We have lots of slow and calm streets in American suburbia, and we love them that way. We value this calm so much that we refuse to admit shopping or even multi-family housing to them, for fear of disturbing it. These uses have to go somewhere, so they go where there is no presumption of an entitlement to low traffic, and that’s the road.
The businesses hardly complain; they love to be where the greatest numbers of eyeballs and potential impulse shoppers are going by.
Maybe you could start with a strong street vs. road discipline, but I would predict that within 40 years any American polity will surely break it, and the stroad will re-emerge.
Mixed use medium density is my urban nirvana. Anywhere I have been with it just makes so much sense for daily life at person scale. Cars tricked us into thinking life can be comfortable spread across large distances and I think we are suffering in various ways for it.
I am reminded of that cartoon where aliens arive on earth, and assume that cars are the dominant species, since so much of our world has been dedicated to them.
Suburbanites hate cars too, and that’s why they’ll never let you have mixed use. It would perhaps eliminate the snarl in commercial areas, but it would also bring some portion of that traffic into what are now quiet residential sanctuaries.
But American suburbia seems entirely designed around cars. Exactly because there are no shops nearby, you need to take the car for everything. If there were shops around the corner, there would be far less need for cars in these streets.
When I go to the shop, I walk or take my bike. And even here, the shops aren't in my street, but there's a small shopping center (with two supermarkets, a pharmacy, two drugstores, a bakery, a butcher, two organic food shops, a small bookstore, a fast food place, a pizza place, and some other shops) two streets over. It's easy to reach by car, but even easier to reach on foot by the entire neighbourhood they serve.
In the other direction, there's the big shopping street of the next neighbourhood over, still walkable, though it's more than a kilometer so I always take my bike, and there's tons more shops and great restaurants there. It's an older neighbourhood, more a shopping street than a shopping center, and cars constantly clog that street. Maybe less fun to live in that street, but it's still a very popular street to live in. Personally I'd prefer to see cars banned from that street, but maybe that's not an option for some reason.
Still, it's a great neighbourhood and a great shopping street, and it's nice to have not one but two such shopping areas close to my home. (There's a third not far from that second one, which had a fantastic cheese shop and has a daily market.)
It is designed around pushing cars away from houses. The thing about walkable neighborhoods is that they’re nice to visit. If you live near one, those visitors will be near your home. To a suburbanite this is unacceptable.
Where I live, every neighbourhood is walkable. There's nothing special about it. Sure, people walk past our house. They're our neighbours and we say hi.
A neighborhood street that literally cannot allow through traffic is not really conducive for high-traffic stores, but really more like low-traffic uses like a convenience store or a hair salon or a daycare, many of which also generally tend to be prohibited by overly restrictive residential zoning.
Car-dependent suburbia is about imposing your car on everyone else while not allowing anyone else to impose their cars on you. It is inherently selfish city design.
Generalizing a bit, it seems that suburbanites hate other people’s cars, but are OK needing to drive everywhere, whereas urbanites hate having a car-dependent lifestyle.
I don't understand how people think that cars zipping by at high speeds is particularly conductive to impulse shopping. When I'm traveling at high speeds I usually have a goal I want to reach quickly and don't have time to follow any impulses.
Exactly. These are two different types of traffic that need to be separated from each other. Maybe have fast 1+1 or 2+2 road in the center for through traffic, with the occasional connection to slow parallel streets to access the shops. Make the center road a level higher or lower so everybody can cross it everywhere without interfering with the through traffic. That way you're still serving both purposes, but a lot more safely and efficiently.
> We value this calm so much that we refuse to admit shopping or even multi-family housing to them, for fear of disturbing it.
With single-family zoning being the overwhelming norm in the U.S, it would be unfair to call this a refusal - the supply is artificially constrained. Had multi-family housing been legal to build, then it's pretty likely that people would move into them at higher rates.
The businesses hardly complain; they love to be where the greatest numbers of eyeballs and potential impulse shoppers are going by.
Maybe you could start with a strong street vs. road discipline, but I would predict that within 40 years any American polity will surely break it, and the stroad will re-emerge.