just had a random flashback of some American Lifestyle Trauma

I lived in the suburbs of Boston before I moved to the Netherlands. It had gotten vastly more crowded in recent years with absolutely horrifically inadequate urban planning to compensate. I worked in this huge cluster of office buildings, like easily ten thousand employees, that were an isolated island along a busy stroad; down the stroad was an equally isolated mall complex with plenty to eat. But there were no sidewalks whatsoever along the stroad, no busses going back and forth between the offices and the restaurants, nothing.

Which meant that ten thousand people piled into cars at the same to go get lunch down the street. With extremely predictable results.

There was this little local-chain fast food place that I liked, in its own building with its own little parking lot. It was clear from the rather outdated decor that it'd been in business for decades. But it was dying, unvisited on the side of the road. It was dying because there was too much traffic, not because there was too little. Being on that road for a quick little lunch trip was stressful because it was massively over-crowded and constantly jammed. Getting in and out of that tiny parking lot along a hugely busy road was difficult and dangerous. People didn't even consider going there anymore, it was too hard.

I'm pretty sure it'd already closed by the time I left. Killed by the miraculous capability of the American car-and-road system to deliver vast amounts of customers nowhere.

to clarify a bit of terminology for people who don't follow this problem closely:

If we agree that a "street" goes through a town and has houses, businesses, schools and the like along it that people are constantly going into and out of,

And a "road" is a higher-capacity vein with a higher speed limit that links clusters of places that are kilometers apart,

A "stroad" is what you get when your urban planning policy is "more car capacity always good" and put your houses, businesses and schools scattered along the edge of a high-capacity high-speed road that's too dangerous to cross, walk along or bike on, and where pulling in and out of destinations causes constant traffic jams.

@0xabad1dea For as long as I can remember I've had recurring nightmares of being stuck in a town I can't walk out of, not because of distance but because of car-focused design. Historically it was a town in the US but after visiting Telford (one of the UK's New Towns, a liminal hellscape of bad design with a fetish for cars and an indoor shopping centre as its town centre) that too has joined my nightmares. Your descriptions of these design issues are giving me similar anxiety.

@0xabad1dea they deliberately create a situation in which the only egress is onto the stroad because they don't want through traffic on the streets. So it's like those horrific fires you hear about where workers are trapped in burning buildings with all but one exit blocked. A catastrophe waiting to happen.

Day to day, it means every destination is at least a 20 minute drive. Even one block takes 20 minutes by the time you get through the red lights and deliberate bottlenecks. Stupid. Anti-human.

@0xabad1dea

I moved to Alexandria VA about 16 years ago because it was one of the few places in the region that supported both cars and alternative means of transportation. I generally park the car in the driveway most of the week and walk, bike, or take public transportation everywhere. But I've got a car for weekly-ish trips out further. I got addicted to that lifestyle from when I lived in Germany for a few years previously.

I happen to live a few blocks from both Mount Vernon Avenue and US-1. The former is built for multimode transportation, with especially great walkability. The local restaurants and shops are thriving.

Meanwhile, restaurants and shops along US-1 tend to die quickly. Yeah, there are some older strip malls with parking lots that do OK. But everywhere else is just too far and inconvenient to walk or bike to, but also has inadequate parking for drivers. The road there is only useful for transporting people through the area, not to it. It's the worst of both worlds.

Which is a damned shame because there's a really outstanding taco place there, and I don't want it to die from the same curse that killed the last few tenants.

@0xabad1dea not to mention having shops in the residential areas themselves, saving people the time to get on the stroad. I find zoning the most stupid idea ever.

@0xabad1dea frustratingly the UK is increasingly full of these developments, a massive blob of nothing but houses (because they’re where the profit is) behind one, maybe two, access roads and without any actual amenities. They’d be lovely if they just had a few corner shops and maybe a couple of cafes/restaurants scattered in amongst the houses.

@0xabad1dea

https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/shops-from-my-childhood-hood_1442881#18/-31.365744/-64.185782

these are the shops I remember from when I was a kid. I lived in that house until I was 24. This was, and probably still is, a low mid class 'hood, which in the various crisis waves would buoy above and below the poverty line. You'll notice the three grocery stores in a <100m radius. Most people didn't have cars and going to the supermarket was out for most. We bought bread an milk every day in these shops.

1/

@0xabad1dea

Many if not most of my school supplies from the stationery in the same street. Somewhere around there there was a greengrocer, but I can't remember where. I'm sure I forgot many, and I'm not counting the other similar shops in the other blocks that I never went to.

@DaveFlater @0xabad1dea I used to live in one of those neighborhoods. The HOA would constantly fight the city who wanted to put a second entrance for emergency vehicles because they didn't want through traffic...

@JessTheUnstill @DaveFlater meanwhile here in the newer parts of Amsterdam I have almost no through-traffic on my street of apartment towers, because why would you not turn onto the larger throughway either before it or after it on this predictable grid of several smaller streets between larger ones

@NudelnAlDente @0xabad1dea it is absolutely no coincidence that everyone laughs at Milton Keynes and (if they are aware of its existence) Telford. Likewise the similar places whose existence was decreed by government instead of arising organically, such as Basingrad and Creepy Crawley.

@DrHyde @NudelnAlDente I am completely 100% willing to believe that there is a town in England with the formal legal name of Creepy Crawley. I'm not going to check.