One day while on our post-retirement world tour, my wife and I ended up in Roanoke Virginia. We spotted a restaurant that looked suitable about a block and half from the front lobby of our hotel and agreed that once we settled in we’d walk over for dinner.
I mentioned to the host how difficult it was to simply walk to the restaurant from our hotel. While sympathetic she was equally matter-of-fact: “Yeah, nobody walks around here.” • They are unsafe, especially for pedestrians. That’s because they are generally wide-multi lane affairs which allow cars to proceed at 50 km/h or more. That makes them difficult to cross while allowing traffic to speed at a rate which can cause severe injury when striking pedestrians;
• They move cars at the worst possible speed — too slow to be efficient because of intersections, driveways and other obstructions and yet too fast to support productive private sector investment, fostering community and creating good street frontage architecture. Marohn coined the word stroad because it’s deliberately ugly — meant to highlight a road design that is unfit for human use in so many different ways. I get it.