Safe and Productive Streets: Putting People First
Streets, Roads, and Stroads: Streets
A street is more than just a stretch of asphalt. It is a platform for building wealth in our communities. Streets are the most valuable assets to our city, and we must take care of them.
Our streets put people first: wide sidewalks, inviting and lively streets, a healthy mix of homes and business, traffic-calming devices, and a whole host of things to make people safe and welcome in their environment.
Streets, Roads, & Stroads: Roads
A road is a high-speed connection between productive places.
Roads are what traffic engineers design best. They are meant to be wide, with large shoulders and clear zones, separate and apart from our streets. Roads also implement the “forgiving design” and protect drivers from deadly crashes.
A road is a classic point A to point B connection that is separate from our streets.
Streets, Roads, & Stroads: Stroads
A stroad is an awkward, deadly, street-road hybrid. A stroad tries to be a productive place (street) while also accommodating high-speed travel (road).
But stroads fail at both jobs. Miserably. Stroads rob cities of wealth and put people in deadly environments.
The High Injury Network
Around 60% of Houston’s deadliest crashes happen on 9% of our total thoroughfares. It’s not hard to see that these deadly crashes happen on stroads. Strong Towns belives in getting rid of stroads once and for all and restoring the street-road dichotomy. No more stroads.
