Читать книгу Confessions of a Recovering Engineer - Charles L. Marohn Jr. - Страница 21

Roads are high-speed connections between productive places. Streets are platforms for building wealth within a place. The greatest value in a transportation system is provided when building roads or streets.

A stroad is a street–road hybrid. It contains the elements of both road and street but fails to provide the benefits of either. Stroads are expensive to build and maintain and have low financial productivity. The complexity of the stroad environment combines with high traffic speeds to create environments that are extremely dangerous.

Cities must discard the hierarchical transportation networks and instead identify their streets and their roads. Where hierarchical classification is required for federal or state funding, it should be considered advisory and subordinate to a transportation map that identifies roads and streets within the community.

The decision on whether a transportation investment is a road or a street is a policy decision requiring no technical expertise. That decision must be made by elected officials, individuals who are accountable to the citizens of a community. It should not be made by technical professionals.

More information on streets, roads, and stroads is available at www.confessions.engineer.