Wow this video perfectly captures what I thought about visiting the US. At the time I couldn't describe what was making me critical of the way it was built, but this is so well described.

In Europe a street as wide as that would be a main thoroughfare. I seemed to see them all over in the US, like every road in a grid would be super wide, but also have shops.

Stroads are really terrible. It's amazing how they can be legal in US.

What's really terrible about stroads is the phenomenon of the later "bypass" roads that are built long after the stroad/city center turns into a an absolute clusterfuck and aren't usable for the kind of high-speed transit they're designed for. The bypass roads usually take the form of a parkway or some other roadtype with limited entrances/exits.

But then later, because the bypass road is usually built on cheap land outside of the city center, all that property gets bought up and developed as well, and the property owners will demand ingress/egress to their properties. Since the environment is nicer than the snarled up city center, people will start to favor businesses and housing in this area. Over the next 10-20 years the bypass will simply turn into another stroad. To make matters worse, the bypass and the original road will often have the same road numbers, differentiated by either "business" or "bypass", making navigation confusing.

Where I live I often see multi-million dollar homes being built right next to high-speed roads, and instead of a feeder street system taking cars to a more limited number of ingress/egress points, they simply dump the driveways out into the 60mph traffic. Total insanity.

It really does all come down to poor planning, and a lack of desire to make street planned city center grids with mixed-zone housing and municipal managed central parking areas. Instead each business sits in an island in a sea of their own giant parking lots, which often sit mostly unused which makes urban centralization impossible.

Then if you live long enough you get to see the bypass get a bypass of its own and the entire process starts over again...

Because the engineering design doesn’t just prioritize cars it fundamentally presumes cars. If the result is something unsafe:

1) they will use individual responsibility arguments on drivers to blame them

2) blame pedestrians or cyclists or whoever for failing to defer to cars

It’s not a legality problem it’s a philosophy one.

> It’s not a legality problem it’s a philosophy one.

This is not a dichotomy. The legal aspect comes from the "philosophical" one that comes for lobby money.

I agree, but I think for the purposes of this conversation it fits...laws emerge from the philosophy. simply making an effort to change the laws won't change the philosophy, it will just be an anachronism standing against the dominant philosophy.

This doesn't fully explain the phenomenon because stroads are terrible for drivers.

They cause congestion and are much slower than actual roads, while still being unfriendly to pedestrians and bikers. They're bad for drivers and bad for pedestrians.

This probably sounds pedantic but…they are terrible for drivers but they are good for cars. They are designed for cars not drivers effectively. They suck at vehicle throughout in a broad sense but they are theoretically more efficient than the other design options available.

The pramaterizarion is largely around the dynamics of the cars not human behavior. It’s the over algorithmization of decision making. It’s like YouTube radicalizing people by showing them videos that increase engagement. It’s not intentional in a strict sense, it’s just mindless adherence to a process without thinking.

They're cheap and they get land owners who want access to shut up. "there, you have your road, now stop telling us how to spend your tax dollars"

It's even worse. They're not cheap at all. They're cheap to build but expensive to maintain.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/5/the-true-cost-o...

The "International Fire Code" (A US regulation used nowhere else outside of North America) mandates roads 20 to 26 feet wide for fire equipment access: https://twitter.com/graykimbrough/status/1404824443600490501

One can assume from this requirement that fighting fires is impossible in Europe, and residential buildings are constantly burning to the ground with firefighters standing around, helpless to intervene.

In Japan they simply have small fire trucks and small garbage trucks for small roads.

Aren't US homes wood framed and EU homes more likely to be made from solid brick/rock?

Grenfell Tower in the UK was made out of concrete. Burning exterior cladding killed 72 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

depends on where you are in the EU I think, UK and Ireland still use piles of blocks but no shortage of wood houses in Europe. There's a whole industry of building woodframe houses in the Baltics and shipping them around Europe, incidentally.

Brick houses still burn; interior walls, floors, ceilings, and furnishings are still made from wood or other flammable materials. There have been plenty of castles that caught fire, despite their stone walls.