Nope, in America through-traffic goes right through the city center. Fortunately, many cities have innovated to solve this problem by bulldozing their city centers to build more stroads
That’s not true in many parts of the country. It’s very much a mixed bag. Look at San Antonio, 410 goes around the city and connects the various highways so you don’t need to go through the city center to drive past the city. In Seattle, 405 was intended to do that for Seattle to avoid 15, but then Bellevue got huge. In SLC, we have 215.
Beltroutes are common across the country and are designed to solve exactly this problem.
Stroads are a different problem unconnected to highways going through cities. In fact, they’re often the old highways that went through town and became a stroad when the highway was built. We then built more of them because people liked driving cars to their destination instead of walking or taking transit.
The best possible bypass won’t solve the stroad problem or congestion in the city center. What we need is a complete redesign of what a city center means, which I think should be:
exits for a city only at the edges, and no reasonable way to cut through the city
tons of free parking at the edge of cities and cheap or free transit from the edge to the city center
fantastic mass transit inside of cities
car free zone in downtown, so the only way to get there is transit or walking/cycling
If we can do that, we can rip out stroads to make room for more density in attractions. Keep some roads for trucks to make deliveries and whatnot, and convert the rest to walkable streets.
Beltroutes are common across the country and are designed to solve exactly this problem.
Not true. Beltroutes and bypasses are built with exits every mile. The land along them is immediately rezoned for development. They’re always intended as (sub)urban expansion. It’s a scam to get Federal funding for local transportation infrastructure.
Having exits isn’t the same as “driving through downtown.”
I do agree that we should redo how highways work, and part of that is having fewer exits, but what causes slowdowns isn’t the quantity of exits, but the ability to get almost everywhere in a car. In other words, the number of exits are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The highway infrastructure is in the right place much of the time, the issue is the rest of the infrastructure.
We don’t need more bypasses or lanes, we need driving to be less convenient than transit and walking for short trips. I think one simple change would improve things greatly: cut major arteries in the middle to prevent getting from one edge of the city to the other quickly by car. Basically, restrict those areas to delivery trucks, buses, and emergency services, and force the rest of the traffic to filter through side streets. Just that amount of inconvenience would push a bunch of people to use transit instead, and the areas cut off could be converted to a street.
Yeah downtown to me means lights every block, some towns are absolutely like that, but they’re not on any “shipping” or major highways. So if you’re traveling across country, you’re not going to be on those highways anyways.
Do most cities not have bypasses? In Canada even most small towns have a bypass so you avoid the traffic lights.
It’s mostly for the semi traffic, the stopping and stopping ruins the roads, so they have a highway going around town to avoid that.
Those highways are often very congested too. It can take like 2 hours just to drive through Houston, even using the loops/beltways
Nope, in America through-traffic goes right through the city center. Fortunately, many cities have innovated to solve this problem by bulldozing their city centers to build more stroads
That’s not true in many parts of the country. It’s very much a mixed bag. Look at San Antonio, 410 goes around the city and connects the various highways so you don’t need to go through the city center to drive past the city. In Seattle, 405 was intended to do that for Seattle to avoid 15, but then Bellevue got huge. In SLC, we have 215.
Beltroutes are common across the country and are designed to solve exactly this problem.
Stroads are a different problem unconnected to highways going through cities. In fact, they’re often the old highways that went through town and became a stroad when the highway was built. We then built more of them because people liked driving cars to their destination instead of walking or taking transit.
The best possible bypass won’t solve the stroad problem or congestion in the city center. What we need is a complete redesign of what a city center means, which I think should be:
If we can do that, we can rip out stroads to make room for more density in attractions. Keep some roads for trucks to make deliveries and whatnot, and convert the rest to walkable streets.
Not true. Beltroutes and bypasses are built with exits every mile. The land along them is immediately rezoned for development. They’re always intended as (sub)urban expansion. It’s a scam to get Federal funding for local transportation infrastructure.
Having exits isn’t the same as “driving through downtown.”
I do agree that we should redo how highways work, and part of that is having fewer exits, but what causes slowdowns isn’t the quantity of exits, but the ability to get almost everywhere in a car. In other words, the number of exits are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The highway infrastructure is in the right place much of the time, the issue is the rest of the infrastructure.
We don’t need more bypasses or lanes, we need driving to be less convenient than transit and walking for short trips. I think one simple change would improve things greatly: cut major arteries in the middle to prevent getting from one edge of the city to the other quickly by car. Basically, restrict those areas to delivery trucks, buses, and emergency services, and force the rest of the traffic to filter through side streets. Just that amount of inconvenience would push a bunch of people to use transit instead, and the areas cut off could be converted to a street.
Yeah downtown to me means lights every block, some towns are absolutely like that, but they’re not on any “shipping” or major highways. So if you’re traveling across country, you’re not going to be on those highways anyways.