Stroad to Recovery: Balancing the needs of roads and streets. (ARCHITECTURE & ENGINEERING)

• Author: Rhode, Scott
• Date: 01 February 2024

During a late autumn sunrise, Charles Marohn walked through Anchorage's Fairview neighborhood. Marohn, perhaps the most famous traffic engineer in the country, had been to forty-nine other states, and his tour finally brought him to Alaska. What he saw, he said afterward, made him sad.

Gambell Street and Ingra Street, bisecting Fairview, are part of the Seward Highway junction with the Glenn Highway. Along narrow sidewalks, traffic roars by at 35 miles per hour.

Marohn quipped, "Is it spelled 'gamble' because you're gambling to cross it?"

A state study in 2018 found the Anchorage area's highest pedestrian crash rate is on Gambell Street between 9th and 15th Avenues, and Ingra Street has the region's highest per-mile rate of vehicle crashes.

To Allen Kemplen, president of the Fairview Community Council, a highway through an urban neighborhood is illogical and unsafe. "You'll move mountains to make a road safe for somebody in an automobile or a truck, right? But making a road safe for human beings--flesh and blood--you don't seem to care," says Kemplen.

In forty-nine states, Marohn has seen it before. "This is North America," he says. "Anchorage is not uniquely bad. It is typical bad."

The conflict is part of the message Marohn came to Alaska to deliver, part of a discussion he started when he gave a name to Gambell's flawed design.

Rules of the Stroad

Streets are spaces where people and vehicles mix. Roads connect living centers--town to town or one part of town to another. On streets, drivers expect to stop for pedestrians or for vehicles turning, parking, or loading. On roads, pedestrians risk their lives where drivers have priority.

Many, many facilities blur that distinction, as Marohn observed around 2011. In his papers, he invented the portmanteau "STROAD." The capital letters were meant to catch attention, as engineers and planners would ask about the non-existent acronym.

Once defined, stroads become obvious. "It is a transportation investment that tries to both move traffic and create economic development at the same time. When you're building a stroad, you're building a really bad road that also is a really bad street," Marohn says.

The term remained somewhat obscure until 2021 when the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes published the video "Stroads Are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous (and they're everywhere)."

That's where Stephanie Cloud, a landscape architect with Bettisworth North, first learned of it. "I hadn't really thought about the distinction between a road and a street," she says. "Roads take you from place to place. Then you slow down in those places, and those are the commercial nodes with streets."

Trade-offs between access and mobility are well understood. For instance, a diagram published by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) plots an inverse...