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.

Another place I lived in Virginia several hundred miles away from Boston had the same fundamental design flaw (so it’s not just Boston’s suburban ring being uniquely bad at this):

Massive stroad, constant traffic, no walking or biking possible. Huge housing development where thousands of people live connected to it by one (1) driveway with no traffic light, no other exit anywhere. It took literally twenty minutes to find an opening to pull out onto the stroad so you could drive a few hundred meters to the grocery store.

I know I’m preaching to the choir on mastodon of all places but it’s really shocking to think how all that’s just treated as normal and inevitable and the unfixable result of “overpopulation” rather than a systematic failure of government to govern in the interests of everyday life being physically possible, for reasons that all, no matter how unrelated it seems at first glance, ultimately boil down to “racism again”

ALT