The inventive Charles Marohn has coined, or at least well-publicized, a badly needed word for those paved places in most U.S. cities that you find where a city street ought to be but that are designed like highways: stroad. In this piece in Better! Cities & Towns (the video at the end about traffic engineering is highly recommended), he writes:
“A STROAD is a street/road hybrid; the futon of transportation alternatives. It functions neither as a road that moves people quickly between two places nor as a street that provides a platform for capturing value. As such, STROADs are the most financially unproductive type of transportation corridor that we can build; they cost a ton, but financially yield very little return for the governments that must pay to maintain them.”
A quick Google search found several references to stroads, so I hope the term is catching on. It’s a good, tongue-in-cheek way to make the point that U.S. cities and traffic engineers have confused the purposes of city streets and country roads. I wrote about this in 2009, after years of getting more and more fretful at the confusion between streets and roads.
So starting now, let’s just call them Providence Stroad, Park Stroad, Rea Stroad, Colony Stroad (except for the actual street section where it starts in Myers Park). North and South Tryon Stroads and Eastway/Wendover/Runnymede/Woodlawn Stroads. Don’t get me started on the corruption of “boulevard” and “parkway.” (Don’t believe me? See photo of Independence “Boulevard,” above, for evidence.) Naming that freeway Billy Graham “Parkway” is truly Orwellian, in using a word that means one thing and applying it to something that’s the complete opposite.