The stroad — built for speed but also lined with retail and residential developments — is the futon of transportation alternatives:
Where a futon is a piece of furniture that serves both as an uncomfortable couch and an uncomfortable bed, a STROAD moves cars at speeds too slow to get around efficiently but too fast to support productive private sector investment. The result is an expensive highway and a declining tax base.
This strikes me as straight-on SWPL utopianism that Steve Sailer recently mocked in his review of “Her”. Did you see any obvious place to park in his example of a street?
What he calls a “road”, I would call a highway (or given the requirement for limited access, Interstates or Interstate wannabes). Is there no alternative to building an Interstate or a residential/urban “street” ?
I think that any intermediate is going to tend to being a “stroad” by his definition.
Rural Japan has something similar, but the shops are much larger, with huge parking slots. So the outer lanes are for accessing the shops, and the inner lanes carry fast traffic. It works pretty well.