My year and a half in Afghanistan working under the US Air
Force confronted me with a new acronym almost every day. One of the bases for which I wrote a
comprehensive plan required a “Glossary of Acronyms” in order to sort them all
out, ballooning to several pages in length. It was exhausting.
And then there are the words made up on the spot.
Generally speaking, I leave neologisms to the likes of
Buckminster Fuller. And even
though acronyms don’t qualify as newly minted words, they can serve largely the
same semantic function. It’s hard
not to scan the cultural forces that help to elicit both acronyms and neologisms
with a certain level of amusement.
I’ll admit that I’ve deployed a new word from my artillery from time to time. (I’d like to think I coined the term
“popera” long before it achieved musical relevancy, but no one will see me
phoning my lawyer.) Even though the output of fabricated labels within the
discipline of urban studies pales in comparison to the Department of Defense, I
still find that I’m rarely in the up-and-up when it comes to new trends or the
modish terms to describe them.
Which brings us to the stroad. I wasn’t aware of what a stroad was
until just a few months ago.
Semantically, it seems just as inaccurate as the façadectomy that I have referenced a few times in the past. After all, “stroad” is a
portmanteau of “street” and “road”, used to characterize an arterial that seems
to share features of both, but also nullifies their intrinsic advantages. But aren’t “street” and “road”
synonymous? According to a recent City Lab article, Chuck Marohn, a “recovering traffic engineer”, coined the term “stroad” to
describe any right-of-way that “moves cars at speeds too slow to get around
efficiently but too fast to support productive private sector
development”. Therefore, a stroad
tries to achieve the most desirable characteristics of both roads (for their
ability to move vehicular traffic quickly) and streets (for their ability to
link neighborhood features in an aesthetic manner that remains safe and
appealing for all users). It fails
on both counts. According to Marohn, “anytime you are traveling between 30 and
50 miles per hour [as is typically characteristic of a stroad], you are
basically in an area that is too slow to be efficient yet too fast to provide a
framework for capturing a productive rate of return.” Marohn has created a video through his nonprofit Strong Towns that offers a
visualization of an archetypal stroad.
My long-repressed English major has turned me into an
insufferable semantic nitpicker. Here
I criticize Marohn for placing two words—street
and road—into tidy, discrete semantic
boxes…two words that for most people are fungible. Beyond that, I need to chill out, because Marohn’s neologism
is effective in pretty much every other sense. Regardless of whether or not a stroad blends a street and a road,
as anyone else would define it, it still feels like a hybrid of two types of
right-of-way. Perhaps it cold be
called an arterial and a collector (a “collecterial”?), but then those two
terms are fully entrenched in the lingo of transportation engineers.
“Stroad” really conveys another key point. It’s one ugly sounding word—clipped,
aggressive and vulgar. It almost
sounds like a blend of stoat and toad, two largely unloved animals. And, in my first real-life encounter
with a stroad (at least at a point when I knew what the word meant), the first
thing that occurred to me was the unattractiveness of the landscape. Here it is:
I’m looking eastward down Michigan Avenue, in the Great Lake
State’s capital of Lansing. And
it’s obvious that this major street, which connects downtown Lansing to the
campus of Michigan State University in nearby East Lansing, has enjoyed a number
of investments that attempt to make it a more attractive environment for
pedestrians. Notice the vintage
lamps hugging the curbs. Another
angle reveals some “bulb out” sidewalk designs intended to lower the section of
the street necessary for walkers to cross at a given crosswalk, as seen below:
And, to be fair, quite a few of the structures on the north
side of the street (to the left in these photos) date from a time period when
most buildings directly addressed the sidewalk. But the side on which I was standing—the south
side—shows the fierce competition that those handsome old two-story buildings
must face.
To be fair, real estate speculators have caught on to the
notion that this is a redeveloping area, and someone is trying to market this
corner parcel to capitalize on what is ostensibly an emerging district for
young professionals.
I wish this developer the best of luck. He or she may very well succeed. After all, just a half-block to the
west, on the north side of the street, sits the Cooley Law School Stadium, an
apparent recent addition that has prompted certain civic boosters to brand this
stretch of Michigan Avenue as the “Stadium District”.
And on the otherwise desolate south side of the street,
another obviously recent mixed-use development sits just a little further to
the west, ostensibly capitalizing on the Stadium District name.
And, another block to the west, an old industrial building has
benefited from a repurposing into a mixed-use facility with restaurants on the
first floor.
Perhaps Michigan Avenue will come together wonderfully as a
corridor with densely interwoven different uses. It doesn’t hurt to be optimistic. After all, this stroad terminates just a few blocks further
to the east, at the Michigan State Capitol.
The elongated dome of the Capitol is visible in the
distance. So this Stadium District
is just a football toss away from Lansing’s downtown and the center of
Michigan’s government. (But,
incidentally, not the Ingham County seat. Lansing is among the only state capitals that is not also the
center of government for its respective county.) But compare Michigan Avenue to another, smaller commercial
thoroughfare in central Lansing:
The above pictures reveal the streetscape for Washington
Square, a street perpendicular to Michigan Avenue that runs just a block east
of the capitol. Both roads are
visible on the map below:
On Washington Square, cars can still get where they need to
be, but never while careening at 50 miles per hour. The abundance of on-street parking—most of it occupied on a
lazy Saturday afternoon—integrates peaceably with the copious sidewalk-oriented
buildings, resulting in an environment that is far more likely to foster higher
concentrations of pedestrians.
Compare once more with Michigan Avenue just a few blocks away:
Churck Marohn recognizes that stroads often boast
superlative investment. But to
what end? The sidewalk on the
right looks great, with decorative brick pavers, street trees, and wrought iron
gates. But the gaps between all
the buildings on the right suggest that most landowners in this area still
prefer setting aside plenty of space for off-street parking. Meanwhile, on the
left, abutting the Cooley Law School Stadium, is another big parking lot.
And since parking lots are not exactly a high-intensity land
use, chances are the land values along Michigan Avenue are significantly lower
than Washington Square.
Admittedly, Washington Square is in the heart of downtown, but Michigan
Avenue’s effort to assert itself as a competing Uptown district isn’t bearing
the same fruit.
On his stroad video, Marohn asserts, “Parking lots don’t
employ anyone, and parking lots don’t pay a lot of taxes, so this environment
becomes very low-yielding.”
Frankly, it’s amazing that this stroad has even achieved what we see
now. But the investment to
get here has been formidable, and it’s hard to imagine that the buildings that
flank this seven-lane arterial will ever host sufficient density to make it hot
real estate that can attract college students away from the much better,
stroad-less street network in MSU’s hometown of East Lansing. The only conceivable way to scale down
this stretch of Michigan Avenue would be to turn it into a full-fledged
street—or at least Marohn’s definition of a street—by giving it a road diet
that invites the superfluous lanes to accommodate bicyclists, pedestrians,
carefully deployed greenery, or mass transit stops. But that, again, would require more infrastructural
investment—the exact sort of Pyrrhic victory that has borne so many stroads in
the first place. By this point,
that sort of money would go to better use in a complete urban dictionary. Or a guide to the US Air Force
acronyms.
Posts
