Our founder Chuck Marohn coined the word stroad in 2011 to explain a common mistake he saw in city after city: building wide streets that attempted to simultaneously be high-speed, high-volume traffic corridors, and productive places full of activity. Stroads end up failing on both counts.

At the end of 2019, as a planner by training, I can attest that the word stroad has permeated the planning profession to a remarkable degree—and to the point that many of the people using it don't know its origin. Great. They don't need to. If Strong Towns, the organization, went away tomorrow, transportation planners would keep talking about what's wrong with stroads.

Successful advocates should want to put themselves out of a job.

Checking in on the Overton Window

I wrote in 2015 that we want to shift the Overton Window when it comes to how we think about planning, growth, and development. The Overton Window, in politics or policy, represents the range of ideas that are considered mainstream or uncontroversial. The goal of advocates who want systemic change is to move the window: to expand that mainstream to include more of the things you want to see, and to shift it to start excluding things you think shouldn't be considered valid or respectable ideas.

Small groups have a lot of power to move the Overton Window on issues in the public eye. The key is to permeate the conversation with a different view of what is normal, acceptable, and possible. And it’s clear to me that we’ve already started to do this.

Five years ago, it was almost unthinkable that a major U.S. city (or entire state!) would move to legalize the next increment of residential development—several forms of missing middle housing ranging from accessory dwelling units to triplexes—in every single neighborhood. That happened in 2019.

Five years ago, we were outliers in calling for #NoNewRoads: that is, an end to more top-down funding for our broken transportation system until its priorities are fixed to put maintenance ahead of expanding the system. In 2019, veteran advocates Transportation For America joined us in that call.

The number of cities doing away with parking minimums continues to expand. So does the number doing the math and asking tough questions about their future financial solvency. We hear a steady stream of stories of cities redoing elements of their zoning codes to encourage walkable, traditional neighborhoods over automobile-oriented ones. Every year more places take action to #SlowTheCars and reclaim their streets as platforms for producing value. Almost nowhere is moving in the opposite direction on any of these issues.

Part of our decision to be a media organization reflects the following observation: Your perception of what planning, or engineering, or development, or community activism, can be is shaped in large part by the range of things you read about planners or engineers or developers or community activists doing. If we're part of the regular media consumption of those who care about cities, then the stories we tell here will help shape your sense of the possible.

There's brilliant, boundary-pushing work going on in every city and town in America that should be the norm rather than the exception. Some of it in City Hall, some of it far from it.

If you want us to keep telling these stories and empowering Strong Towns advocates to change the realm of the possible, support us by becoming a member of the Strong Towns movement.