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.
You’re assuming no traffic in major cities. I’ve gone from close to the Louisiana border to new Mexico and it took about 16 hours.
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.
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.