Great piece. I appreciate the time it took to break down these arguments. That said, I am not sure that you picked the right target in Strong Towns, who are really not your typical New Urbanists. I suspect that your case against them has something to do with your aesthetic distaste for density and urban living. And that may be somewhat warranted, as lots of urbanism boosters foster a thinly veiled distaste for rural and suburban living. But again, I do not think that is what Strong Towns is going for. My reading of Strong Towns is not “cities good; everything else bad.” I don't even think that they are anti-car. Rather, I think that they are advocating a move from exurban sprawl to something resembling old-fashioned inner-ring suburbs and small towns with charming Main Streets.
The exurban sprawl issue is where the case against stroads comes in and it is a particularly confusing concept. Here is a pretty easy way to know if you are on a stroad. If you go down to the commercial district to run visit two stores that are exactly across from each other on opposite sides of the street/road, how would you get from the first to the second? If the answer is ‘walk across,’ then you are on a street. If the answer is ‘get in your car, drive away from your destination and find somewhere you can make a u-turn, then drive back and pull into the parking lot,’ then you are on a stroad.
Part of the reason why you cannot suss out a clear position on density is that they do not see density as something that ought to be determined or prescribed by policy. A place should be as dense as it needs to be to support the economic vitality and financial health of the place. One of Marohn’s big crusades is against the need for local governments to endlessly issue debt that it can never pay off. The reason that happens is because many of cities and towns have way more infrastructure than they can maintain given their tax base. This ties back to stroads, which require all the commercially viable businesses to be located over an unnecessarily large area, which necessitates more capex and more operating expenses, which make these places not economically viable in the long run.
You were right to start this with a discussion of preferences, but preferences are part of the problem. People want to live in nicer, more pleasant neighbourhoods than they can afford, so they try to mimic nicer locations with land-use regulations. That works for a while, but eventually the bills come due and the people with means have moved on to the next new housing development or shopping complex.
There's no doubt that the four-to-six lane arterials where malls, supermarkets, and big box stores are located are not particularly pretty. Nor pleasant to cross on foot, nor even pleasant to drive on. But they are quite suited for their purpose, which is providing a way to get to the stores. Just pejorating them as "stroads" and claiming they shouldn't exist doesn't solve that problem.
As for the Strongtowns thing about infrastructure, it's nonsense to anyone who has looked at a municipal budget. It's not physical infrastructure that takes the vast majority of the budget, it's salaries for services for residents. Education, police, fire. Commercial development is often welcomed because it tends to be a net positive for the budget.
- My point about stroads is that the definition is not confusing. You know one when you see one.
- Aesthetics aside, the main issue with stroads is that they are supposed to be commercial districts but are completely inhospitable to pedestrians. Is that a problem? It depends. Certainly there are equity concerns. Personally, I am more worried about the fact that large numbers of Americans report not being able to come up with $1,000 in an emergency while the average car payment is somewhere between $400 and $500. Are these things related? Maybe, maybe not.
- I try to avoid getting into housing and planning conversations that rely on "expert" opinion about how things should be built. Instead, I can just look at revealed preference. Do more people want to live in inner-ring suburbs or in the exurbs? Which has the higher housing prices? I don't think anyone chooses exurban sprawl. I think it's were we end up by default when more desirable modes of development are made unworkable by zoning, by other regulations (environmental impact assessments, fire codes, ADA compliance, etc.) and by financing conditions (it's hard to get a mortgage unless you are a known entity building one of a set number of products).
- Yes municipal budgets are dominated by current expenditure, but that is because local governments fund capex off-budget through the issuance of general obligation bonds. Are those bonds sustainable? I don't know. After the global financial crisis, Meredith Whitney predicted that municipal bonds would be the next to go bust. It hasn't happened yet. Munis still get pretty strong rating. Maybe there is nothing to worry about.
- I'm no expert on local government budgeting, but I do work in public finance. Here is an analogy: the United States has a AAA sovereign bond rating. Does that mean our public finances are perfect and there's nothing to worry about? I suppose how you answer that question depends on how you view these things.
- This goes back to the issues with stroads and what gets built next to them. Local governments love commercial development; it brings tax revenue without the liability of residents to service. So they build shiny new strip malls with chain stores (the only ones who can jump through all the regulatory hoops and get financing) that amortize over 20 years. What happens as they age? There's not much incentive to refurbish or redevelop, because a newer shinier strip mall has opened up a half mile down the road. Same goes for the residential subdivisions. So these areas just slide down the economic ladder, which means even less tax revenue while the operating costs remain the same or go up. Plus those bond payments start coming due.
Is all this a problem? I don't know. We will find out, though.
I have limited time in my morning but I wanted to address something:
"My point about stroads is that the definition is not confusing. You know one when you see one."
I have to disagree with this in a sort of complex way. Strong Towns wants you to think it's something where it's definitionally a "bad" combination of a road and a street, but this isn't their actual unearthed opinion - they are lying out their everloving asses about this.
Inherent in their definition is that a stroad is a combination of a road and street, and that this bad - things should be one or the other. If you read their work, a street is a <20mph road where all traffic is prioritized against cars and thus even slower than that in in normal sense. And a road is a thoroughfare that goes fast, but not anywhere people might want to cross it - which in a city is functionally at every point in the road, meaning roads to them are an exclusively "outside of town" thing.
Your personal definition of Stroad might be more different and reasonable and have more nuance, but the actual definition of Stroad they use when you dig down isn't - it's "anything within a city that ever exceeds 20mph".
>If you read their work, a street is a <20mph road where all traffic is prioritized against cars and thus even slower than that in in normal sense
It feels like you've been taking the least defensible aspect of one particular advocacy org's position and painting a broad brush attack on walkability with it.
I'd guess, if you asked them, that even the most ardent advocates for walkability would admit that cities need a variety of speed limits to match the purpose of the roads. I'd read there claims as saying "hey maybe we should have a few less 40MPH 6 lane roads with strip malls on both sides" and instead replace them with a 65mph highway that drops you in a spot that you then go 20 MPH and/or walk to get your stuff. If you want to live urban you live in that 20 MPH zone. If you want to live in the woods you do it, then drive the highway in to the urban area when you need stuff instead of the miles of strip malls.
Here's the thing about this: If I had looked at their articles/work, and found that's what they were saying (they being strong towns) I would have said that instead. But everywhere I looked, they basically don't like roads that go over 20mph anywhere people might want to cross them, which is everywhere in a city.
That's not all walkability people, because it couldn't be; nobody is THAT monolithic. I tried (and probably failed) to represent that there's different levels of it. A lot of those levels I'm fine with - I'm not saying there are no versions of walkability that could ever work. But this is, if not the main site for the moment, at least one of the really big visible outlets. I have to think it's OK to talk about their views as part of this.
That's fine, but this is really more of a 'contra Strong Towns' than a post about walkability. I, personally, had never heard of Strong Towns prior to this post. And that's despite the fact that I value walkability highly and use it as a determining factor in where I live.
I worry that you're fighting a strawman here and that there's room for a more interesting conversation to be had on how we construct our cities and what outcomes we might want from that.
This is obnoxious. If you have an argument, make it and be willing to defend it. Gesturing in the direction of one without putting any rhetorical skin in the game is just dark arts.
> Are those bonds sustainable? I don't know.
Ditto here.
> Aesthetics aside, the main issue with stroads is that they are supposed to be commercial districts but are completely inhospitable to pedestrians. Is that a problem? It depends. Certainly there are equity concerns.
Equity? I am willing to accept unequal distribution of wealth over equal distribution of poverty. It is better for those unable to afford a car to have to deal with the difficulties of those commercial districts on foot (and on buses) than to have to shop at smaller, more expensive stores in walkable areas.
> Local governments love commercial development; it brings tax revenue without the liability of residents to service. So they build shiny new strip malls with chain stores (the only ones who can jump through all the regulatory hoops and get financing) that amortize over 20 years.
The cliche for new strip malls in the areas I've lived is they all have a bank branch, a nail salon, and a convenience store. The bank branch is a chain, the convenience store often is, but the nail salon only rarely. And there are typically restaurants also, only some of which are chains. And other various categories of store, only some of which are chain.
> What happens as they age? There's not much incentive to refurbish or redevelop, because a newer shinier strip mall has opened up a half mile down the road. Same goes for the residential subdivisions. So these areas just slide down the economic ladder, which means even less tax revenue while the operating costs remain the same or go up. Plus those bond payments start coming due.
What actually seems to happen is indeed one strip mall will deteriorate and new ones will be built. But then the deteriorating strip mall will be refurbished or rebuilt and the former new one starts to deteriorate. And the same doesn't happen with residential subdivisions at all; that's a claim Strong Towns makes that isn't generally true. The original Levittowns in the US proper are still doing fine. Based on Zillow, it appears Daly City of "Little Boxes" fame is also.
Apologies for the thread necro, but just chiming in as an attorney who works with a lot of convenience stores to note that even if the store itself is branded as being part of a national or international chain, it's most likely a franchise rather than a corporate store. This means the store is actually a mom-and-pop (owned by a couple people, who probably took out a loan to get the property and start-up capital), only instead of taking out their own branding, they pay the chain for the right to use the chain's brand name, sales strategies (e.g. store layouts and product lines), supply chains, etc.
I'm very sympathetic to the demands of people who like walkability, although only to a certain extent - I cycle, and I much prefer wide roads that give cars plenty of room to pass to narrow roads where I accidentally back up traffic. I think the ideal situation was a town I once lived in called Stevenage in the UK, which had an elaborate network of underpasses that allowed cyclists and pedestrians to pretty much go anywhere in the town without having to cross roads. However, the entire place was built in the 1960s (and everyone hates it and thinks its ugly), so I don't think it's really practical to retrofit those into somewhere else.
I basically agree with you that the best solution is to have lots of different types of community to meet different needs, I think it makes sense to try to make city centres walkable since you're most of the way there already and that's usually what city people like, but you shouldn't forget that there's a need for access from outside the city. I do think the concept of having uncrossable roads is a really bad idea, it's nice to have pedestrian access for those times when its relevant.
I can kind of see what they're doing with the road/street distinction, the location does mean they have different connotations, but in my experience it can be very effective to have "roads" going through cities to separate traffic, as long as there's a way to go around them.
Our city roads are narrow and windy. This makes them quite safe because vehicle speeds are low (<40km/hr average) and it is easy for bikes to occuppy the full lane. I used to live in a city with wide streets (60km/hr av). The collision rate (/km vehicle travelled) with pedestrians and cyclists was quite a bit higher (mostly due tocrashes at intersections),
The residential speed limit in the UK is 30 mph, a little higher than 40 km/hr - given that cars will be overtaking me, I prefer wider roads than narrower roads. But I'd prefer not to cycle on roads with a higher speed limit - 40 mph isn't too bad, and 60 mph is only tolerable if it's a quiet country lane that's empty most of the time! Intersections and roundabouts are definitely the most dangerous places for cyclists because you have to pull out in front of cars, but I do think roundabouts are worse than intersections, the cars are much more unpredictable on a roundabout. Lower speed limits than 30 mph usually means speed bumps, and one of those once put me in the hospital (mudguard came loose when I hit it) so I really hate those, no matter how slowly you go over them it always feels violent!
Cycling is probably the most dangerous thing I do on a regular basis. I'd prefer it if there were more cycle lanes, but they're normally shared with pedestrians and they're much worse than cars, I never have any idea what people on foot are about to do!
I'm in NZ and a commuter cylist off and on for 45 years (20 min ride to work). You have way more traffic than we do. Our residential speed limit is 50kph but locally vehicles seldom reach that, especially during the peaks. I agree roundabouts are dangerous for cyclists. They do make intersections safer for pedestrians and drivers. For me, car doors have been most dangerous, having hit 3 of them, though without injury.
FWIW, I do agree with the Stroaders that pedestrian overpasses are a poor solution to the problem of pedestrians trying to cross major highways. Of course, a poor solution is better than none, but still, overpasses are hard to navigate for people with bicycles, wheelchairs, strollers, and pretty much anyone else who isn't an athletic power jogger. Obviously major high-speed highways are required for transportation, but IMO putting them in the middle of your residential/retail area is not a great idea.
I think it's sort of a matter of degrees, if that makes sense. I don't disagree that the overpasses are less short of a route than if highway didn't exist, but it removes the safety concern of crossing the highway. If you won't accept that, or crosswalks, then what's left is getting rid of the highway, or else having it only curl around the edge of the city. A person might still want to trade for this, but they should know that "highways only on borders, and <20mph everywhere else" is what they are trading for.
I think there's a reasonable middle-ground, though. For example, you could have a 2-lane street, or even a 4-lane street with frequent pedestrian crossings (1 per block), where each crossing has a traffic light and safety isle in the middle. Lots of cities do something like this, and IMO it works reasonably well. Pedestrians can cross (as long as drivers obey traffic lights, which you should make absolutely certain that they do), and vehicles can still move at a decent speed. In addition, as the Stroaders say, the lower speed allows shops and other local businesses to put up storefronts all along the road, and have the road actually channel pedestrians as well as motorists towards the shops.
This really is a warning that people passionate about any 'cause' don't necessarily think dispassionately.
Whether a libertarian approach might work really depends on the stability of the equilibrium ie for an equilibrium solution to emerge conditions need to be fairly stable. At a social/cultural scale that hasn't really been the case for built metropolitan infrastructure for say 100 years or more. Where I live trams were a big thing up through the '50s and the suburbs developed around them. Then cars got cheap and prevalent and suburban development changed accordingly. Now that land availability is constrained by geography (and travel times), metro land is rapidly rising in price and higher density living is arising and dense public transport networks are being promoted by the new residents. etc etc etc. Sometimes it pays to have 'far sighted' people plan ahead. Note, most 'Planners' are people who administer regulation ie there is no selection for 'far sighted' people in their profession.
Great piece! I think about cities a lot, and how they work, so I’m very interested any talk about that subject.
The first thing that comes to my mind is, why isn’t there an intermediate entity between “street” and “road”? Surely the Strong Towns people don’t expect their walkable streets to just -WHABAM- turn into arterial highways all at once? Capillaries don’t immediately empty into the venae cavae.
I personally am a fan of density in cities *if* it comes with relationships among the residents, and some form of base-level community self-policing, like a neighborhood watch. Where I live (Omaha) there is a consistently vocal cohort who really want a streetcar, even though IMHO the city is not nearly dense enough to justify a streetcar’s existence. Last year, the city compromised by starting a new bus line with larger vehicles, dedicated lanes, and larger stops, the goal being to entice people to move closer to the bus and thereby create walkable, dense neighborhoods spaced approximately one mile apart. It’s probably too early to tell, but in the nine months that the program has been in operation the results have been… meh. Barely anyone rides the new bus. I really wanted the idea to work, but I doubt an efficient bus is enough of a draw to make people want to move into denser neighborhoods, much less build them out of scratch (which is what will have to happen in some parts of the city for the idea to work).
I think the problem is that Stroad is a poorly defined thing, and too broadly defined. Any place people would cross it, they want it to be a street (and thus super slow moving) and any place it's a road it has to have really limited access and absolute deference to foot traffic (i.e. become a street, however temporarily). The tricky bit is them not acknowledging there just aren't any places you can actually put a road within a city as they define it - the best you are going to get is something that hugs the borders. They imply you can have your cake and eat it to, but you really can't in most cities under their definition.
One fun thing about the bus line is when they start massaging the data to make it work. Phoenix put in a light rail to be more like California once, and I've been on it a dozen times during peak traffic hours where it was maybe 1/5th full at best. The data all show it's very much used by everybody all the time. I've wanted to deep dive it to see how they are getting those numbers before.
I'm not sure how UK/USA terminology compares, but pedestrian crossings are a decent solution - you can have wide roads for driving at high speed, but as soon as anyone wants to cross the speed limit temporarily becomes 0. That works pretty well if well designed, but it's obviously annoying for both drivers (who have to stop) and pedestrians (who have to cross only at specific points), which suggests its a decent compromise.
Report changes in absolute numbers if you want to encourage a particular transport mode. To analyse actual use of different modes needs comparitive data. I expect transport planners will have built their models on such data.
I found your substack from Scott Alexander's and was so impressed that I read everything on it. While there's some things I disagree with, this was the only post that made me question that if posts were fair and coming from a well informed place. Is Strong Towns right? Maybe, maybe not. But this essay doesn't help me decide due to your refusal to engage their arguments on their terms. I think you're being unfair in a few places, which could be from misunderstanding what Strong Towns is about:
1. You question their definition of roads and streets here:
Don’t feel bad; I didn’t know either. If you - like me! - thought that a road was just something you travelled on and a street was a road inside a town, that’s because the dictionary definition of road and street are just as I said - Strong Towns made up the definitions it’s using here and pretends they are normal to try to sell the harder-to-swallow Stroad concept.
They are "normal" within certain communities, including their own (and wikipedia for that matter). These definitions serve their purposes of differentiating between two types of roads. I'd also guess that they're mapping English words on the Dutch terms of Gebiedsontsluitingswegen and Erftoegangswegen , that do have specific legal definitions. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_Netherlands) Strong Towns, and their youtube supporter NotJustBikes, look to the Netherlands for inspiration, so its not surprising to see translations of the terms pop up. Words are tricky and can have multiple meanings. Good for them for clearly defining their terms and sticking to that definition throughout the article. A more general context that doesn't use the terms as narrowly shouldn't factor into the discussion.
2. You criticize them for saying that stroads are bad at moving people quickly but also have cars going too fast.
"For instance, in the quote I provided they simultaneously claim that Stroads are bad at moving cars, but also that cars on Stroads move much too fast."
If a driver spends half their time going 50 mph and half their time going 0 mph sitting at lights, they are traveling at 25mph overall but always going at 50 mph when moving. In practice it'll be considerably less because they are changing speeds due to upcoming lights, lane changes or entering/exiting the "stroad" (and high speeds means that more time is spent slowing and accelerating). This inconsistent speed explains the seeming contradiction between the roads being slow but the cars being too fast.
3. Why do they think freeways are bad?
"No, of course they wouldn’t. But the reasons are very vague here and absolutely reek of hippy logic. For instance, freeways are bad because some guy can make them seem bad while playing a video game"
This is an incredibly unfair way to characterize DoNotEat's youtube videos, which are essentially lectures using a videogame as a visual aid. It's like if they used a diagram to support an argument and you complained that "oh, they can make it seem bad while drawing a picture" or they used a hypothetical example (oh, they make it seem bad while writing short fiction). Does DoNotEat make a strong case against freeways? People should watch the video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rseaKBPkRPU) and judge for themselves, but your characterization is ridiculous. It's also incomplete. Strong Towns and DoNotEat are specifically talking about urban freeways through city centers in what you're linking to, not freeways in general. The main criticism is that the land used for the freeway displaces a large amount of both homes and businesses and replaces them areas where people don't live or work. This is illustrated by dozens of before/after photos, comparisons between cities or, yes, simulations using a city simulator game.
4. You're missing the central idea of Strong Towns by trying to look at revealed preferences.
"Or here, because they let people choose where to live and it turns out they don’t want to live in ultra-crowded city centers like Strong Towns-type urbanists prefer:"
Strong Towns (and other "walkability" advocates) don't believe you can really choose your home's transportation network, any more than you can choose your school district's curriculum. As described in your linked article, the decision to build a freeway through Rondo was not up to Rondo residents. It was decided by St. Paul suburbanites, using funds from state and federal governments.
But doesn't this reveal a preference for suburbs over places like Rondo? Sure, I guess. But Strong Towns would characterize these suburbs as existing off of federal and state funds and pillaging places like Rondo. In this mindset, someone moving to the suburbs is revealing a preference to be the robber, rather than the robbed and to receive government cash transfers rather than fund them. A critique of Strong Towns should focus on central thesis that car-focused transportation planning create and necessitate these wealth transfers, not that people like receiving them.
As described "by the guy playing a video game", there is often pushback to urban freeways, including in your hometown.
In general, I'd say one of the main issues with your critique is that you are thinking too small and assume Strong Towns is too. This is best illustrated by your characterization of the article that describes pedestrian bridges. The bridge (in their view) is useless without changing the surrounding car-focused infrastructure. This idea is summarized in the articles title: The Myth of Pedestrian Infrastructure in a World of Cars. You're right that the author does not like the pedestrian bridge over the 7 lane highway. But their criticism isn't of the bridge, but of the existence of the 7 lane highway in the first place.
Think of it this way: You homeschool your children, right? You probably have good reasons for this. Imagine if homeschooling was completely illegal in most of the country. You would probably advocate for a change to the education system that allowed homeschooling. You're able to convince the school district to compromise and allow kids to leave school for 1 hour daily to learn math at home. Everyday, you could drive to the school, check in at the school office, withdraw your kids from school, drive home, teach math, then drive back. drop your kids off, fill out more forms in the office, then return home. Would this be a win for homeschooling? Probably not. While it seems a concession to homeschooling, without larger changes it wouldn't really fulfill the goals of any homeschool advocate.
This is the position that Strong Towns often find itself in and critiques should keep that in mind.
Hi Robert! I appreciate you reading all the articles, and I think it's fair to question whether any of them are coming from a good/fair place (and a good habit, to boot). I'll try to address each of your bullets, but there's also a summary at the end that if you don't get through my responses would probably also be worth reading.
1.
"They are "normal" within certain communities, including their own (and wikipedia for that matter). These definitions serve their purposes of differentiating between two types of roads. I'd also guess that they're mapping English words on the Dutch terms of Gebiedsontsluitingswegen and Erftoegangswegen , that do have specific legal definitions. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_Netherlands) Strong Towns, and their youtube supporter NotJustBikes, look to the Netherlands for inspiration, so its not surprising to see translations of the terms pop up. Words are tricky and can have multiple meanings. Good for them for clearly defining their terms and sticking to that definition throughout the article. A more general context that doesn't use the terms as narrowly shouldn't factor into the discussion."
So I think it's important here to talk about what "defining terms" is. If they said "We take roads to mean..." and "We take streets to mean..." I don't think I'd have objected as much, if at all. This would have been especially true if they then said "because we map them from foreign language terms that you, our intended layman reader who this piece is clearly aimed at, don't know". But they don't do that; they use a phrasing that very strongly implies that those are the common, accepted usage of those words.
But they aren't the accepted, common uses of those words; they are a usage that's only popular in the walkability community, and it seems only popular there because strongtowns popularized them specifically for use in their Stroads slur.
Note that this is just me trying to restate what the article says; that they say "these words mean these things!" when that's not accurate, really. If they had said "these words mean these things to us, and there's two specialized words that mean roughly the same thing in dutch!" I wouldn't have an argument. But they didn't.
To put a different point on it, say I loved cats but hated dogs; I didn't want dogs around me if I could help it at all. But I was fine with cats; cats could stay. Then say I said "Cats are small, furry pet animals for being fun little munchkins around the house. Dogs are working animals, hunting and herding animals meant for commercial purposes and not for being pets." My definition of dogs isn't the commonly used one, and by asking you to accept it and all the premises I packed into it, I'm asking you to accept my argument as true without me actually making my argument as to why I'm right that dogs should be banned. That's not an honest way of arguing; it's a sneaky, deceptive one.
2.
"2. You criticize them for saying that stroads are bad at moving people quickly but also have cars going too fast.
"For instance, in the quote I provided they simultaneously claim that Stroads are bad at moving cars, but also that cars on Stroads move much too fast."
If a driver spends half their time going 50 mph and half their time going 0 mph sitting at lights, they are traveling at 25mph overall but always going at 50 mph when moving. In practice it'll be considerably less because they are changing speeds due to upcoming lights, lane changes or entering/exiting the "stroad" (and high speeds means that more time is spent slowing and accelerating). This inconsistent speed explains the seeming contradiction between the roads being slow but the cars being too fast."
You can't selectively cut the quote like that, man. It's not cool. Here's the whole thing:
*For instance, in the quote I provided they simultaneously claim that Stroads are bad at moving cars, but also that cars on Stroads move much too fast - these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but the incongruity seems to require some level of explanation to mesh the two (like, maybe the streetlights are supposed to suck out all the extra speed, or something). Strong Towns hates putting those definitions in one place, so I went digging.*
I'm explicitly saying here that it's absolutely possible for stroads to be both moving cars too fast and yet being too slow in some way. That's what "these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive" means. What I'm criticizing them for is making a big, broad but incredibly important claim that boils down to "accept that stroads are bad!" without backing it up.
Here they say "stroads are bad at moving cars". Compared to what? Streets (by their definition, not the dictionary definition) would have a lower speed limit (they ask for this) and more infrastructure to accommodate pedestrian crossings (and thus likely as many or more stops for cars). If I'm wrong on that, it would be useful to have them explain why, and what their alternatives are. But they steadfastly refuse to do this in the same place they make their big, broad claims.
Short version: the full quote you clipped shows me saying they aren't definitively wrong about stroads being bad at moving cars, but criticizes them for demanding I accept that they are without providing any argument or evidence as to why.
3.
"This is an incredibly unfair way to characterize DoNotEat's youtube videos, which are essentially lectures using a videogame as a visual aid. It's like if they used a diagram to support an argument and you complained that "oh, they can make it seem bad while drawing a picture" or they used a hypothetical example (oh, they make it seem bad while writing short fiction). Does DoNotEat make a strong case against freeways? People should watch the video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rseaKBPkRPU) and judge for themselves, but your characterization is ridiculous. It's also incomplete. Strong Towns and DoNotEat are specifically talking about urban freeways through city centers in what you're linking to, not freeways in general. The main criticism is that the land used for the freeway displaces a large amount of both homes and businesses and replaces them areas where people don't live or work. This is illustrated by dozens of before/after photos, comparisons between cities or, yes, simulations using a city simulator game."
We need to back up, because you are clipping my full argument and making it seem like it's something it isn't again. Full context:
*I had another thought - I live in Phoenix, Arizona. We have a lot of freeways. Strong Towns wouldn’t like them because you can get on and off them every mile or so, but they do have some things going for them: at every on-ramp and off-ramp in the metro area, the non-highway roads either go over or under the highway in a pretty seamless way. Essentially our freeways are “buried” for all intents and purposes. Would Strong Towns be OK with freeways with very, very limited entry and exit points?*
I'm explicitly talking about urban freeways here, asking if Strongtowns would be OK with them in cities in the way they exist in Phoenix. Neither Strongtowns or I call for the abolition of the highway system outside of cities; it's as far as I know something we both accept as a necessity. My question here, in context, is whether they'd accept something like freeways in cities as a way of getting around cities.
Whether or not Strongtowns likes freeways in cities is relevant, because they offer a way to get around cities very quickly. It's also a roadway that isolates fast-moving cars from pedestrians, which they claim to want. It's especially important since they want to slow cars as much as possible in every other urban context; slowing traffic literally everywhere makes cars much less viable as a transportation method, putting walkability directly at odds with driveability and setting up an "us or them" dichotomy.
When I went to check to see if Strongtowns liked urban freeways, they very much don't. And one of the reasons they don't like them is that a guy can make a completely fictional reality in which they look maximally bad. That's a horrible argument for obvious reasons; I could get the same game and put in a freeway and tell the exact opposite story he's telling; I could talk of incredibly improved commerce and people getting to the hospital in the nick of time. Would I be lying doing so? We don't know without data. But we also don't know if DoNotEat's is accurate or honest without data - which is what makes "this guy can make it look bad in a video game" a piss-poor form of argumentation.
I don't doubt that there's a stronger form of this argument to be made; there's probably reasons to dislike freeways. But I can only respond to the actual arguments Strongtowns actually makes, and here they made a really, really laughably weak one.
"You're missing the central idea of Strong Towns by trying to look at revealed preferences."
Again, I have to criticize the arguments that Strongtowns actually makes, and here it's making the argument that people want to live in suburbs, and freeways make that possible, and thus freeways are bad because people chose something Strongtowns doesn't like.
You are criticizing me for using revealed preference here, but it's not me that's using it! Strongtowns is very literally saying that freeways give people a choice on where to live, and that this is bad because sometimes they pick something Strongtowns doesn't like. Where you say "pillaging places like Rondo", what Strongtowns is explicitly saying is what was pillaged were people, and that they were pillaged by *offering them a place to live they liked better*. They are arguing that people should never have had a choice, and should have been forced to live in ultra-dense city centers whether they liked it or not. I know *you* are not making this argument, but they are - and it's horrific.
"Strong Towns (and other "walkability" advocates) don't believe you can really choose your home's transportation network, any more than you can choose your school district's curriculum. As described in your linked article, the decision to build a freeway through Rondo was not up to Rondo residents. It was decided by St. Paul suburbanites, using funds from state and federal governments."
This is partially potentially true and partially false. In terms of being true, it's potentially true that a given city-center area may not have wanted a freeway through it. That's a complex argument of the type that I've broadly found Strongtowns absolutely unwilling to have - they make appeals to emotion and call freeways racist or mention video games, but come up short on actual data-driven arguments in terms of almost everything I've read for them.
In terms of being false, lots of people choose the transportation schema they want, as well as choosing school districts: they do this by having the ability to choose where they live. As per the example, Strongtowns is arguing that much of this choice shouldn't exist and should be eliminated.
"But doesn't this reveal a preference for suburbs over places like Rondo? Sure, I guess. But Strong Towns would characterize these suburbs as existing off of federal and state funds and pillaging places like Rondo. In this mindset, someone moving to the suburbs is revealing a preference to be the robber, rather than the robbed and to receive government cash transfers rather than fund them. A critique of Strong Towns should focus on central thesis that car-focused transportation planning create and necessitate these wealth transfers, not that people like receiving them."
I don't think I'd have a problem with this except that it's not an argument Strongtowns actually usually makes from a strong, persuasive data-driven perch. If I'm a robber baron unfairly taking wealth transfers, that's an argument to make; Strongtowns doesn't make arguments like that as a general rule except by stating them and asking me to swallow them. Am I stealing from the inner city by living someplace else? It's possible, but the burden of proof is on them and they don't do the hard work of actually proving anything.
Again, I can only argue against the arguments Strongtowns actually makes. What I'm criticizing them for is not doing the hard work of actually making them - they appeal to emotion, tell me things they like are good and things other people like are bad, and then stop arguing. *This is really bad and what my article focuses on criticizing*.
"In general, I'd say one of the main issues with your critique is that you are thinking too small and assume Strong Towns is too. This is best illustrated by your characterization of the article that describes pedestrian bridges. The bridge (in their view) is useless without changing the surrounding car-focused infrastructure."
Here's the thing: I'm not thinking small. I'm relating what they are asking for. They say pedestrian bridges are bad. They say crosswalks are bad. We can't bury all the roads - that's clearly prohibitively expensive (I think both sides would probably do it if they could). So what's left? Getting rid of the high speed road. If their premise is that pedestrians should be able to walk that way and they reject every single kind of crossing, what's left is getting rid of the road.
You acknowledge the same thing: What they really want is to get rid of the road. They think the road is the problem; the road should go away. But their definition of "the road" is any road that goes faster than ~20 MPH inside of a city. That's a really, really big ask. By pretending like the bridge is the issue, they are avoiding talking about what they really want: the abolition of any kind of roadway within a city over which cars can move quickly.
TLDR Summary:
Strongtowns wants something really, really huge: they want it to be mostly non-viable to own and use a car for transport within a city. They want urban freeways not to exist; they want the remaining roads to move at <=20 MPH speeds and to give way to pedestrians in ways maximally favorable to the pedestrians at any cost. They want suburbs to be non-viable so that people are forced to live in urban areas, making them more viable.
It's possible that they are correct in wanting this. I'm not saying it's not. It's entirely possible that the benefits of this outweigh the downsides in huge, substantial ways and we were all fools to make car-viable infrastructure and to give it any level of priority over pedestrian traffic. Strongtowns believes this. But if they believe it, that's the argument they should explicitly and clearly be making, and they *refuse to do this*.
Instead of coming out and asking for what they want and being honest about the costs of what they are asking for, they bury it under layers and layers of confusion. They pretend that cars would be at all viable with common-sense changes to accommodate pedestrian traffic, but when you dig it turns out they won't accept any form of accommodation; the cars need to go away, full-stop. They pretend extreme density isn't necessary for their model to work without trade-offs; it is. And they do this over and over again, in virtually any article they write.
You won't believe me, but I'm actually not anti-walkability. I just spent a whole weekend in DC, and there are some very appealing aspects to it. But it comes with costs. Enforcing it in the way Strongtowns wants it would come with much, much more extreme costs. I want them to be honest and upfront about this; they won't. Until they are, I will actively resist everything they seem to want by default; that's the correct response to take when someone is trying to fool you.
(Is this really the best formatting Substack has? oof). Thank you for taking the time to respond and for addressing everything. And should also apologize if I strayed a bit from what your actual point was. Would it be fair to say that your post isn't about whether Strong Towns is right, but more that Strong Towns is dishonest in presenting their arguments? I struggle thinking about the more meta critique of their argument without weighing in on the argument itself.
1. When someone defines terms in an article, the "we take _____ to mean" is implied. The "yes, there's a difference" also shows that they're acknowledging that these words are being used differently than expected by someone new to the site. Maybe the tone is didactic or patronizing, but I don't think they're misleading the reader. I didn't find the phrasing to be implying the same thing as you, but that's just my opinion. Do you think most people have your reaction and read the same implications into the phrasing?
I also don't find your cat/dog example analogous. I already thought there was a difference between cats and dogs, used streets and roads interchangeably. They're making terms more precise by creating subcategories (of something that I would previously have not differentiated between). Your analogy is more like replacing definitions I already have. I'd find that dishonest, but don't mind having to accept a new taxonomy in order to understand an argument.
The result that I took from it was to look more carefully at my surroundings and categorize them in the new taxonomy. (e.g. I recently went through the intersection of Glenview Rd and Ridgeton Rd in Cleveland. Using this taxonomy, I'd call them streets).
I also have to ask if you watched the video on the page. They directly map the Dutch terms on to street and road at about the 10 minute mark. It’s the only reason I know what they are.
They do make a direct comparison to streets and roads at 3:05 and 4:40 respectively in the video. There's also sections labeled things like "stroads are unsafe" or "stroads are inefficient" that list their arguments.
I think their suggestion is pretty clear (and is in the video labeled "how to fix our stroads"). City planners should look at individual stroads because they're unsafe, inefficient and expensive (see video labels). To fix them, they should more clearly state what they'd like it to do. If they'd like it to be a destination for shopping, eating or living, they should make it into a street. This would make it less useful for moving long distances, but make it much more convenient. Or make it a road and do the opposite.
2. *For instance, in the quote I provided they simultaneously claim that Stroads are bad at moving cars, but also that cars on Stroads move much too fast - these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but the incongruity seems to require some level of explanation to mesh the two (like, maybe the streetlights are supposed to suck out all the extra speed, or something)
I cut off the quote because I thought the suggestion that streetlights suck out speed was obviously false and therefore your previous explicit statement was sarcastic and should not be taken seriously. That's my mistake.
3. You regularly use anecdotes or hypotheticals in your posts (and even in these replies). Do they prove your argument? No, not really. But they certainly help the audience understand what you mean.
. No one at Strong Towns thinks that freeways are bad because some guy can make them seem bad while playing a video game. They believe that freeways are bad because they’re the result of ignorant central planning or caused isolated car-centric suburbs and dilapidated inner cities (see the articles linked in the one about the video). The video itself is clear that it is a narrative meant to illustrate something that already happened. Saying they’re using someone playing a video game as proof is like saying Orwell was against authoritarian governments because of something that fictional pigs did. (This is minor but your characterization is wrong - no one actually plays a video game. He uses it as a model)
4. This is probably where it’ll be most difficult to distinguish between strong town’s argument (society should rely less on the automobile) and the meta-argument (ST does not argue effectively or honestly).
It could be difficult to have data-driven argument about whether “people want freeways”. But they use data in all kinds of ways. For example, here’s a comparison between the tax revenue from two commercial lots with similar sizes but different focuses on cars:
Here’s one where they analyze an entire city in a similar way (looking at taxes generated by block) then compares it to infrastructure it needs to maintain:
This is much more data driven than just saying something is racist or playing a video game. They argue that the lifestyle that requires freeways requires more infrastructure maintenance than is generated by taxes of the people living that lifestyle. This difference is made up by either wealth transfers from people not living that lifestyle or from the future (i.e. debt) until it eventually fails entirely.
This is very clearly stated by the founder while he responds (dismissively) to a density question:
To me it is obvious that there needs to be enough private wealth in a place to provide enough public revenue (which, in my way of viewing the world, is essentially excess private wealth) to maintain the systems that support that private wealth. In short, we don't just exist in order to build roads, sewers and storm drains. These things are a means to an end—wealth creation and prosperity—not the end in and of themselves.
If all this public investment is not providing adequate returns, it will fail. Period. That's not a theory; that's math.
Much of the site is building up support for the difference between public revenue and maintenance costs and that tends to be data driven. Other parts of the site might illustrate some of the harder to quantify costs or speculate on motivations, but at the core is some accounting.
That might also be why I found your essay frustrating enough to register a substack account about. Strong Towns is not pro-density or pro-walkability. Here’s the first result I found for “strong towns walkability”
In it, walkability is mainly valued for its effect on tax revenue, not as a goal in itself. The site is about financially sustainable infrastructure and advocates for density or walkability when those serve that purpose. They’re not trying to pull some sort of trick when they dismiss density questions. They’re weird about density or walkability for the same reason a nutritionist would be weird if you demanded they tell you what to eat. The answer is “well, it depends.” Sometimes density helps cities balance budgets, but in other situations it doesn’t.
Would a “strong town” support your hypothetical Wal-Mart or Cat Cafe? Maybe. It depends on if they’re able to generate enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure required to support them. If they want to eat, they’re going to have to work.
I found some articles about Wal-Mart and it doesn’t seem like it. They believe that Wal-Mart produces a small value per square foot compared to small stores on main street, while also requiring much more infrastructure.
If you’ve read Scott Alexander’s blog, they’re mistake theorists, not conflict theorists. They’re not going to argue directly that it SHOULD be mostly non-viable to own and operate a car within a city or live in the suburbs.. They’re arguing that it IS mostly non-viable to do so and it only seems like it isn’t due to debt, delusion and deceitful accounting. Instead of just listing cities financial situations (e.g. Akron has a 6:10 debt to revenue ratio, Albuquerque has a 4:10…..Yonkers is 7:10) they spend a lot of time telling anecdotes. There’s a strong data-driven skeleton if you peel away all the fleshy stories about redlining or car accidents, but you have to understand what its about.
> People don’t really think about “distance” in terms of distance - they think about it in terms of travel time. Dropping all town and city speed limits to <20 MPH makes these things farther away in the way that matters to people; that means less people live within a reasonable travel distance from any particular spot in the city. That means, all things the same, that you get less big-box stores and specialty shops.
> I want to live in the suburbs and have the advantages of driving at reasonably high speeds, but that doesn’t mean everyone does. Some people want to live in super-dense urban environments, even if I don’t. I don’t want Strong Towns to be able to force me to drive everywhere at sub-bicycle speeds...
This bit I want to address because I think you're making the assumption that car-dependency is the default and 'normal' way to travel. You're absolutely right that people think of distance in terms of travel time, and will take the fastest and most convenient mode of transport available. That's why I'm confused by the second quote above: you mention the advantages of driving at reasonably high speeds, which just seems to be a roundabout way of saying that, yes, you also want to get to your destination quickly and easily. But why should driving your car fast have to be the best (or only) method for this?
The fact that dropping the speed limits makes car travel less attractive is a feature, not a bug. Walkability advocates don't want to punish people for driving, but to create an environment that facilitates different modes of transport for different purposes in a human-friendly way. One reason that more people don't use bikes is because it's too dangerous with all the cars on the road. City planners give priority to car infrastructure over public transit because the expectation is that everyone is going to drive anyway.
None of this is necessary or expected outside of North America. Suburbs in the Netherlands have easily accessible shopping streets reachable in minutes by bike, which don't need a dozen football fields worth of parking lot as a result. Most people still have cars, which they use for trips to the beach, to visit family in other towns, or to ikea. But it's not always the default mode of transport whenever anyone wants to get anywhere, which is why we don't /have/ to decide how to get pedestrians across freeways, or find a way to fit massive amounts of car traffic from suburbs into cities, or figure out how to get our kids to school when dad needs the car for a business trip, and so on.
I don't think either walking or driving are defaults that are better than one another, but that there are trade-offs that don't get acknowledged.
As a for-instance, I live in Arizona. Last year, I needed to change jobs. In looking for a job, I found one that looked good that was 21 miles away. This ended up being the best option I could find at that time. To drive that distance took about 30-40 minutes in fairly good traffic with a freeway for a large part of the distance. If I had wanted to bike it, it would take about 90-120 minutes. This is "each way". In a town where temperatures often exceed 40C/100F. Or I can take a complex series of bus rides for a >2 hours one way transit.
In this case, I have to make choices. I can either accept a labor market that's a quarter as large, or I can sacrifice multiple hours of my life per day, or I can take worse jobs. I could move closer to that particular work, but this works against me the other way - I chose where I live because I wanted to live there, not arbitrarily. My housing market choices would also be restricted, even if I was comfortable moving every time I needed a job, which I'm not.
If Strong Towns-style city rules were put in place here, I'd have a maximum speed of 20MPH in the entire city, not counting lights; I'd be looking at travel times 1/3rd as fast around the city no matter what form of travel I chose, with similar restrictions. Somewhere, I'm paying for what they want - either in terms of more expensive or worse housing, less pay, something.
There's solutions for a lot of this, but the big obvious one is density. Phoenix (the city, not the metro area) has a population density of 3,000-3400 people per square mile depending on who you ask; The Netherlands have ~1300 people per square mile across the entire country, Randstad has 3900 and Amsterdam has 13,500. So yes, they can make it entire walkable, but they've already "paid for it" by packing people in like sardines. That's no less inherently "human friendly" than driving everywhere, by the by; liking one or the other reveals preferences, not biology or how people have lived for most of the history of people.
That's what I'm saying, for the most part - Strong Towns-type sites slyly represent that you can have everything for free, but you can't; you are paying for it somewhere. Some people are going to want to make the trades their demands need to work (far less absolute-distance mobility and increased density traded to maintain "practical" mobility), and that's fine to want, it's even fine to get in a lot of situations. But to a lot of people what they want is a constant stress-horror, and they wouldn't choose it if they knew what was being proposed. Which is arguably why Strong Towns is very, very careful not to acknowledge those costs - they go "wouldn't it be nice if everything was cobblestones?" but never the other stuff.
> The fact that dropping the speed limits makes car travel less attractive is a feature, not a bug. Walkability advocates don't want to punish people for driving
These statements are blatantly contradictory. If making car travel less attractive -- in an absolute sense, not merely a relative one -- is one of their goals, then walkability advocates do want to punish people for driving.
> yes, you also want to get to your destination quickly and easily. But why should driving your car fast have to be the best (or only) method for this?
It just is. Walking is too slow and laborious, the bus is too roundabout, and trains too limited in service points.
If car travel is less attractive, but there are other viable options available, I do not consider that a punishment. But whether it's absolute or relative is the question: if you would lower the speed limits without consideration of whether that's appropriate for the road or whether there's a concurrent effort to make transit more effective, that would be punishing, and counterproductive.
> It just is.
We should be careful to distinguish an is from an ought.
I live in a small town in the midwest United States. In kind of sounds like Strong Towns wants to live in a... small town in the midwest United States.
It is super interesting to read about Strong Towns from a perspective of someone who isn’t super into this stuff. I’m quite interested in this stuff, but like many other things it can turn into a bit of an echo chamber.
About streets vs. roads: the current colloquial term for what they call a street is “a mall”. As in shopping mall. The hallways are car free spaces with shops on the sides, for all intents and purposes these are private streets.
You can do a thought experiment. What would it take to let people drive, even slowly, through the middle of a mall? After all sometimes it is convenient to park in front of a shop, right? You would have to delineate a roadway through the middle of a mall, and clear out all the people. You would now have to ask people to look out for cars instead of just shopping around. Cars are loud so talking to other people becomes annoying. It would be hugely disruptive. This thought experiment gives you a feel of the kind of compromise it takes to actually drive cars through a street. (before 1920 or so streets in a city functioned much more like malls today, and it was in fact hugely disruptive when cars showed up).
Now, cars gave us something — a level of mobility that 200 years ago, even the kings and emperors of the world couldn’t dream about. But it is still worth wondering if this compromise is the right one for every single street.
A basic thing of walkable cities is to consciously decide on which streets we are going to drive faster than 20 mph. Most streets would be 20 mph but we would designate a network of streets where you can drive faster, and that comes to within a mile of most homes. This combines most advantages of walkable slow streets (most homes on quiet streets) and mobility by car (you are limited to 20 mph only for the first and last mile or so). This obviously costs you capacity, but that is often more than offset by people now able to walk or ride a bicycle for short trips. This would combine with some changes in zoning, eg. you can open corner stores or cafes on your average suburban lot so more people will have these much closer to their homes.
I think one of the inspirations is basically reverse-engineering how cities like Tokyo work. In many cities (European and Asian) you can get around completely on foot or on bicycle, and if you have to go somewhere too far to walk, you can take some train or metro. And these trains and metros, and buses, actually work well enough, and are clean enough, with “normal people” on them, to casually go to whatever random place in the city you want to go. Or to commute to some job. Metro in particular is able to support large malls with huge catchments.
About what they call “stroads”: this is a quite specific type of streets that has a combination of many lanes, it is lined with businesses, and it has high speed limits (i.e. much more than 30 mph). *This type of street does not exist in many countries outside the US*. I have never driven on a “stroad”. I currently live in New Zealand and the closest approximation over here is a 2 + 2 lane road (plus the obligatory ballooning at intersections) with a speed limit of 50 km/h (30 mph).
Strong Towns calculates the value of a specific street/road by value-per-acre. The recommended VPA there's a specific ratio between the cost of yearly maintenance to how much the city makes off of a property. You would find that the VPA of "stroads" is usually very low, in a way that means that the city can't turn a profit with its inclusion. (the businesses don't pay enough property tax to maintain a stroad. they often even receive some tax subsidies from the city in order to start the business)
BUT, strong towns is not even strongly advocating of getting rid of "straods". It's talking about making sure that the ratio is much higher than the current "acceptable" ratio. If you have a specific stroad that can do that, People will leave it and move to a lower hanging fruit.
If we assume the reasons given for flight to the suburbs are true. Once suburban population growth causes commute times become excessive and prices to rise, according to this model people should have moved back to the city centers. Many cities in the north east (US) are easily traversed on foot or have accessible mass transportation, but even before covid people weren't moving back. While some of their criticisms of the modern city maybe valid, especially a sense of community, I tend to believe that crime, corruption, and economics are bigger factors.
In isolation, the "easy win" might be a good thing from a liberty perspective. But live and let live really isn't an option. Strong Towns people, if they get a chance, won't let you have those less-dense suburbs. One of their basic premises is that such suburban development is not viable; the infrastructure maintenance costs are deferred and when they come due, tax revenues are orders of magnitude too small to cover them and the suburb is left to decay while a new suburb is then built using the same model.
So while parking minimums, lot-size minimums, street width minimums and single-family-detached-only zoning may be offense to liberty, they serve as an important bulwark against Strong Towns and other urbanists who would force us all into tiny apartments with no cars. They would do this with various well-known tools such as Urban Growth Boundaries (sorry, can't build a new less-dense suburb out in farmland), parking maximums, street-width maximums and pedestrian-only streets, zero-setback requirements, etc. Freedom isn't an option; there's no one to accept the bargain "live and let live" (if one group did, the coercive proposals could just come from another group) and no one who could be trusted to stick to it even if there was.
I grew up in dense, walkable, and fairly poor neighbourhoods, generally right in the city (not suburban). I don't have a problem with density, provided it doesn't come with other problems, as it often does. Yet you class it as a downside in itself.
I also grew up in Canada, where people are stereotypically more law abiding. So we weren't plagued with careless drivers causing pedestrian deaths and injuries, or the crime that I suspect most Americans think of when they think of dense city neighbourhoods.
During covid, I was glad that I now live in a single family house with its very own lot - no common entrances, or other reason to come within 6 feet of my neighbours. But that's a very unusual feeling for me. About the only downside to density in itself in normal conditions is noise, and it's easy enough to get used to noise and basically stop being disturbed by it. (In my teens, I lived in an apartment building on the same intersection as the local fire hall; I soon became able to sleep through fire trucks and their sirens.)
To address the other part of this, I sort of ran out of room to talk about some of my thoughts about density. I think as you say there's some stuff going on with SES that change the lived experience of it. I'm sure living in a very dense environment where houses are 900k is much different than a very dense environment where they are 150k, and so on. Ditto national differences or even differences between cities.
Phoenix, where I live, is a very suburb-driven town; I think that probably lends itself to density having different connotations here than other places.
Well, no. I didn't do that. I definitely said that I personally hate it; I do. But I didn't class it as an always bad. See below for snips of text designed to specifically be not-that:
"I want to live in the suburbs and have the advantages of driving at reasonably high speeds, but that doesn’t mean everyone does. Some people want to live in super-dense urban environments, even if I don’t."
"in a lot of places, it’s illegal to build houses smaller than a certain size, which artificially limits density in places where it might make sense"
"Now, you may not like density (I absolutely hate it, more on this later) but it really would solve some of these problems - you don’t have to pay more for your stuff or have less of it, you just have to pack people together a little closer."
I'm not saying density is always-bad, just that I don't like it much. People are allowed to want it, and as far as I'm concerned the market should be allowed to give it to them if they do.
You are absolutely right. Your post is more nuanced than I gave it credit for. In fact, I think I reacted to "You Have to Make it Up With Density, Prices, or Worse Stuff" without checking what came after it.
Great piece. I appreciate the time it took to break down these arguments. That said, I am not sure that you picked the right target in Strong Towns, who are really not your typical New Urbanists. I suspect that your case against them has something to do with your aesthetic distaste for density and urban living. And that may be somewhat warranted, as lots of urbanism boosters foster a thinly veiled distaste for rural and suburban living. But again, I do not think that is what Strong Towns is going for. My reading of Strong Towns is not “cities good; everything else bad.” I don't even think that they are anti-car. Rather, I think that they are advocating a move from exurban sprawl to something resembling old-fashioned inner-ring suburbs and small towns with charming Main Streets.
The exurban sprawl issue is where the case against stroads comes in and it is a particularly confusing concept. Here is a pretty easy way to know if you are on a stroad. If you go down to the commercial district to run visit two stores that are exactly across from each other on opposite sides of the street/road, how would you get from the first to the second? If the answer is ‘walk across,’ then you are on a street. If the answer is ‘get in your car, drive away from your destination and find somewhere you can make a u-turn, then drive back and pull into the parking lot,’ then you are on a stroad.
Part of the reason why you cannot suss out a clear position on density is that they do not see density as something that ought to be determined or prescribed by policy. A place should be as dense as it needs to be to support the economic vitality and financial health of the place. One of Marohn’s big crusades is against the need for local governments to endlessly issue debt that it can never pay off. The reason that happens is because many of cities and towns have way more infrastructure than they can maintain given their tax base. This ties back to stroads, which require all the commercially viable businesses to be located over an unnecessarily large area, which necessitates more capex and more operating expenses, which make these places not economically viable in the long run.
You were right to start this with a discussion of preferences, but preferences are part of the problem. People want to live in nicer, more pleasant neighbourhoods than they can afford, so they try to mimic nicer locations with land-use regulations. That works for a while, but eventually the bills come due and the people with means have moved on to the next new housing development or shopping complex.
There's no doubt that the four-to-six lane arterials where malls, supermarkets, and big box stores are located are not particularly pretty. Nor pleasant to cross on foot, nor even pleasant to drive on. But they are quite suited for their purpose, which is providing a way to get to the stores. Just pejorating them as "stroads" and claiming they shouldn't exist doesn't solve that problem.
As for the Strongtowns thing about infrastructure, it's nonsense to anyone who has looked at a municipal budget. It's not physical infrastructure that takes the vast majority of the budget, it's salaries for services for residents. Education, police, fire. Commercial development is often welcomed because it tends to be a net positive for the budget.
A few thoughts that are mostly questions:
- My point about stroads is that the definition is not confusing. You know one when you see one.
- Aesthetics aside, the main issue with stroads is that they are supposed to be commercial districts but are completely inhospitable to pedestrians. Is that a problem? It depends. Certainly there are equity concerns. Personally, I am more worried about the fact that large numbers of Americans report not being able to come up with $1,000 in an emergency while the average car payment is somewhere between $400 and $500. Are these things related? Maybe, maybe not.
- I try to avoid getting into housing and planning conversations that rely on "expert" opinion about how things should be built. Instead, I can just look at revealed preference. Do more people want to live in inner-ring suburbs or in the exurbs? Which has the higher housing prices? I don't think anyone chooses exurban sprawl. I think it's were we end up by default when more desirable modes of development are made unworkable by zoning, by other regulations (environmental impact assessments, fire codes, ADA compliance, etc.) and by financing conditions (it's hard to get a mortgage unless you are a known entity building one of a set number of products).
- Yes municipal budgets are dominated by current expenditure, but that is because local governments fund capex off-budget through the issuance of general obligation bonds. Are those bonds sustainable? I don't know. After the global financial crisis, Meredith Whitney predicted that municipal bonds would be the next to go bust. It hasn't happened yet. Munis still get pretty strong rating. Maybe there is nothing to worry about.
- I'm no expert on local government budgeting, but I do work in public finance. Here is an analogy: the United States has a AAA sovereign bond rating. Does that mean our public finances are perfect and there's nothing to worry about? I suppose how you answer that question depends on how you view these things.
- This goes back to the issues with stroads and what gets built next to them. Local governments love commercial development; it brings tax revenue without the liability of residents to service. So they build shiny new strip malls with chain stores (the only ones who can jump through all the regulatory hoops and get financing) that amortize over 20 years. What happens as they age? There's not much incentive to refurbish or redevelop, because a newer shinier strip mall has opened up a half mile down the road. Same goes for the residential subdivisions. So these areas just slide down the economic ladder, which means even less tax revenue while the operating costs remain the same or go up. Plus those bond payments start coming due.
Is all this a problem? I don't know. We will find out, though.
I have limited time in my morning but I wanted to address something:
"My point about stroads is that the definition is not confusing. You know one when you see one."
I have to disagree with this in a sort of complex way. Strong Towns wants you to think it's something where it's definitionally a "bad" combination of a road and a street, but this isn't their actual unearthed opinion - they are lying out their everloving asses about this.
Inherent in their definition is that a stroad is a combination of a road and street, and that this bad - things should be one or the other. If you read their work, a street is a <20mph road where all traffic is prioritized against cars and thus even slower than that in in normal sense. And a road is a thoroughfare that goes fast, but not anywhere people might want to cross it - which in a city is functionally at every point in the road, meaning roads to them are an exclusively "outside of town" thing.
Your personal definition of Stroad might be more different and reasonable and have more nuance, but the actual definition of Stroad they use when you dig down isn't - it's "anything within a city that ever exceeds 20mph".
>If you read their work, a street is a <20mph road where all traffic is prioritized against cars and thus even slower than that in in normal sense
It feels like you've been taking the least defensible aspect of one particular advocacy org's position and painting a broad brush attack on walkability with it.
I'd guess, if you asked them, that even the most ardent advocates for walkability would admit that cities need a variety of speed limits to match the purpose of the roads. I'd read there claims as saying "hey maybe we should have a few less 40MPH 6 lane roads with strip malls on both sides" and instead replace them with a 65mph highway that drops you in a spot that you then go 20 MPH and/or walk to get your stuff. If you want to live urban you live in that 20 MPH zone. If you want to live in the woods you do it, then drive the highway in to the urban area when you need stuff instead of the miles of strip malls.
Here's the thing about this: If I had looked at their articles/work, and found that's what they were saying (they being strong towns) I would have said that instead. But everywhere I looked, they basically don't like roads that go over 20mph anywhere people might want to cross them, which is everywhere in a city.
That's not all walkability people, because it couldn't be; nobody is THAT monolithic. I tried (and probably failed) to represent that there's different levels of it. A lot of those levels I'm fine with - I'm not saying there are no versions of walkability that could ever work. But this is, if not the main site for the moment, at least one of the really big visible outlets. I have to think it's OK to talk about their views as part of this.
That's fine, but this is really more of a 'contra Strong Towns' than a post about walkability. I, personally, had never heard of Strong Towns prior to this post. And that's despite the fact that I value walkability highly and use it as a determining factor in where I live.
I worry that you're fighting a strawman here and that there's room for a more interesting conversation to be had on how we construct our cities and what outcomes we might want from that.
> Are these things related? Maybe, maybe not.
This is obnoxious. If you have an argument, make it and be willing to defend it. Gesturing in the direction of one without putting any rhetorical skin in the game is just dark arts.
> Are those bonds sustainable? I don't know.
Ditto here.
> Aesthetics aside, the main issue with stroads is that they are supposed to be commercial districts but are completely inhospitable to pedestrians. Is that a problem? It depends. Certainly there are equity concerns.
Equity? I am willing to accept unequal distribution of wealth over equal distribution of poverty. It is better for those unable to afford a car to have to deal with the difficulties of those commercial districts on foot (and on buses) than to have to shop at smaller, more expensive stores in walkable areas.
> Local governments love commercial development; it brings tax revenue without the liability of residents to service. So they build shiny new strip malls with chain stores (the only ones who can jump through all the regulatory hoops and get financing) that amortize over 20 years.
The cliche for new strip malls in the areas I've lived is they all have a bank branch, a nail salon, and a convenience store. The bank branch is a chain, the convenience store often is, but the nail salon only rarely. And there are typically restaurants also, only some of which are chains. And other various categories of store, only some of which are chain.
> What happens as they age? There's not much incentive to refurbish or redevelop, because a newer shinier strip mall has opened up a half mile down the road. Same goes for the residential subdivisions. So these areas just slide down the economic ladder, which means even less tax revenue while the operating costs remain the same or go up. Plus those bond payments start coming due.
What actually seems to happen is indeed one strip mall will deteriorate and new ones will be built. But then the deteriorating strip mall will be refurbished or rebuilt and the former new one starts to deteriorate. And the same doesn't happen with residential subdivisions at all; that's a claim Strong Towns makes that isn't generally true. The original Levittowns in the US proper are still doing fine. Based on Zillow, it appears Daly City of "Little Boxes" fame is also.
Apologies for the thread necro, but just chiming in as an attorney who works with a lot of convenience stores to note that even if the store itself is branded as being part of a national or international chain, it's most likely a franchise rather than a corporate store. This means the store is actually a mom-and-pop (owned by a couple people, who probably took out a loan to get the property and start-up capital), only instead of taking out their own branding, they pay the chain for the right to use the chain's brand name, sales strategies (e.g. store layouts and product lines), supply chains, etc.
"The exurban sprawl issue is where the case against stroads comes in and it is a particularly confusing concept..."
That should read "it is not a particularly confusing concept."
I'm very sympathetic to the demands of people who like walkability, although only to a certain extent - I cycle, and I much prefer wide roads that give cars plenty of room to pass to narrow roads where I accidentally back up traffic. I think the ideal situation was a town I once lived in called Stevenage in the UK, which had an elaborate network of underpasses that allowed cyclists and pedestrians to pretty much go anywhere in the town without having to cross roads. However, the entire place was built in the 1960s (and everyone hates it and thinks its ugly), so I don't think it's really practical to retrofit those into somewhere else.
I basically agree with you that the best solution is to have lots of different types of community to meet different needs, I think it makes sense to try to make city centres walkable since you're most of the way there already and that's usually what city people like, but you shouldn't forget that there's a need for access from outside the city. I do think the concept of having uncrossable roads is a really bad idea, it's nice to have pedestrian access for those times when its relevant.
I can kind of see what they're doing with the road/street distinction, the location does mean they have different connotations, but in my experience it can be very effective to have "roads" going through cities to separate traffic, as long as there's a way to go around them.
Our city roads are narrow and windy. This makes them quite safe because vehicle speeds are low (<40km/hr average) and it is easy for bikes to occuppy the full lane. I used to live in a city with wide streets (60km/hr av). The collision rate (/km vehicle travelled) with pedestrians and cyclists was quite a bit higher (mostly due tocrashes at intersections),
The residential speed limit in the UK is 30 mph, a little higher than 40 km/hr - given that cars will be overtaking me, I prefer wider roads than narrower roads. But I'd prefer not to cycle on roads with a higher speed limit - 40 mph isn't too bad, and 60 mph is only tolerable if it's a quiet country lane that's empty most of the time! Intersections and roundabouts are definitely the most dangerous places for cyclists because you have to pull out in front of cars, but I do think roundabouts are worse than intersections, the cars are much more unpredictable on a roundabout. Lower speed limits than 30 mph usually means speed bumps, and one of those once put me in the hospital (mudguard came loose when I hit it) so I really hate those, no matter how slowly you go over them it always feels violent!
Cycling is probably the most dangerous thing I do on a regular basis. I'd prefer it if there were more cycle lanes, but they're normally shared with pedestrians and they're much worse than cars, I never have any idea what people on foot are about to do!
I'm in NZ and a commuter cylist off and on for 45 years (20 min ride to work). You have way more traffic than we do. Our residential speed limit is 50kph but locally vehicles seldom reach that, especially during the peaks. I agree roundabouts are dangerous for cyclists. They do make intersections safer for pedestrians and drivers. For me, car doors have been most dangerous, having hit 3 of them, though without injury.
FWIW, I do agree with the Stroaders that pedestrian overpasses are a poor solution to the problem of pedestrians trying to cross major highways. Of course, a poor solution is better than none, but still, overpasses are hard to navigate for people with bicycles, wheelchairs, strollers, and pretty much anyone else who isn't an athletic power jogger. Obviously major high-speed highways are required for transportation, but IMO putting them in the middle of your residential/retail area is not a great idea.
I think it's sort of a matter of degrees, if that makes sense. I don't disagree that the overpasses are less short of a route than if highway didn't exist, but it removes the safety concern of crossing the highway. If you won't accept that, or crosswalks, then what's left is getting rid of the highway, or else having it only curl around the edge of the city. A person might still want to trade for this, but they should know that "highways only on borders, and <20mph everywhere else" is what they are trading for.
I think there's a reasonable middle-ground, though. For example, you could have a 2-lane street, or even a 4-lane street with frequent pedestrian crossings (1 per block), where each crossing has a traffic light and safety isle in the middle. Lots of cities do something like this, and IMO it works reasonably well. Pedestrians can cross (as long as drivers obey traffic lights, which you should make absolutely certain that they do), and vehicles can still move at a decent speed. In addition, as the Stroaders say, the lower speed allows shops and other local businesses to put up storefronts all along the road, and have the road actually channel pedestrians as well as motorists towards the shops.
This really is a warning that people passionate about any 'cause' don't necessarily think dispassionately.
Whether a libertarian approach might work really depends on the stability of the equilibrium ie for an equilibrium solution to emerge conditions need to be fairly stable. At a social/cultural scale that hasn't really been the case for built metropolitan infrastructure for say 100 years or more. Where I live trams were a big thing up through the '50s and the suburbs developed around them. Then cars got cheap and prevalent and suburban development changed accordingly. Now that land availability is constrained by geography (and travel times), metro land is rapidly rising in price and higher density living is arising and dense public transport networks are being promoted by the new residents. etc etc etc. Sometimes it pays to have 'far sighted' people plan ahead. Note, most 'Planners' are people who administer regulation ie there is no selection for 'far sighted' people in their profession.
Great piece! I think about cities a lot, and how they work, so I’m very interested any talk about that subject.
The first thing that comes to my mind is, why isn’t there an intermediate entity between “street” and “road”? Surely the Strong Towns people don’t expect their walkable streets to just -WHABAM- turn into arterial highways all at once? Capillaries don’t immediately empty into the venae cavae.
I personally am a fan of density in cities *if* it comes with relationships among the residents, and some form of base-level community self-policing, like a neighborhood watch. Where I live (Omaha) there is a consistently vocal cohort who really want a streetcar, even though IMHO the city is not nearly dense enough to justify a streetcar’s existence. Last year, the city compromised by starting a new bus line with larger vehicles, dedicated lanes, and larger stops, the goal being to entice people to move closer to the bus and thereby create walkable, dense neighborhoods spaced approximately one mile apart. It’s probably too early to tell, but in the nine months that the program has been in operation the results have been… meh. Barely anyone rides the new bus. I really wanted the idea to work, but I doubt an efficient bus is enough of a draw to make people want to move into denser neighborhoods, much less build them out of scratch (which is what will have to happen in some parts of the city for the idea to work).
I think the problem is that Stroad is a poorly defined thing, and too broadly defined. Any place people would cross it, they want it to be a street (and thus super slow moving) and any place it's a road it has to have really limited access and absolute deference to foot traffic (i.e. become a street, however temporarily). The tricky bit is them not acknowledging there just aren't any places you can actually put a road within a city as they define it - the best you are going to get is something that hugs the borders. They imply you can have your cake and eat it to, but you really can't in most cities under their definition.
One fun thing about the bus line is when they start massaging the data to make it work. Phoenix put in a light rail to be more like California once, and I've been on it a dozen times during peak traffic hours where it was maybe 1/5th full at best. The data all show it's very much used by everybody all the time. I've wanted to deep dive it to see how they are getting those numbers before.
I'm not sure how UK/USA terminology compares, but pedestrian crossings are a decent solution - you can have wide roads for driving at high speed, but as soon as anyone wants to cross the speed limit temporarily becomes 0. That works pretty well if well designed, but it's obviously annoying for both drivers (who have to stop) and pedestrians (who have to cross only at specific points), which suggests its a decent compromise.
Report changes in absolute numbers if you want to encourage a particular transport mode. To analyse actual use of different modes needs comparitive data. I expect transport planners will have built their models on such data.
I found your substack from Scott Alexander's and was so impressed that I read everything on it. While there's some things I disagree with, this was the only post that made me question that if posts were fair and coming from a well informed place. Is Strong Towns right? Maybe, maybe not. But this essay doesn't help me decide due to your refusal to engage their arguments on their terms. I think you're being unfair in a few places, which could be from misunderstanding what Strong Towns is about:
1. You question their definition of roads and streets here:
Don’t feel bad; I didn’t know either. If you - like me! - thought that a road was just something you travelled on and a street was a road inside a town, that’s because the dictionary definition of road and street are just as I said - Strong Towns made up the definitions it’s using here and pretends they are normal to try to sell the harder-to-swallow Stroad concept.
They are "normal" within certain communities, including their own (and wikipedia for that matter). These definitions serve their purposes of differentiating between two types of roads. I'd also guess that they're mapping English words on the Dutch terms of Gebiedsontsluitingswegen and Erftoegangswegen , that do have specific legal definitions. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_Netherlands) Strong Towns, and their youtube supporter NotJustBikes, look to the Netherlands for inspiration, so its not surprising to see translations of the terms pop up. Words are tricky and can have multiple meanings. Good for them for clearly defining their terms and sticking to that definition throughout the article. A more general context that doesn't use the terms as narrowly shouldn't factor into the discussion.
2. You criticize them for saying that stroads are bad at moving people quickly but also have cars going too fast.
"For instance, in the quote I provided they simultaneously claim that Stroads are bad at moving cars, but also that cars on Stroads move much too fast."
If a driver spends half their time going 50 mph and half their time going 0 mph sitting at lights, they are traveling at 25mph overall but always going at 50 mph when moving. In practice it'll be considerably less because they are changing speeds due to upcoming lights, lane changes or entering/exiting the "stroad" (and high speeds means that more time is spent slowing and accelerating). This inconsistent speed explains the seeming contradiction between the roads being slow but the cars being too fast.
3. Why do they think freeways are bad?
"No, of course they wouldn’t. But the reasons are very vague here and absolutely reek of hippy logic. For instance, freeways are bad because some guy can make them seem bad while playing a video game"
This is an incredibly unfair way to characterize DoNotEat's youtube videos, which are essentially lectures using a videogame as a visual aid. It's like if they used a diagram to support an argument and you complained that "oh, they can make it seem bad while drawing a picture" or they used a hypothetical example (oh, they make it seem bad while writing short fiction). Does DoNotEat make a strong case against freeways? People should watch the video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rseaKBPkRPU) and judge for themselves, but your characterization is ridiculous. It's also incomplete. Strong Towns and DoNotEat are specifically talking about urban freeways through city centers in what you're linking to, not freeways in general. The main criticism is that the land used for the freeway displaces a large amount of both homes and businesses and replaces them areas where people don't live or work. This is illustrated by dozens of before/after photos, comparisons between cities or, yes, simulations using a city simulator game.
4. You're missing the central idea of Strong Towns by trying to look at revealed preferences.
"Or here, because they let people choose where to live and it turns out they don’t want to live in ultra-crowded city centers like Strong Towns-type urbanists prefer:"
Strong Towns (and other "walkability" advocates) don't believe you can really choose your home's transportation network, any more than you can choose your school district's curriculum. As described in your linked article, the decision to build a freeway through Rondo was not up to Rondo residents. It was decided by St. Paul suburbanites, using funds from state and federal governments.
But doesn't this reveal a preference for suburbs over places like Rondo? Sure, I guess. But Strong Towns would characterize these suburbs as existing off of federal and state funds and pillaging places like Rondo. In this mindset, someone moving to the suburbs is revealing a preference to be the robber, rather than the robbed and to receive government cash transfers rather than fund them. A critique of Strong Towns should focus on central thesis that car-focused transportation planning create and necessitate these wealth transfers, not that people like receiving them.
As described "by the guy playing a video game", there is often pushback to urban freeways, including in your hometown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolts_in_the_United_States#Arizona
In general, I'd say one of the main issues with your critique is that you are thinking too small and assume Strong Towns is too. This is best illustrated by your characterization of the article that describes pedestrian bridges. The bridge (in their view) is useless without changing the surrounding car-focused infrastructure. This idea is summarized in the articles title: The Myth of Pedestrian Infrastructure in a World of Cars. You're right that the author does not like the pedestrian bridge over the 7 lane highway. But their criticism isn't of the bridge, but of the existence of the 7 lane highway in the first place.
Think of it this way: You homeschool your children, right? You probably have good reasons for this. Imagine if homeschooling was completely illegal in most of the country. You would probably advocate for a change to the education system that allowed homeschooling. You're able to convince the school district to compromise and allow kids to leave school for 1 hour daily to learn math at home. Everyday, you could drive to the school, check in at the school office, withdraw your kids from school, drive home, teach math, then drive back. drop your kids off, fill out more forms in the office, then return home. Would this be a win for homeschooling? Probably not. While it seems a concession to homeschooling, without larger changes it wouldn't really fulfill the goals of any homeschool advocate.
This is the position that Strong Towns often find itself in and critiques should keep that in mind.
Hi Robert! I appreciate you reading all the articles, and I think it's fair to question whether any of them are coming from a good/fair place (and a good habit, to boot). I'll try to address each of your bullets, but there's also a summary at the end that if you don't get through my responses would probably also be worth reading.
1.
"They are "normal" within certain communities, including their own (and wikipedia for that matter). These definitions serve their purposes of differentiating between two types of roads. I'd also guess that they're mapping English words on the Dutch terms of Gebiedsontsluitingswegen and Erftoegangswegen , that do have specific legal definitions. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_Netherlands) Strong Towns, and their youtube supporter NotJustBikes, look to the Netherlands for inspiration, so its not surprising to see translations of the terms pop up. Words are tricky and can have multiple meanings. Good for them for clearly defining their terms and sticking to that definition throughout the article. A more general context that doesn't use the terms as narrowly shouldn't factor into the discussion."
So I think it's important here to talk about what "defining terms" is. If they said "We take roads to mean..." and "We take streets to mean..." I don't think I'd have objected as much, if at all. This would have been especially true if they then said "because we map them from foreign language terms that you, our intended layman reader who this piece is clearly aimed at, don't know". But they don't do that; they use a phrasing that very strongly implies that those are the common, accepted usage of those words.
But they aren't the accepted, common uses of those words; they are a usage that's only popular in the walkability community, and it seems only popular there because strongtowns popularized them specifically for use in their Stroads slur.
Note that this is just me trying to restate what the article says; that they say "these words mean these things!" when that's not accurate, really. If they had said "these words mean these things to us, and there's two specialized words that mean roughly the same thing in dutch!" I wouldn't have an argument. But they didn't.
To put a different point on it, say I loved cats but hated dogs; I didn't want dogs around me if I could help it at all. But I was fine with cats; cats could stay. Then say I said "Cats are small, furry pet animals for being fun little munchkins around the house. Dogs are working animals, hunting and herding animals meant for commercial purposes and not for being pets." My definition of dogs isn't the commonly used one, and by asking you to accept it and all the premises I packed into it, I'm asking you to accept my argument as true without me actually making my argument as to why I'm right that dogs should be banned. That's not an honest way of arguing; it's a sneaky, deceptive one.
2.
"2. You criticize them for saying that stroads are bad at moving people quickly but also have cars going too fast.
"For instance, in the quote I provided they simultaneously claim that Stroads are bad at moving cars, but also that cars on Stroads move much too fast."
If a driver spends half their time going 50 mph and half their time going 0 mph sitting at lights, they are traveling at 25mph overall but always going at 50 mph when moving. In practice it'll be considerably less because they are changing speeds due to upcoming lights, lane changes or entering/exiting the "stroad" (and high speeds means that more time is spent slowing and accelerating). This inconsistent speed explains the seeming contradiction between the roads being slow but the cars being too fast."
You can't selectively cut the quote like that, man. It's not cool. Here's the whole thing:
*For instance, in the quote I provided they simultaneously claim that Stroads are bad at moving cars, but also that cars on Stroads move much too fast - these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but the incongruity seems to require some level of explanation to mesh the two (like, maybe the streetlights are supposed to suck out all the extra speed, or something). Strong Towns hates putting those definitions in one place, so I went digging.*
I'm explicitly saying here that it's absolutely possible for stroads to be both moving cars too fast and yet being too slow in some way. That's what "these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive" means. What I'm criticizing them for is making a big, broad but incredibly important claim that boils down to "accept that stroads are bad!" without backing it up.
Here they say "stroads are bad at moving cars". Compared to what? Streets (by their definition, not the dictionary definition) would have a lower speed limit (they ask for this) and more infrastructure to accommodate pedestrian crossings (and thus likely as many or more stops for cars). If I'm wrong on that, it would be useful to have them explain why, and what their alternatives are. But they steadfastly refuse to do this in the same place they make their big, broad claims.
Short version: the full quote you clipped shows me saying they aren't definitively wrong about stroads being bad at moving cars, but criticizes them for demanding I accept that they are without providing any argument or evidence as to why.
3.
"This is an incredibly unfair way to characterize DoNotEat's youtube videos, which are essentially lectures using a videogame as a visual aid. It's like if they used a diagram to support an argument and you complained that "oh, they can make it seem bad while drawing a picture" or they used a hypothetical example (oh, they make it seem bad while writing short fiction). Does DoNotEat make a strong case against freeways? People should watch the video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rseaKBPkRPU) and judge for themselves, but your characterization is ridiculous. It's also incomplete. Strong Towns and DoNotEat are specifically talking about urban freeways through city centers in what you're linking to, not freeways in general. The main criticism is that the land used for the freeway displaces a large amount of both homes and businesses and replaces them areas where people don't live or work. This is illustrated by dozens of before/after photos, comparisons between cities or, yes, simulations using a city simulator game."
We need to back up, because you are clipping my full argument and making it seem like it's something it isn't again. Full context:
*I had another thought - I live in Phoenix, Arizona. We have a lot of freeways. Strong Towns wouldn’t like them because you can get on and off them every mile or so, but they do have some things going for them: at every on-ramp and off-ramp in the metro area, the non-highway roads either go over or under the highway in a pretty seamless way. Essentially our freeways are “buried” for all intents and purposes. Would Strong Towns be OK with freeways with very, very limited entry and exit points?*
I'm explicitly talking about urban freeways here, asking if Strongtowns would be OK with them in cities in the way they exist in Phoenix. Neither Strongtowns or I call for the abolition of the highway system outside of cities; it's as far as I know something we both accept as a necessity. My question here, in context, is whether they'd accept something like freeways in cities as a way of getting around cities.
Whether or not Strongtowns likes freeways in cities is relevant, because they offer a way to get around cities very quickly. It's also a roadway that isolates fast-moving cars from pedestrians, which they claim to want. It's especially important since they want to slow cars as much as possible in every other urban context; slowing traffic literally everywhere makes cars much less viable as a transportation method, putting walkability directly at odds with driveability and setting up an "us or them" dichotomy.
When I went to check to see if Strongtowns liked urban freeways, they very much don't. And one of the reasons they don't like them is that a guy can make a completely fictional reality in which they look maximally bad. That's a horrible argument for obvious reasons; I could get the same game and put in a freeway and tell the exact opposite story he's telling; I could talk of incredibly improved commerce and people getting to the hospital in the nick of time. Would I be lying doing so? We don't know without data. But we also don't know if DoNotEat's is accurate or honest without data - which is what makes "this guy can make it look bad in a video game" a piss-poor form of argumentation.
I don't doubt that there's a stronger form of this argument to be made; there's probably reasons to dislike freeways. But I can only respond to the actual arguments Strongtowns actually makes, and here they made a really, really laughably weak one.
4.
"You're missing the central idea of Strong Towns by trying to look at revealed preferences."
Again, I have to criticize the arguments that Strongtowns actually makes, and here it's making the argument that people want to live in suburbs, and freeways make that possible, and thus freeways are bad because people chose something Strongtowns doesn't like.
You are criticizing me for using revealed preference here, but it's not me that's using it! Strongtowns is very literally saying that freeways give people a choice on where to live, and that this is bad because sometimes they pick something Strongtowns doesn't like. Where you say "pillaging places like Rondo", what Strongtowns is explicitly saying is what was pillaged were people, and that they were pillaged by *offering them a place to live they liked better*. They are arguing that people should never have had a choice, and should have been forced to live in ultra-dense city centers whether they liked it or not. I know *you* are not making this argument, but they are - and it's horrific.
"Strong Towns (and other "walkability" advocates) don't believe you can really choose your home's transportation network, any more than you can choose your school district's curriculum. As described in your linked article, the decision to build a freeway through Rondo was not up to Rondo residents. It was decided by St. Paul suburbanites, using funds from state and federal governments."
This is partially potentially true and partially false. In terms of being true, it's potentially true that a given city-center area may not have wanted a freeway through it. That's a complex argument of the type that I've broadly found Strongtowns absolutely unwilling to have - they make appeals to emotion and call freeways racist or mention video games, but come up short on actual data-driven arguments in terms of almost everything I've read for them.
In terms of being false, lots of people choose the transportation schema they want, as well as choosing school districts: they do this by having the ability to choose where they live. As per the example, Strongtowns is arguing that much of this choice shouldn't exist and should be eliminated.
"But doesn't this reveal a preference for suburbs over places like Rondo? Sure, I guess. But Strong Towns would characterize these suburbs as existing off of federal and state funds and pillaging places like Rondo. In this mindset, someone moving to the suburbs is revealing a preference to be the robber, rather than the robbed and to receive government cash transfers rather than fund them. A critique of Strong Towns should focus on central thesis that car-focused transportation planning create and necessitate these wealth transfers, not that people like receiving them."
I don't think I'd have a problem with this except that it's not an argument Strongtowns actually usually makes from a strong, persuasive data-driven perch. If I'm a robber baron unfairly taking wealth transfers, that's an argument to make; Strongtowns doesn't make arguments like that as a general rule except by stating them and asking me to swallow them. Am I stealing from the inner city by living someplace else? It's possible, but the burden of proof is on them and they don't do the hard work of actually proving anything.
Again, I can only argue against the arguments Strongtowns actually makes. What I'm criticizing them for is not doing the hard work of actually making them - they appeal to emotion, tell me things they like are good and things other people like are bad, and then stop arguing. *This is really bad and what my article focuses on criticizing*.
"In general, I'd say one of the main issues with your critique is that you are thinking too small and assume Strong Towns is too. This is best illustrated by your characterization of the article that describes pedestrian bridges. The bridge (in their view) is useless without changing the surrounding car-focused infrastructure."
Here's the thing: I'm not thinking small. I'm relating what they are asking for. They say pedestrian bridges are bad. They say crosswalks are bad. We can't bury all the roads - that's clearly prohibitively expensive (I think both sides would probably do it if they could). So what's left? Getting rid of the high speed road. If their premise is that pedestrians should be able to walk that way and they reject every single kind of crossing, what's left is getting rid of the road.
You acknowledge the same thing: What they really want is to get rid of the road. They think the road is the problem; the road should go away. But their definition of "the road" is any road that goes faster than ~20 MPH inside of a city. That's a really, really big ask. By pretending like the bridge is the issue, they are avoiding talking about what they really want: the abolition of any kind of roadway within a city over which cars can move quickly.
TLDR Summary:
Strongtowns wants something really, really huge: they want it to be mostly non-viable to own and use a car for transport within a city. They want urban freeways not to exist; they want the remaining roads to move at <=20 MPH speeds and to give way to pedestrians in ways maximally favorable to the pedestrians at any cost. They want suburbs to be non-viable so that people are forced to live in urban areas, making them more viable.
It's possible that they are correct in wanting this. I'm not saying it's not. It's entirely possible that the benefits of this outweigh the downsides in huge, substantial ways and we were all fools to make car-viable infrastructure and to give it any level of priority over pedestrian traffic. Strongtowns believes this. But if they believe it, that's the argument they should explicitly and clearly be making, and they *refuse to do this*.
Instead of coming out and asking for what they want and being honest about the costs of what they are asking for, they bury it under layers and layers of confusion. They pretend that cars would be at all viable with common-sense changes to accommodate pedestrian traffic, but when you dig it turns out they won't accept any form of accommodation; the cars need to go away, full-stop. They pretend extreme density isn't necessary for their model to work without trade-offs; it is. And they do this over and over again, in virtually any article they write.
You won't believe me, but I'm actually not anti-walkability. I just spent a whole weekend in DC, and there are some very appealing aspects to it. But it comes with costs. Enforcing it in the way Strongtowns wants it would come with much, much more extreme costs. I want them to be honest and upfront about this; they won't. Until they are, I will actively resist everything they seem to want by default; that's the correct response to take when someone is trying to fool you.
(Is this really the best formatting Substack has? oof). Thank you for taking the time to respond and for addressing everything. And should also apologize if I strayed a bit from what your actual point was. Would it be fair to say that your post isn't about whether Strong Towns is right, but more that Strong Towns is dishonest in presenting their arguments? I struggle thinking about the more meta critique of their argument without weighing in on the argument itself.
1. When someone defines terms in an article, the "we take _____ to mean" is implied. The "yes, there's a difference" also shows that they're acknowledging that these words are being used differently than expected by someone new to the site. Maybe the tone is didactic or patronizing, but I don't think they're misleading the reader. I didn't find the phrasing to be implying the same thing as you, but that's just my opinion. Do you think most people have your reaction and read the same implications into the phrasing?
I also don't find your cat/dog example analogous. I already thought there was a difference between cats and dogs, used streets and roads interchangeably. They're making terms more precise by creating subcategories (of something that I would previously have not differentiated between). Your analogy is more like replacing definitions I already have. I'd find that dishonest, but don't mind having to accept a new taxonomy in order to understand an argument.
The result that I took from it was to look more carefully at my surroundings and categorize them in the new taxonomy. (e.g. I recently went through the intersection of Glenview Rd and Ridgeton Rd in Cleveland. Using this taxonomy, I'd call them streets).
I also have to ask if you watched the video on the page. They directly map the Dutch terms on to street and road at about the 10 minute mark. It’s the only reason I know what they are.
They do make a direct comparison to streets and roads at 3:05 and 4:40 respectively in the video. There's also sections labeled things like "stroads are unsafe" or "stroads are inefficient" that list their arguments.
I think their suggestion is pretty clear (and is in the video labeled "how to fix our stroads"). City planners should look at individual stroads because they're unsafe, inefficient and expensive (see video labels). To fix them, they should more clearly state what they'd like it to do. If they'd like it to be a destination for shopping, eating or living, they should make it into a street. This would make it less useful for moving long distances, but make it much more convenient. Or make it a road and do the opposite.
2. *For instance, in the quote I provided they simultaneously claim that Stroads are bad at moving cars, but also that cars on Stroads move much too fast - these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but the incongruity seems to require some level of explanation to mesh the two (like, maybe the streetlights are supposed to suck out all the extra speed, or something)
I cut off the quote because I thought the suggestion that streetlights suck out speed was obviously false and therefore your previous explicit statement was sarcastic and should not be taken seriously. That's my mistake.
3. You regularly use anecdotes or hypotheticals in your posts (and even in these replies). Do they prove your argument? No, not really. But they certainly help the audience understand what you mean.
. No one at Strong Towns thinks that freeways are bad because some guy can make them seem bad while playing a video game. They believe that freeways are bad because they’re the result of ignorant central planning or caused isolated car-centric suburbs and dilapidated inner cities (see the articles linked in the one about the video). The video itself is clear that it is a narrative meant to illustrate something that already happened. Saying they’re using someone playing a video game as proof is like saying Orwell was against authoritarian governments because of something that fictional pigs did. (This is minor but your characterization is wrong - no one actually plays a video game. He uses it as a model)
4. This is probably where it’ll be most difficult to distinguish between strong town’s argument (society should rely less on the automobile) and the meta-argument (ST does not argue effectively or honestly).
It could be difficult to have data-driven argument about whether “people want freeways”. But they use data in all kinds of ways. For example, here’s a comparison between the tax revenue from two commercial lots with similar sizes but different focuses on cars:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/1/2/the-cost-of-auto-orientation.html
Here’s one where they analyze an entire city in a similar way (looking at taxes generated by block) then compares it to infrastructure it needs to maintain:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money
This is much more data driven than just saying something is racist or playing a video game. They argue that the lifestyle that requires freeways requires more infrastructure maintenance than is generated by taxes of the people living that lifestyle. This difference is made up by either wealth transfers from people not living that lifestyle or from the future (i.e. debt) until it eventually fails entirely.
This is very clearly stated by the founder while he responds (dismissively) to a density question:
To me it is obvious that there needs to be enough private wealth in a place to provide enough public revenue (which, in my way of viewing the world, is essentially excess private wealth) to maintain the systems that support that private wealth. In short, we don't just exist in order to build roads, sewers and storm drains. These things are a means to an end—wealth creation and prosperity—not the end in and of themselves.
If all this public investment is not providing adequate returns, it will fail. Period. That's not a theory; that's math.
Much of the site is building up support for the difference between public revenue and maintenance costs and that tends to be data driven. Other parts of the site might illustrate some of the harder to quantify costs or speculate on motivations, but at the core is some accounting.
That might also be why I found your essay frustrating enough to register a substack account about. Strong Towns is not pro-density or pro-walkability. Here’s the first result I found for “strong towns walkability”
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-streets-are-more-economically-productive
In it, walkability is mainly valued for its effect on tax revenue, not as a goal in itself. The site is about financially sustainable infrastructure and advocates for density or walkability when those serve that purpose. They’re not trying to pull some sort of trick when they dismiss density questions. They’re weird about density or walkability for the same reason a nutritionist would be weird if you demanded they tell you what to eat. The answer is “well, it depends.” Sometimes density helps cities balance budgets, but in other situations it doesn’t.
Would a “strong town” support your hypothetical Wal-Mart or Cat Cafe? Maybe. It depends on if they’re able to generate enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure required to support them. If they want to eat, they’re going to have to work.
I found some articles about Wal-Mart and it doesn’t seem like it. They believe that Wal-Mart produces a small value per square foot compared to small stores on main street, while also requiring much more infrastructure.
If you’ve read Scott Alexander’s blog, they’re mistake theorists, not conflict theorists. They’re not going to argue directly that it SHOULD be mostly non-viable to own and operate a car within a city or live in the suburbs.. They’re arguing that it IS mostly non-viable to do so and it only seems like it isn’t due to debt, delusion and deceitful accounting. Instead of just listing cities financial situations (e.g. Akron has a 6:10 debt to revenue ratio, Albuquerque has a 4:10…..Yonkers is 7:10) they spend a lot of time telling anecdotes. There’s a strong data-driven skeleton if you peel away all the fleshy stories about redlining or car accidents, but you have to understand what its about.
> People don’t really think about “distance” in terms of distance - they think about it in terms of travel time. Dropping all town and city speed limits to <20 MPH makes these things farther away in the way that matters to people; that means less people live within a reasonable travel distance from any particular spot in the city. That means, all things the same, that you get less big-box stores and specialty shops.
> I want to live in the suburbs and have the advantages of driving at reasonably high speeds, but that doesn’t mean everyone does. Some people want to live in super-dense urban environments, even if I don’t. I don’t want Strong Towns to be able to force me to drive everywhere at sub-bicycle speeds...
This bit I want to address because I think you're making the assumption that car-dependency is the default and 'normal' way to travel. You're absolutely right that people think of distance in terms of travel time, and will take the fastest and most convenient mode of transport available. That's why I'm confused by the second quote above: you mention the advantages of driving at reasonably high speeds, which just seems to be a roundabout way of saying that, yes, you also want to get to your destination quickly and easily. But why should driving your car fast have to be the best (or only) method for this?
The fact that dropping the speed limits makes car travel less attractive is a feature, not a bug. Walkability advocates don't want to punish people for driving, but to create an environment that facilitates different modes of transport for different purposes in a human-friendly way. One reason that more people don't use bikes is because it's too dangerous with all the cars on the road. City planners give priority to car infrastructure over public transit because the expectation is that everyone is going to drive anyway.
None of this is necessary or expected outside of North America. Suburbs in the Netherlands have easily accessible shopping streets reachable in minutes by bike, which don't need a dozen football fields worth of parking lot as a result. Most people still have cars, which they use for trips to the beach, to visit family in other towns, or to ikea. But it's not always the default mode of transport whenever anyone wants to get anywhere, which is why we don't /have/ to decide how to get pedestrians across freeways, or find a way to fit massive amounts of car traffic from suburbs into cities, or figure out how to get our kids to school when dad needs the car for a business trip, and so on.
I don't think either walking or driving are defaults that are better than one another, but that there are trade-offs that don't get acknowledged.
As a for-instance, I live in Arizona. Last year, I needed to change jobs. In looking for a job, I found one that looked good that was 21 miles away. This ended up being the best option I could find at that time. To drive that distance took about 30-40 minutes in fairly good traffic with a freeway for a large part of the distance. If I had wanted to bike it, it would take about 90-120 minutes. This is "each way". In a town where temperatures often exceed 40C/100F. Or I can take a complex series of bus rides for a >2 hours one way transit.
In this case, I have to make choices. I can either accept a labor market that's a quarter as large, or I can sacrifice multiple hours of my life per day, or I can take worse jobs. I could move closer to that particular work, but this works against me the other way - I chose where I live because I wanted to live there, not arbitrarily. My housing market choices would also be restricted, even if I was comfortable moving every time I needed a job, which I'm not.
If Strong Towns-style city rules were put in place here, I'd have a maximum speed of 20MPH in the entire city, not counting lights; I'd be looking at travel times 1/3rd as fast around the city no matter what form of travel I chose, with similar restrictions. Somewhere, I'm paying for what they want - either in terms of more expensive or worse housing, less pay, something.
There's solutions for a lot of this, but the big obvious one is density. Phoenix (the city, not the metro area) has a population density of 3,000-3400 people per square mile depending on who you ask; The Netherlands have ~1300 people per square mile across the entire country, Randstad has 3900 and Amsterdam has 13,500. So yes, they can make it entire walkable, but they've already "paid for it" by packing people in like sardines. That's no less inherently "human friendly" than driving everywhere, by the by; liking one or the other reveals preferences, not biology or how people have lived for most of the history of people.
That's what I'm saying, for the most part - Strong Towns-type sites slyly represent that you can have everything for free, but you can't; you are paying for it somewhere. Some people are going to want to make the trades their demands need to work (far less absolute-distance mobility and increased density traded to maintain "practical" mobility), and that's fine to want, it's even fine to get in a lot of situations. But to a lot of people what they want is a constant stress-horror, and they wouldn't choose it if they knew what was being proposed. Which is arguably why Strong Towns is very, very careful not to acknowledge those costs - they go "wouldn't it be nice if everything was cobblestones?" but never the other stuff.
> The fact that dropping the speed limits makes car travel less attractive is a feature, not a bug. Walkability advocates don't want to punish people for driving
These statements are blatantly contradictory. If making car travel less attractive -- in an absolute sense, not merely a relative one -- is one of their goals, then walkability advocates do want to punish people for driving.
> yes, you also want to get to your destination quickly and easily. But why should driving your car fast have to be the best (or only) method for this?
It just is. Walking is too slow and laborious, the bus is too roundabout, and trains too limited in service points.
If car travel is less attractive, but there are other viable options available, I do not consider that a punishment. But whether it's absolute or relative is the question: if you would lower the speed limits without consideration of whether that's appropriate for the road or whether there's a concurrent effort to make transit more effective, that would be punishing, and counterproductive.
> It just is.
We should be careful to distinguish an is from an ought.
I live in a small town in the midwest United States. In kind of sounds like Strong Towns wants to live in a... small town in the midwest United States.
It is super interesting to read about Strong Towns from a perspective of someone who isn’t super into this stuff. I’m quite interested in this stuff, but like many other things it can turn into a bit of an echo chamber.
About streets vs. roads: the current colloquial term for what they call a street is “a mall”. As in shopping mall. The hallways are car free spaces with shops on the sides, for all intents and purposes these are private streets.
You can do a thought experiment. What would it take to let people drive, even slowly, through the middle of a mall? After all sometimes it is convenient to park in front of a shop, right? You would have to delineate a roadway through the middle of a mall, and clear out all the people. You would now have to ask people to look out for cars instead of just shopping around. Cars are loud so talking to other people becomes annoying. It would be hugely disruptive. This thought experiment gives you a feel of the kind of compromise it takes to actually drive cars through a street. (before 1920 or so streets in a city functioned much more like malls today, and it was in fact hugely disruptive when cars showed up).
Now, cars gave us something — a level of mobility that 200 years ago, even the kings and emperors of the world couldn’t dream about. But it is still worth wondering if this compromise is the right one for every single street.
A basic thing of walkable cities is to consciously decide on which streets we are going to drive faster than 20 mph. Most streets would be 20 mph but we would designate a network of streets where you can drive faster, and that comes to within a mile of most homes. This combines most advantages of walkable slow streets (most homes on quiet streets) and mobility by car (you are limited to 20 mph only for the first and last mile or so). This obviously costs you capacity, but that is often more than offset by people now able to walk or ride a bicycle for short trips. This would combine with some changes in zoning, eg. you can open corner stores or cafes on your average suburban lot so more people will have these much closer to their homes.
I think one of the inspirations is basically reverse-engineering how cities like Tokyo work. In many cities (European and Asian) you can get around completely on foot or on bicycle, and if you have to go somewhere too far to walk, you can take some train or metro. And these trains and metros, and buses, actually work well enough, and are clean enough, with “normal people” on them, to casually go to whatever random place in the city you want to go. Or to commute to some job. Metro in particular is able to support large malls with huge catchments.
About what they call “stroads”: this is a quite specific type of streets that has a combination of many lanes, it is lined with businesses, and it has high speed limits (i.e. much more than 30 mph). *This type of street does not exist in many countries outside the US*. I have never driven on a “stroad”. I currently live in New Zealand and the closest approximation over here is a 2 + 2 lane road (plus the obligatory ballooning at intersections) with a speed limit of 50 km/h (30 mph).
Strong Towns calculates the value of a specific street/road by value-per-acre. The recommended VPA there's a specific ratio between the cost of yearly maintenance to how much the city makes off of a property. You would find that the VPA of "stroads" is usually very low, in a way that means that the city can't turn a profit with its inclusion. (the businesses don't pay enough property tax to maintain a stroad. they often even receive some tax subsidies from the city in order to start the business)
BUT, strong towns is not even strongly advocating of getting rid of "straods". It's talking about making sure that the ratio is much higher than the current "acceptable" ratio. If you have a specific stroad that can do that, People will leave it and move to a lower hanging fruit.
If we assume the reasons given for flight to the suburbs are true. Once suburban population growth causes commute times become excessive and prices to rise, according to this model people should have moved back to the city centers. Many cities in the north east (US) are easily traversed on foot or have accessible mass transportation, but even before covid people weren't moving back. While some of their criticisms of the modern city maybe valid, especially a sense of community, I tend to believe that crime, corruption, and economics are bigger factors.
In isolation, the "easy win" might be a good thing from a liberty perspective. But live and let live really isn't an option. Strong Towns people, if they get a chance, won't let you have those less-dense suburbs. One of their basic premises is that such suburban development is not viable; the infrastructure maintenance costs are deferred and when they come due, tax revenues are orders of magnitude too small to cover them and the suburb is left to decay while a new suburb is then built using the same model.
So while parking minimums, lot-size minimums, street width minimums and single-family-detached-only zoning may be offense to liberty, they serve as an important bulwark against Strong Towns and other urbanists who would force us all into tiny apartments with no cars. They would do this with various well-known tools such as Urban Growth Boundaries (sorry, can't build a new less-dense suburb out in farmland), parking maximums, street-width maximums and pedestrian-only streets, zero-setback requirements, etc. Freedom isn't an option; there's no one to accept the bargain "live and let live" (if one group did, the coercive proposals could just come from another group) and no one who could be trusted to stick to it even if there was.
I grew up in dense, walkable, and fairly poor neighbourhoods, generally right in the city (not suburban). I don't have a problem with density, provided it doesn't come with other problems, as it often does. Yet you class it as a downside in itself.
I also grew up in Canada, where people are stereotypically more law abiding. So we weren't plagued with careless drivers causing pedestrian deaths and injuries, or the crime that I suspect most Americans think of when they think of dense city neighbourhoods.
During covid, I was glad that I now live in a single family house with its very own lot - no common entrances, or other reason to come within 6 feet of my neighbours. But that's a very unusual feeling for me. About the only downside to density in itself in normal conditions is noise, and it's easy enough to get used to noise and basically stop being disturbed by it. (In my teens, I lived in an apartment building on the same intersection as the local fire hall; I soon became able to sleep through fire trucks and their sirens.)
To address the other part of this, I sort of ran out of room to talk about some of my thoughts about density. I think as you say there's some stuff going on with SES that change the lived experience of it. I'm sure living in a very dense environment where houses are 900k is much different than a very dense environment where they are 150k, and so on. Ditto national differences or even differences between cities.
Phoenix, where I live, is a very suburb-driven town; I think that probably lends itself to density having different connotations here than other places.
You say:
"Yet you class it as a downside in itself."
Well, no. I didn't do that. I definitely said that I personally hate it; I do. But I didn't class it as an always bad. See below for snips of text designed to specifically be not-that:
"I want to live in the suburbs and have the advantages of driving at reasonably high speeds, but that doesn’t mean everyone does. Some people want to live in super-dense urban environments, even if I don’t."
"in a lot of places, it’s illegal to build houses smaller than a certain size, which artificially limits density in places where it might make sense"
"Now, you may not like density (I absolutely hate it, more on this later) but it really would solve some of these problems - you don’t have to pay more for your stuff or have less of it, you just have to pack people together a little closer."
I'm not saying density is always-bad, just that I don't like it much. People are allowed to want it, and as far as I'm concerned the market should be allowed to give it to them if they do.
You are absolutely right. Your post is more nuanced than I gave it credit for. In fact, I think I reacted to "You Have to Make it Up With Density, Prices, or Worse Stuff" without checking what came after it.
Thanks for calling me on my sloppy reading.
No worries! I do the same thing sometimes.