Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use (then again, it looks like they already made that decision with a bunch of single-family house subdivisions). Notice nearby that the stuff you can access from I-15 is a bunch of big roads, malls, car dealerships, and an Air Force base. Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise.

Plus, as we see in any majorly dense area, the freeways turn into buffers for inadequate local traffic capacity as they very quickly turn into parking lots. Low volume exits onto slow surface streets with tons of intersections jams everything up.

Neither of these are necessarily true. Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times.

Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people. That encouragement doesn't guarantee high density will happen, builders preferences and peoples budgets will still dictate cheap single family houses most of the time regardless. But that's not something the freeway itself influences. (In the same way that a train station encourages high density, but many are still in suburban areas anyway).

The only real drawback is price. Ugly, space-wasting rural freeways at ground level are much cheaper. But they are worse for drivers and pedestrians, every bit as bad as what we see here for everyone.

> Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise.

The air pollution and noise is mostly unchanged (same exact cars making the same trips). And Electric Cars already fully solved both of these problems anyway, it's just a matter of time as gasoline vehicles get phased out.

It looks like their current solution to the crosswalk is to add a stoplight to it. Which ironically will actually increase air pollution, as previously-traveling cars will now often sit idling, right next to two schools...

I have a similar straight road with a school near my house. To make matters worse it's a main artery to the freeway. However, the city solved this much better. As suggested in the article the road is fairly narrow and there are physical separators in the middle of the road in the area where the school is. You can still easily go the speed limit, yet from my anecdotal experience of driving the road at least twice a day I'm pretty much the only person going slightly over the speed limit. I would argue that the road very much works as intended to transport cars efficiently and children safely.

Can you show an example? 280 in San Francisco comes to mind. The division is the underpass or the overpass, and the frontage roads required to support it. Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use. It's not limited to freeways, either -- you can achieve a similar effect with grade-separated railways.

It's green, it's safe, it's pedestrian / bike friendly and they are always at grade, so it's accessible. Cars only go 10mph (the distance is so short, they couldn't go much faster anyway). The freeway takes up almost no land -- it's just a single 1 minute walk to either side. Plant bollards at both ends to block the cars, and it's now 100% safety for everyone at all times.

Here's a really creative example from Seattle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_Park

> Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use

I don't think that's inherently true, it's just the cheap way to do it. Freeways can be high density and pedestrian friendly too. They just usually aren't, for the same reasons buildings aren't -- it costs money.

Additionally, there doesn't need to be any distance between buildings to have a freeway. See Cobo Center in Detroit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-10_(Michigan_highway) or Washington State Convention Center in Seattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_State_Convention_Ce...

I can’t easily figure out what proportion of other trips happen by bike/walking, what proportion of students walk/bike to school, etc., but I would be surprised if they match cities like NYC or Boston or most parts of Europe.

I don’t know what your neighborhood is like in person: how well trafficked is that underpass by pedestrians and cyclists in practice? Having some freeway underpasses near low-traffic streets be “pedestrian and bike friendly” doesn’t really help anyone if nobody walks or bikes anyway because there is nothing nearby to walk to because nearby places are extremely spread out and largely designed with the expectation that people will visit them by car, e.g surrounded by giant parking lots, with inconvenient road plans, etc.

The Southern CA town I grew up was similar low-density suburban with freeways passing through, and there were various ostensibly pedestrian-friendly freeway crossings here and there, but in practice few people ever walked anywhere except in the small downtown area or maybe exercising their dogs or going to one or another park (a decent number of kids <16 rode bikes around though). One of the nicest low-density suburban places I know of, but life for kids without cars was necessarily highly structured and relatively isolating.

You picked a spot right near the downtown between a low-density residential neighborhood and a commercial area, but looking at a satellite view and map search most of the residential areas in the city and surrounds seem to be relatively far from shops, restaurants, grocery stores, schools, ..., (at least compared to denser cities) so in practice many trips probably require a car. I’ve never been there so I can’t tell you what it’s like in practice.

But anyway, with that said, as low-density suburban development goes, Grand Rapids looks pretty nice, just judging from satellite view. Not my personal cup of tea, but definitely better than lots of places in the US.

The worst part though was getting off work late and tring to go for a nice walk, only to find the sidewalks and half the street flooded from the heavy irrigation! I get that rain storms there flood things, but this was a consistent "lets flood a lane on either side of the street watering our lawn".

And this is the best-case scenario, where the highway is relatively permeable because it's next to downtown.

The Columbus freeway cap is a far better example of integrating a freeway into a neighborhood: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/.a/6a00d834518cc969e... https://www.google.com/maps/place/Columbus,+OH/@39.9740161,-... But it's an expensive enough project that it can't be possibly be duplicated on every street crossing, and the freeway infrastructure surrounding it still profoundly separates downtown from its neighborhoods.

What Strong Towns is about is prioritizing cheap, maintainable infrastructure that supports walking and biking— and freeways are not remotely cheap, especially when designed to be anything but an awful experience for those not in a car.

High speed transportation of people is the exact opposite of what encourages high density land use. If you can live 30 miles from work, and get to work in 30 minutes by freeway-driving, that's acceptable. If that same trip would take two hours, perhaps you'd consider living closer to work.

Given how politically acerbic your comment is towards StrongTowns and their efforts to save lives, your argument is incredibly badly reasoned. These are separate schools with separate facilities serving separate age groups. It is unlikely the reason this young junior high student was crossing the street at 8:30pm[1] was to visit the elementary school.

There are not that many schools along typical commuter routes. It seems unlikely that calming traffic along this one would seriously impact the "transportation needs of real [sic] citizens everyday."

[1] https://www.ksl.com/?sid=43931746&nid=148&title=syracuse-tra...

There is a pretty obvious solution — put in a traffic light controlled by a button. Lights have high compliance.

Strongtowns is what it is. They have a particular agenda and they present questions that fit their answers.

You say they can't with away the people's lives. True, but they can't wish away the bad decisions made by others either. They still have a choice to make, between allowing a dangerous situation for children or a worse traffic circulation. And it's valid to judge that decision.

If we didn’t have them, people would live closer, we would have better public transport, better walking and cycling infrastructure, and we wouldn’t have a wasteful, excessive driving culture. And to many people steeped in the toxic car culture, riding a bike either means you got a DUI or you are crazy and deserve to die.

The article is blaming all the wrong factors.

Then over time developers built neighborhoods and the population exploded, so as the population grew the roads had to be expanded. Traffic planners had to move people somewhere, and they compensated for the wide streets with 20mph school speed limits, volunteer crossing guards, extensive education of children and drivers, and regular active enforcement of the school speed.

So the article comes across as clueless, seemingly almost deliberately so to exploit a tragedy.

As for the 20mph speed limit - besides the fact that he specifically says they are irrelevant, since drivers don't respect them -, how would that have helped, considering it was 8:30pm when the accident happened? And I'm betting the "volunteer crossing guards" weren't around either. Apparently kids sometimes leave schools outside "schooltime" - who'd a thunk it.

Finally, if we're talking about what he left out - maybe you should add the other detail he didn't mention: that there had been already 15 accidents in the crosswalk in question in the last five years. So maybe it should have been clear by now that the methods weren't working.

(By the way, "the population exploded and the streets had to be expanded" is false. Governments have tools to control the growth of the population, like permits and zoning.)

Clearly.

Its not just "StrongTowns hates them", it's that a lot of cities have gotten the shit end of the stick, transportation-wise, and people who actually live in the city don't want to live next to a fucking highway for the convenience of suburbanites. It's not a conspiracy, there's political support for these policies in cities.

Just use park and ride, cut throughs can go fuck themselves, you sound entitled as hell. It's not your God given right to shit up other peoples' home with your car.

And in any case, if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars" I'm sure where an engineers opinion will fall. But traffic engineers aren't all that.

It never was. The suggestion is "don't put kids in the few areas of the city specifically marked as dangerous".

It's like building a school inside of a river, watching kids drown, and suggesting the water is at fault and should get out of the way. Or building a school on an airport runway and complaining the noise scares the children and suggesting the airplanes are at fault and should land elsewhere.

I'm afraid your thinking on this is roughly 60 years behind. Of course vehicular deaths are not "natural".

You don't don't seem to be reading what the OP is writing. They are clearly laying the blame at the feet of the people who decided to build 2 schools on opposite sides of a dangerous street. Where are you getting "it's no ones fault"

To blame the school placement (likely decided by the very same governmental body doing the street design) is the epitome of the problem here: "what are the pedestrians doing on my street".

Look, the schools are already there, no sense tearing them down now and traffic calming is a fine solution but it shouldn't have been like this in the first place. There are plenty of areas marked as too dangerous for pedestrians when it comes to zoning decisions and this should have been one of them.

>The teen was crossing from the junior high Monday about 8:30 p.m. when a southbound car struck him

This didn't happen during normal business hours.

What does "safe engineering" mean and how is that different than "engineering?"

Rarely are these things difficult to mostly solve, but it requires at least some minimal effort. Sadly, that is too much to ask of most people in North America.

These problems are widely known and currently, they have no solutions in sight. Most people want to keep the status quo, but even if there was a mass movement to change this situation, I doubt the money would be allocated. The money most certainly exists, but much of it is currently wasted (defense, bailouts, tax breaks for the rich, weapons, more weapons, etc.), at least at the federal level. I don't think any state currently has the budget to even begin to make a dent in car culture. Hell, we can't even replace hundred year old critical infrastructure bridges, yet anti-car people want a whole new infrastructure (either that, or they're delusionally thinking that everyone can cram into downtown somehow). Car culture is here to stay. That's what the market dictates in the US, anyway.

Er...yes. That's the reason there's anti-car rhetoric.

But you're also overstating the problem, which I wouldn't have thought was possible. Car culture is pervasive, but plenty of major American cities have decent-ish public transit.

Your whole argument is weird. It seems like you're saying "This problem is real, massive, and pervasive, therefore we need to stop trying to fix it and ignore it completely."

And, living near Seattle as I currently do, the notion that we'd need to completely rebuild everything for public transit to work at all is not accurate. Plenty of major cities have decent public transit already. There may be a few cities that are beyond saving, and it wouldn't work in small towns, but that's true anywhere; no one in rural Germany is taking the bus to work, no matter how great it is in Frankfurt.