An American stroad in action: Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Photographer: Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
How to Fix the Most Dangerous Streets in America
The multilane arterials known as “stroads” remain dangerous fixtures of US cities. In an excerpt from his book Walkable City, planner Jeff Speck outlines how to tame them.
Since it was published in 2012, Jeff Speck’s book Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time has become one of the most popular titles in urban planning. Speck’s blunt assessment of the state of the planning profession and 10 steps for improving street design have influenced the last decade of efforts to improve safety and livability across US cities. The book’s 10th anniversary edition is now being released, with a 100-page update by the author. Here’s the second of three exclusive excerpts from Speck’s new text.
The longest quote in Walkable City, longer even than Jane Jacobs’s, is from Chuck Marohn, the former roadway engineer whose early Grist essay on the wrongheadedness of his profession rocked me to my core; reading it was my When Harry Met Sally delicatessen moment. Over the past decade, Chuck’s message has become all the more necessary, and America may finally be ready for it. Happily, it has been published at length in a book of the same title, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer — which you should read immediately after mine if you care about public safety.