Forward
Last week I discussed the problem of stroads, what they are, why we have them, and possible solutions to them. Today, I will dive deeper into service streets as a possible solution for stroads, look at some design details that may help or hinder the success of a service road, and how they can simultaneously fill in bike infra.
Access
There are three broad ways of providing vehicle access to a service street:
Intersections
The first idea for access to service streets is to provide access at the intersections. Those intersections already exist, so continuing the service street to the intersection is simple and straightforward. Cars can then turn onto a service street at the intersection ahead of the main street. This strategy is used in Belmont Village in Kitchener Ontario:
But this has downsides. The goal of service streets in this example is to split the street and road functions of a stroad; part of this is limiting the number of intersections. Therefore, we’d like to remove these intersections from the main road, so it’s a contradiction to use them to access the service road. The main road will still have dangerous turning traffic and many intersections.
Local Street Grid
That brings us to the next possible method of connecting service streets: delete the intersections. Those cross roads will still exist, but they will not intersect the main road, and will only be accessible to the service streets. Therefore, the service road becomes a part of the local street network outside the road which then becomes a through road only.
This design provides a lot of benefits. It connects the destinations on the stroad/service road with the community directly while increasing the separation between the road and the service street.
Of course there are trade offs. Not all intersections can be deleted–but the more that are deleted, the better the road will function, but drivers accessing destinations will have to drive farther. This is the fundamental trade-off that we must make to fix stroads and as I discussed in the previous article is why stroads exist.
How we make this trade off is important however as any traffic that destinations on the service street generate are imposed on the local street grid. This works best when the local street grid and the service street have compatible destinations. The main Ring Road in Amersfoort for example, employs this design. The local grid is largely residential, and the destinations on the service street are also largely residential.
However, in the case where the service streets will be primarily retail and local streets are residential, people living there may not want the increased traffic and parking that the retail locations would create in their neighbourhood. The stroad may even have been zoned for separate uses, so there may not be intersections with the local street grid to use. In this case, we may need a different option.
Right-in Right-out
An alternative design is to allow vehicles to enter the service street from the main through street in a right in right out arrangement. These are often called slip roads, but that is a bad term because slip roads are exactly the wrong way to design this access.
Right-in right-out increases the connection between the road and service streets, which can make the service street higher speed and dangerous. When designed as a slip road, as is often the case in North America, this can create a very dangerous road.
A major arterial cuts through the New York City borough of Queens. This boulevard was referred to as the Boulevard of Death for a long time, and for good reason. In the deadliest year, 18 pedestrians were killed on this single road.
This six lane arterial comes complete with service streets, but they were accessed by slip roads, which were designed to allow drivers to maintain a dangerous speed onto the slip road.
Fortunately in recent years this road has been redesigned to limit the speed of cars travelling onto the service streets. The slip road was converted into a turning lane with a far tighter turn to enter the now single lane slip road (the other lane is now a bike lane and widened median).
This single design change has almost certainly saved dozens of lives, and one must ask why the obviously dangerous and negligent design was in place for so many years. Why so many people had to die on this road, why we listened and continue to listen to traffic engineers who place the value of human lives so low on their list of priorities.
But we only need to zoom out a little more to see how much work there is left to do. With 4 intersections in two thirds of a kilometre, even with service streets, this road remains a stroad. While not every cross street crosses main street, most do, and many blocks are barely as long as the original slip road. What were the engineers thinking here?!
In the Netherlands, there is a distinct transition from the high speed road context to the street context. (This is the kind of transition that the Netherlands is uniquely good at, whereas North America is uniquely bad at unfortunately).
Bikes
The Netherlands has a reputation for cycling infrastructure. So you might think that these fancy service streets must have some pretty advanced cycle infrastructure. Well, you’d be wrong. One of the secrets of cycling in the Netherlands is that there are a lot of shared spaces.
The key difference of course being that “shared spaces” in the Netherlands are a real thing–a space that is reasonable and feasible to share between motor vehicle drivers and cyclists. This is in stark contrast to North America where ‘shared spaces’ are what Traffic Engineers say when their design fails to accommodate cycling.
So how do we make a real shared space? In the Netherlands, shared spaces are designed to limit vehicle speeds and traffic to a safe level. They do this by making the road uncomfortable for drivers often by narrowing the lanes, using a tactile surface like brick, and tightening the turn radius of any intersections. This is a subject unto itself and it is literally the topic of entire books.
As long as service streets are designed well (as they must be in order to create a street instead of a road) service streets are a great opportunity for a shared space.
Now I exaggerate a bit, there are some pieces of bike infrastructure. The goal of a cycling route is to allow cyclists (and pedestrians) to make quick, efficient and direct journeys; but service streets are necessarily discontinuous.
But there is no reason that they must be so for cyclists. While cars are forced to exit the service road, cyclists are not. Bike paths can connect the ends of disjoint sections of service roads allowing cyclists and pedestrians to make direct continuous trips along the service roads, while drivers are required to use the main road.
Conclusion
And there we have it, another possible solution to stroads: service streets, with connecting bike paths. You make the road better for drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, businesses, who loses? Nobody! The only cost is that traffic engineers (and politicians) must have the bravery to slightly limit access to stores. Drivers will need to go to the next intersection, possibly make a u-turn and access the service street. It could delay them by up to a minute–a very small cost to pay for repairing our stroads and creating more safe and liveable cities.
Service streets could be applied effectively and cheaply in North America where we have miles and miles of strip malls and gas stations lining our stroads. These parking lots are generally separated from each other by nothing more than an overgrown curb and sometimes a few light posts. If the government was willing to use eminent domain to take a strip of land along these parking lots, it would be very straightforward to connect them into a service street and thereby eliminate the majority of service entrances. It wouldn’t even require much construction.
This could single-handedly improve virtually every stroad in the country and as a bonus we would get a significant biking corridor in most of these places.
Next week I will demonstrate just this by showing what converting a stroad in Kitchener ON to a road with service streets would look like.