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by PaulDavisThe1st 1658 days ago
> Generally there is a hierarchy of roads called functional class. It goes local street - collector - minor arterial - major arterial - freeway.

This heirarchy seems to miss the importance distinction that Strong Towns makes between a "street" and a "road", in that "streets" are places where human life takes place, and "roads" are how vehicles move rapidly from place to place. It has only category with the word "street" literally present, and then moves immediately to other things whose relationship to the street/road distinction is unclear. This is a problem because streets include those that are purely residental as well as those with retail etc.
2 comments
takk309 1658 days ago
You are correct. The old way of thinking about roads/streets (synonyms in this case) is a place to move cars. The people centric view on transportation is new enough that there isn't much traction among the old guard at state DOTs. Changing something like functional class and what it means is very hard due to decades of history. As the saying goes, old dogs can't learn new tricks. This is especially true for government agencies. I have worked with cities that have a strong desire to make their transportation network people centric but the state won't help pay for it because the concepts don't move enough cars and to them, that is all that matters.
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mcv 1658 days ago
Exactly. Ideally, only the street should have real street functionality (houses and shops directly accessible from the street). Maybe the collector too; it's meant to have many streets connecting to it, so access to car parks for shops makes a lot of sense there too. But anything arterial should just be about getting people from one end to the other as smoothly as possible.

There's one more category that's often ignored in this list: the rural road. There, the functions can mix without any problems, but only because of its very low density and low use; very little traffic means you can still cross the road easily, and have time to turn into drive ways and things like that without hindering anyone.

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