Stroad to Recovery: Balancing the Needs of Roads and Streets

Trade-offs between access and mobility are well understood. For instance, a diagram published by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) plots an inverse relationship between mobility and accessibility.

As Marohn puts it, “The value of your road goes down when you start building stuff [along it]. If you’re building a road to move cars quickly, and someone comes and says, ‘We need to put a signal here so we can have a big-box store and a gas station,’ well OK, but you’ve just wrecked the road.”

Stroad Smarts

The FHWA classifies roads by function: interstates, urban or rural arterials (that is, highways not built to Interstate System standards), major and minor collectors, and local roads (which Marohn calls “streets”). According to the agency, collectors “balance mobility with land access.”

By calling collectors “stroads,” Marohn admits there’s some criticism implied.

However, it’s not necessarily pejorative. “I feel like it’s more of a neutral term,” says Mark Kimerer, principal landscape architect at Bettisworth North, “because it’s something we live with and experience on a daily basis.”

For instance, stroads that intersect the Gambell Street-Ingra Street alignment include the Fifth and Sixth Avenue couplet, Fireweed Lane, and the Northern Lights Boulevard and Benson Boulevard couplet. Kimerer also points to Dimond Boulevard, Tudor Road, and Muldoon Road as examples.

The Old Seward Highway was once the road out of Anchorage until businesses grew around it, so a new highway was built in 1971. A similar conflict in Cooper Landing, where Sterling Highway traffic slows to neighborhood speed, is being addressed by a 15-mile bypass, slated for completion in 2028.

In Wasilla, the Parks Highway serves as both a main drag and an inter-city link. Bypass concepts have been proposed since the ‘80s. The latest planning and environmental linkage study was in the works last year, gathering public comment, until it was paused.

By contrast, Palmer has a more amiable relationship with the Glenn Highway. Signals stop traffic at major intersections, but the downtown area is conspicuously off the main arterial. “I like Palmer,” says Kimerer. “A little more character.”

His colleague, Cloud, adds, “Enjoyable to be there.”

No slight against Wasilla; every North American town has its stroads.

A Stroad Less Traveled

In Fairbanks, Airport Way is a fine cross-town conveyance. However, miles of chain-link fence on either side indicate conflicting needs. The fence discourages pedestrian crossing because the road slices through where people might walk.

Last year, two roads paralleling Airport Way received sidewalk upgrades. Pedestrian amenities could boost the overall rating for Fairbanks on Walk Score, a website for apartment hunters that has become a simple measure of walkability.

In Alaska, Fairbanks has the highest score with 32 out of 100, just ahead of Anchorage’s 31. Juneau, the only other Alaska city scored, has 21; all three are considered “car dependent.”

Some neighborhoods score better (but many are not scored at all, including Fairview; a heat map shows a friendly green zone straddling the Gambell Steet-Ingra Street couplet). Out of forty in Anchorage, the top spot goes to “Downtown Spenard,” the segment of Spenard Road that overlaps Midtown north of 32nd Avenue. Its walkability of 87 is nearly on par with New York City or top-ranked San Francisco.

Spenard, once the road from Anchorage to an out-of-town lumber camp, has steadily become more street-like. Thirty years ago, the segment south and west of Minnesota Drive was overhauled into a three-lane street with wide sidewalks.

Those improvements were partly thanks to NeighborWorks Alaska, a nonprofit housing organization. “Our community members and advocates were part of the redesign,” says Lindsey Hajduk, director of community engagement. “It was forward-looking in the ‘90s and gave us an example of what we could do to make more of that ‘neighborhood feel’ along the corridor.”

A more recent phase revamped the Downtown Spenard stretch. Bettisworth North had a hand in it, designing crosswalks away from signaled intersections and consolidating driveways.

Meg Mielke, president of the Spenard Community Council, welcomes the change. “I think the north side of Spenard is a pleasant place for both drivers and pedestrians and hopefully could be a model for other places in Anchorage,” she says.

Fork in the Stroad

Many of Walk Score’s highest-ranked Anchorage neighborhoods have Minnesota Drive as part of their boundary. That is, the expressway manifests a barrier to walkability.

A new barrier was installed late last summer at the edge of Downtown Spenard. A fence in the median between Northern Lights Boulevard and Benson Boulevard is meant to deter jaywalking.

With the Northern Lights Center mall and Walgreens on one side and Carrs Aurora Village on the other, shoppers on foot must cross the “outside” corners of the Northern Lights Boulevard and Benson Boulevard intersections; crossing is forbidden at the “inside” corners.

The Spenard Community Council protested in November, passing a resolution fourteen to four in favor of removing the barrier. “The majority believed that the wall makes things worse for drivers, pedestrians, as well as businesses and homes on both sides,” Mielke says. “There is a concern that the wall is part of a process of making Minnesota Drive a high-speed highway without pedestrian crossing.”

The Low Stroad

The process of making Gambell Street and Ingra Street part of a highway was “a clear act of discrimination,” according to a resolution adopted by the Anchorage Assembly in 2022. Plans for a highway link skirting Merrill Field airport were scrapped due to cost after the 1964 earthquake. Instead, the couplet was widened in 1966 despite warnings that doing so would harm the neighborhood—one of the few areas where property covenants did not exclude non-white homeowners.

Around the same time, the I Street and L Street couplet (the north end of Minnesota Drive) was routed through South Addition. Kemplen, who previously worked as a transportation planner, points to inclined curves that slow traffic on three lanes in each direction instead of four. “They had separated sidewalks, they had trees, they had slower speeds,” he says. “Fairview? There’s no separation. You walk on Gambell Street, a 4-foot-wide sidewalk… If you’re not scared-the-bejeezus-out-of, you’re not a human being!”

Marohn calls it an “oft-repeated story” that happened to minority neighborhoods across America. “I look at how much money you have spent on infrastructure that is actually making you poorer. You’ve spent three times what you should’ve spent, and as a result, you made your neighborhood worse. It just makes me sad,” he says.

Fairview has seen improvements since the original sin of the Gambell Street-Ingra Street couplet. On side streets, Kemplen helped bring about “traffic calming” by interrupting the grid with chicanes and tighter intersections. “We implemented that vision, and it’s a totally different place,” he says, recalling that people used to be afraid to go outdoors. “And what we want to do is to take that same positive result and apply it to the Gambell-Ingra corridor.”

Stroad Warriors

Engineers have a variety of tools for fixing a stroad. They either push it toward road-like mobility or street-like accessibility.

For North Spenard, Kimerer says “Complete Streets” was the watchword for his landscape architects. They were involved in designing transit stops, wayfinding columns, banners, and the color scheme.

Balanced stroads are possible. Marohn likes the Champs-Élysées in Paris, where center lanes move cars quickly while separated edges are for walking and parking. The Esplanade in downtown Chico, California, is similar: fourteen blocks of a through street (a “road”) flanked by frontage roads (or “streets”).

Marohn adds, “I don’t think it’s impossible to design a good stroad, but those are the 0.1 percent exception to the rule.”

A balanced, nuanced approach to transportation must think beyond grabbing as much federal funding as possible to move vehicles at the expense of everything else, according to Kemplen. “It’s more than just moving traffic safely, fast,” he says. “It’s a road that doesn’t force everybody into an automobile because you don’t maintain the sidewalks.”

End of the Stroad

Fairview has some federal funds to fix its stroad problem. Last February, NeighborWorks Alaska helped the community obtain a $537,660 grant under the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program. The 2021 infrastructure package set aside money for environmental justice, such as undoing the rift that split Fairview in the ‘60s.

Hajduk explains, “This is the first federal program of its kind where the federal government has acknowledged that transportation decisions and infrastructure like this were intentionally built to disenfranchise already disadvantaged communities.”

Out of forty-five successful applicants, Fairview was one of four non-governmental organizations awarded a grant. Also, the Anchorage Assembly appropriated a 20 percent match, for a total of $672,000.

The money is meant to give residents a voice in the state’s Seward-Glenn Connection Project, which has the stated goals of improving regional travel between the highways while also adding to livability and local travel in surrounding neighborhoods.

Hajduk says, “We want to make sure our efforts are collaborative and integrated, so the planning that we’ll do with the community-led vision can feed into that and ultimately move it further down the line.”

Past concepts for a Gambell Steet-Ingra Street remedy have included a cut-and-cover trench or an elevated freeway. “Both of those are horrible ideas,” in Marohn’s opinion. Based on what he saw that morning during his walking tour, “You do not have the traffic volume to justify anything more than taking out two lanes.”

Marohn acknowledges that constricting highway-to-highway traffic would inconvenience commuters. However, he sees “living out on the edge” as a lifestyle subsidized by the inconvenience of urban residents.

Convenience, on the other hand, drives economic vitality. Cloud says, “Pedestrians, if they’re out walking, they’re going to spend more money. If you take more time, you’re window shopping, you can pop in these shops.”

Reconnecting Fairview benefits the whole city, in Kemplen’s view, because a vibrant neighborhood attracts private capital and adds value to adjoining land uses.

“Why can’t we identify streets that are designed around the people?” he asks. “Public right-of-way is for all of us.”