Beyond Stroads: 5 Glossary Terms for Building a Strong Town
An example of a typical stroad. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
If Strong Towns has one major claim to fame, it’s the word “stroad.” Founder Chuck Marohn coined this combination of “street” plus “road” to describe a form of transportation and land use that’s had disastrous consequences for North America’s towns and cities. For Strong Towns, stroad is more than a novelty word. It’s a way of explaining a complex, interrelated series of problems—safety, productivity, disinvestment—that plague modern development. Here are some other coined phrases and words that help tell the story of the daunting-yet-important challenges that local advocates all across North America grapple with.
Transportation Industrial Complex
If you want to know why our built environment looks the way it does, follow the finance streams. In housing, this takes the form of easy financing to build a 10-acre housing complex and a hassle to get a mortgage to renovate a duplex. The transportation version is that while municipalities struggle to perform basic maintenance on existing infrastructure, they can tap into tens of millions of dollars in federal and state funding to expand a highway or build a new stroad. Often those grants come with undesired strings attached, such as increasing speeds on adjacent roads, which leads to a perverse incentive structure in transportation decision-making. One of Strong Towns’ core campaigns is End Highway Expansion. Accomplishing that, and allocating transportation funding where it would benefit the maximum number of people regardless of vehicle type, would make a big dent in the TIC.
Thickening
There’s almost certainly a place in your community—a vacant lot, a failed shop, a lonely street—that you think is ripe for renovating into a new business or housing. Your instinct is right: activating underutilized land within existing boundaries is the best thing your city can do. Strong Towns calls this thickening, and by taking advantage of existing infrastructure and population centers, it’s better for people and municipal finances alike. As a bonus, incremental development is often done by local citizens and businesses who think of their communities as more than a profit center. Think of it as the opposite of a sprawl pattern, which calls for completely new infrastructure in a place that won’t have the tax base to support its maintenance. Thickening takes places where the pipes, and the people, already are.
Shameflag
It sounds like a benign idea: Give pedestrians an orange flag when they’re crossing the street to make them more visible to cars. The shame in shameflags is that we would make the victims in the traffic violence equation be the ones who need to take action. Not to mention that, as Strong Towns Video Producer Mike Pasternock memorably and dangerously demonstrated in this video, they don’t have much effect on driver behavior. Dutch traffic engineers use the continuous sidewalk, in which the level of the crosswalk (or bike lane) is elevated relative to the roadway, as a way to telegraph that the shared space belongs to pedestrians and not vice-versa. Traffic calming, curb extensions, and longer pedestrian intervals are a much more serious and effective way to reduce pedestrian deaths than making them carry battle flags into the roadway arena.
Roadpilled
(See also, Transportation Industrial Complex)
Citizen advocates often encounter elected officials or planning professionals who seem stuck in a very specific mindset and suite of solutions. To freeway fighters, these stakeholders have been roadpilled, effectively ruling out any option but the maximum expansion of a highway (and the funding streams that come with it). There are other forms of this bias, but one of the best ways to break through is with “do the math” arguments. That’s what Rochester, New York, officials did when they convinced the state department of transportation that it was a good deal to replace a highway that needed tens of millions of dollars of deferred maintenance with acres of productive city land.
Indicator Species
In the book Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn writes that “humans are the indicator species of success.” This is an anthropological way of describing an observable phenomenon: People congregate where they’re comfortable. Countless studies show that people who spend time in a place will also spend money, which is why Strong Towns posits that spending on pedestrian and human-powered infrastructure is the best investment your city can make. You can also spot the opposite across the North American landscape, vast swaths of land made completely inhospitable for anyone not in a car (and for drivers, too). One of the recurring themes of the annual Strongest Town Contest is how places are striving to make their shared spaces more welcoming, through a combination of design and safety improvements, support for local businesses, and event programming to bring people together. The indicator species will tell you if you’re doing it well.
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.