you like having to drive everywhere, to shops with massive parking lots? Or having stroads not safe for your kids to play on where cars blast past at 40mph?
Have you been to places where they do density right? Paris comes to mind, as does the urban centers of the Netherlands.
Not everyone wants to live in the city, that's cool. But even inherently low density suburbs in the US suck. We used to have walkable streetcar suburbs [0], then the car came along and fucked everything up.
In suburbs, those stroads are essential to get people from place to place. IMO that "essential" ends at the edge of a city -- at high density, cars selfishly dominate public spaces, and actually detract from that environment's utility. It's a scalability problem; single occupancy cars can only move so much meat. Walking + biking + transit can move a lot more meat in a dense space.
I think a lot of people do want those suburban environments even today. I'm not sure many people want today's US city center environment that has been compromised by the car.
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