Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes

cars, pedestrians, and intersections are inevitable. 42 Who, Marohn asks, is most responsible for that fatal crash in Oregon? Is it the driver who was momentarily inattentive and mistook a red light for green? Or should blame be laid before the engineers who make residential streets with design speeds 20 or 30 miles per hour faster than the posted speed limit? Or the policy makers who allow posted speed limits high enough in residential areas to be catastrophic every time a pedestrian collision occurs? The street where the three children died carries four lanes of traffic with a center turn lane—a design that invites risky speeds in a family neighborhood.
    â€œSpeed is seductive,” Marohn observes. “We engineer for high performance. Can we then blame drivers for taking advantage of that engineering? We know they will. . . . This is indicative of our incoherent approach to streets and roads.”
    Marohn argues that the distinction between streets and roads has become blurred over time, a confusion at the heart of motor violence. Streets are supposed to be platforms for creating wealth, he argues, while roads exist to get people from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible.
    Great streets thrive on complexity, which today can encompass the safe (and slow) mix of pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses, trolleys, delivery vans, schoolchildren, shoppers, business people—the classic Main Street mix. Think of any street where you love to walk or window-shop or sightsee, where you slow or stop your car to turn and park and no one angers, honks, or glares, and you get the idea. Great streets build business, society, prosperity, and strong towns.
    Roads serve a completely different purpose. They do not tolerate complexity. Think of freeways. They have barriers that prevent turning. They have no traffic signals or crosswalks. Pedestrians and bicycles are banned. There are no roadside attractions to park and visit without getting off the freeway first. Roads serve the simple purpose of taking us and our stuff somewhere far and fast. They can take you to streets, but they can’t be streets.
    â€œWe need both,” Marohn says. “What we don’t need is something that tries to be both.”
    Yet the modern landscape is filled with thoroughfares trying to be both. Marohn coined the useful term “stroad” to describe these often unsightly hybrids that arose during the age of postwar suburban sprawl and the car-centric traffic engineering philosophy that accompanied it. The fatal crash in Oregon took place on such a stroad—a conveyance that has the worst attributes of street and road while performing neither function well. Stroads offer commercewithout walkability—fast-food drive-throughs, strip malls, big-box stores—but they usually lack the larger economic payoffs that great streets generate. At the same time, the turning, parking, and crosswalks bolted onto these fast, wide stroads slow down the Point-A-to-B traffic flow, imposing the cost of delay on drivers, encouraging them to speed even more when they are moving.
    This uncomfortable mix makes stroads the scene of many crashes, particularly those involving cars hitting pedestrians. The official response—when there is any at all—is usually to armor up the roads with guardrails or barriers or, as in the Oregon case, to propose stepped-up police patrols. Rarely is the obvious and only effective solution imposed, Marohn says: making sure cars can’t go faster than a statistically safe 20 miles per hour where significant numbers of pedestrians are present. That means having pure streets and pure roads, with hybrids taken out of the mix.
    The problem is that stroads have become an enormous part of the American landscape. Converting them one way or the other would be a long and arduous project—and a controversial one. Pushing this viewpoint has turned Marohn from insider to political pariah in his own