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by zephjc 3638 days ago
It's important to make a semantic distinction between 'streets' and 'roads'. A typical one is:

Streets are things which are where humand can play, people bike and walk, go to stores, around the places we live and work, etc. They are 'Places' where people can live about their day to day lives. Very human-friendly.

'Roads' which are higher-speed connectors between Places. Highways are a very high-speed type of roads.

In a typologically healthy region, there is a clear distinction between streets in roads, but in the US there is a blurring, and we often see what are sometimes dubbed 'stroads' - a mutant street-road hybrid, the sort of thing we typically see in the US with wide, fast, multi-lane streets, lined with strip malls and the like. They're hostile to human and make walking between locations at best boring and tedious, and at worst dangerous.

1 comments

This is interesting stuff. Where'd you learn about this distinction?
Strongtowns I think was my first introduction to it. Here's a good recent article on it

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/5/22/engineers-shoul...

Note his definitions are a little different than what I used, but have roughly the same point