I didn't even realize this is why Paris is so pleasant to walk around. It doesn't even feel like you're walking through parking lots adjacent to a busy road.

Multi-way boulevards are really common in the Netherlands. I've seen so many arterial roads flanked by local one way streets with parking and bike lanes on each side. They allow fast through traffic to go through unhindered, while providing a safer environment for pedestrians, bike and local traffic. The trees also create a visual and sound barrier for residents that live on that road. I really think this type of design could be the answer to many of the U.S's stroads as you already have the required width. You just have to reconfigure the layout. Another solution that is used in the UK a lot is the bypass road. A road is built around a town centre to carry through traffic, and the old main street is made for local traffic only, or even pedestrianised. This brings life back to the shopping area, while also allowing traffic to pass through the town quite quickly. It's not perfect, but it's better than trying to make a one size fits all stroad.

Note: In Buenos Aires, they attempted to address the 9 de Julio issue by converting up to 5-6 lanes of car traffic in some places into BRT. It's apparently much much much safer to cross now.

Boulevards really do combine the best of both worlds. In Cities Skylines I struggle to find ways of building arterials that don't wind up as highways, stroads, or "deserts" with no buildings on them, but doing something like a Boulevard with a central 4-lane two-way road with flanking one-way roads actually sounds like a great idea.

Multiuse boulevards are the norm here in Brazil, they separate pedestrians from fast-moving traffic pretty well, but crossing the middle can be hard without stop lights.

My planning team proposed the multi way boulevard concept for an 8-lane major arterial and state route (Fowler Av) in Tampa. Local government leaders and public response was very positive. But, the FDOT "Environmental" design manager said in an internal meeting: "We're not ever building that." So the concept isn't being considered in the Phase 2 study which will recommend the "Preferred" alternative. My very educated guess is this myopic and biased mindset is quite prevalent among many engineers.

I live in Turin, Italy. Most of the major streets are tree line multi-way boulevards. Many of these were built in the 19th century and give Turin a feel that is vary non-Italian. Rather the traffic flows more like Paris. Recently, the city in partnership with FS (the Italian state railroad) completed a major project to cover a major rail line with a new boulevard.

French captain here: there is actually a precise definition of Boulevard. Historically, it's large streets/avenues built on former battlements locations that were around (old) towns. Now-days a Boulevard is a collector or a arterial ("Boulevard périphérique" = ring road) that aim to avoid the city centers.

Boulevards are only valuable from an urbanist perspective if the medians are wide enough that people can comfortably wait or walk on. In NYC, Eastern Parkway is definitely an example of a pretty good one although it could be improved with more pedestrian islands between the travel lanes. There is also Queens Boulevard, which has medians so narrow it does not feel safe to linger on them longer than you need to. Hopefully that will be an improved with a proposed bus lane.

One of my favourites is Vienna's Ringstraße. Flanked by many landmark government, university, arts and coffeehouse buildings as well as many green parks, moderated by trams and with many parallel, tree-lined pedestrian and cyclist paths, it's a truly great place to be.

I live in Vancouver and these are desperately needed. Because we don’t have any urban highways (great!) our arterials have become huge, multi-lane stroads (not great) anywhere outside of downtown. I think turning our main arterials into these types of multi-section boulevards could really go a long way to both reactivating the streetscapes for pedestrians AND improving traffic flow for through-traffic by eliminating all the waiting for people to make turns onto side streets and businesses

Having grown up a few blocks from the dreaded Queens Boulevard, the aptly named boulevard of death, I've seen the evolution of traffic patterns along it. There has always been the push pull between limiting left turns, but also not diverting too much traffic to certain collector roads. Regardless of how much greenspace you add, there will always be a tear in the social fabric of a neighborhood by having large thoroughfares. Moving lots of cars is just not conducive to the other land uses going on. I always wished they turned the outer lanes into a light rail.

For recent new boulevard construction in New York City, Sheridan Expressway (I-895) was dismantled and converted into Sheridan Blvd in 2019.

I didn’t realize this until now, but Detroit (of all places) has a multi-way boulevard called West Grand Blvd. It’s not pretty, but it works. And in the suburbs, Woodward Ave has a lot of multi-way functionality as well. It makes the stroadiness a little less bad for pedestrians.

Boulevards are really just improved stroads, which is nice, but I still call a stroad a stroad. it is good for large cities that would take too long to cross with regular slow streets , but for everywhere else complex slow streets in town, and fast simple roads between towns is the way to go.

Tucson kind of just did this with our Broadway boulevard. It used to be a stroad that was flanked by nothing but parking lots with very limited pedestrian access. They just completely redid the road to make it more of a destination. They got rid of most of the parking lots and replaced them with wide sidewalks, renovated old buildings to make them walkable shopping destinations, added lots of plants, and added plenty of crosswalks with HAWK lights. They even moved a row of old Pueblo homes there that will be converted into shops and restaurants. It looks and feels a million times better than before. Excited to see what the future holds.

theres a few blvds in chicago however they're in mainly residential neighborhoods, but they're super nice and give the blocks nice little communal spaces

Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City is like this, and it's truly beautiful and iconic. It was built, indeed, inspired by the French.

I enjoy seeing things I learned from City Skylines youtubers showing up in actual city planning videos

These boulevards could be a decent compromise! I great up on a boulevard and have the frontage-type road was great for street hockey - despite living on a busy street. Obviously there are better options, but I don’t think these are a terrible step (at least for some areas).

I love this balanced approach. We won't convince car people to reduce their space any time soon, no matter how much we fight and beg, so being balanced is our only chance at bargaining safe liveable spaces. Thanks for bringing the attention to this!

Part of what makes Paris Paris...is not just their use of boulevards...but also their block types. In most modern western countries, the block type is a "square", but in Paris "triangle blocks" are common. The latter has signicant advantages...it provides more surface area access to the buildings which in turn makes things like walk paths, bike paths, metro access points, and one-way roads more viable. One-way roads are a key feature of Paris and other walkable cities. They improve density, allow for synchronized stop-lights, and reduce slow/dangerous cross traffic turns. IMO...one-way roads, narrow streets, and triangular blocks are more so the reason Paris is special...and not so their overly wide boulevards.

I lived in SF for 7 years - Octavia is a very short segment - about 1/4 a mile - that acts to connect you to one of the few ways to get onto the freeway and out of SF. And despite being 1/4 a mile, it still had 3 or so traffic lights on it. Multiple neighborhoods used it to get out of the city. While I'm sure its better than the alternative, the traffic the thing created was immense, and it regularly backed up into other city streets.

This huge space could be put to better use by putting public transport in there. I'm talking trams, bike lanes, the whole package. Reduces traffic anyway.

One of my favorite streets is Winkelriedstrasse in Bern, Switzerland. It's the main street to enter the city from the autobahn. 2 car lanes, dedicated bus lanes, detached bike paths and wide sidewalks. And it has trees on both sides and it's so beautiful in autumn.

Multi-way boulevards are also very common in China. Saw them in very different size Cities and Towns. Also saw them occasionally in Italy.

9 de julio Avenue has improved a lot over the last 10 years. Now it has 6 crossings in the typical section an I believe every stretch has its own independent pedestrian signal and no left turn for cars. I will be there next week and would check it out. Also, if you call it a boulevard here you'll be take as a crazy person lol we call it an urban highway or an urban travesy (more like an urban travesty). A boulevard here is a two way street with a green median wider than the streets themselves Ps: you should check the renewal of Corrientes avenue (the stroad between the two shots of 9J avenue). During the day half of the street is a busway and the other half is for general traffic. During theater nights the general traffic section is closed for pedestrian use

Olmstead also designed a collar multiway boulevard and park system in Chicago. My favorite is Logan Boulevard, which runs west from Western Ave. to Milwaukee Ave.

Great video! I live in the SF Bay Area and have drivan down Octavia Boulevard many times. Prior to watching this video, I would always look at the side streets and think, why don't they just turn it into a BRT lane, or a proper two way bike path. Now I understand the reasons for the street design. Thank you!

In Florence there is a giant 6 lane ring road circling the historical centre which cuts the core off from its surrounding urban areas. The city is renovating it into a boulevard but with the addition of two tram tracks down what was once the the two car lanes either side of the central reservation, reducing the number of lanes on each side down from 3 to 2. The tram lines are a great way to justify the reduction of car lanes, and in turn greatly increases pedestrian foot traffic for all of the business alongside the boulevard. Not to mention the general facelift that the street furniture is getting making the public space much more inviting.

Never forget the Chicago Boulevard system. Filled with usable green space and, in places, actually functions more as a park than road (Palmer Square being a perfect example). The one major issue is that it lags bus coverage at points.

The Bronx also has Pelham Parkway and a few other roads modeled after Paris’ boulevards. I know you mentioned Brooklyn, but I know for sure in the Bronx the lanes used for cars is greater than the original design. The Central Park of Pelham parkway is underutilized. I’ve always thought it would be a great space for light rail or even a right of way for subway style service that could… cross the Hudson River into Jersey towns. Makes too much sense for the USA :-(

MnDOT in Minnesota is doing a study of I-94, the interstate highway that connects downtown Minneapolis to downtown Saint Paul to consider ways to reconstruct the freeway. We have a local compaign (which has some steam behind it) that wants MnDOT to consider tearing down the freeway between the downtowns, filling in the trench, and redeveloping the land as a multi-lane boulevard like the ones described in this video. The proposed boulevard would feature a central dedicated transit way, two lanes of thru-traffic in each direction, two medians with pedestrian walkways (or could be developed as residential or commercial buildings), and outer local-access/parking lanes.

Washington, DC is in the early stages of redesigning Pennsylvania Ave into something like this. It’s currently waaaay too wide for the amount of car traffic it gets and they’re trying to be smart about how transit and bikes get through there, and just making it a more vibrant place in general.

The reason why this is not done more often is probably that it requires ENORMOUS amounts of space. Most cities that could really use this would have absolutely no space to have it without demolishing buildings or greatly reducing stuff like parking lots, sidewalk width, etc.

The ad I got at the beginning of this video was an ad for a car dealership where a woman complained that she hated the subway because it stank and was inconvenient and she wanted to buy a car.

Massive boulevards are the standard for our major arterial streets in Detroit, most all the major "spokes" radiating from the city center are boulevards, most famously Woodward Ave.

The Parisian boulevard looks clearly applicable to at-grade highways that run through smaller cities, a means to slow traffic down while adding efficient space for parking & nonvehicular travel. It’s a tougher proposition for retrofitting large urban cores with a lot of congestion & cross traffic. For example, in Los Angeles there just isn’t space along Wilshire Blvd or Vermont Ave, two heavily traveled main streets, to run local lanes alongside arterial lanes. It could be done on Van Nuys Blvd.

I seem to recall NotJustBikes covering a very similar approach. The Netherlands avoids stroads by keeping properties and highways separate. Properties connect to local access roads parallel to highways, and ramps connecting the two are only periodic. I guess the main difference is to what level tree usage is bound up in the concept?

Love your work!

Nice! It would be great to see a video in the future auditing LA's stroads and multi-model transportation retrofits :)

NYC has a few of these boulevard types in the outer boroughs: Eastern & Ocean Parkways in Brooklyn, Queens Blvd. in Queens, and Grand Concourse and Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. Philadelphia's Roosevelt Blvd. is another one.

I always love your videos!

When you talked about Olmsted and central park it reminded me - Olmsted had a grand design for LA before LA grew into a massive metropolitan area. The city of LA begged for them to to design the future of the city. Olmsted finally agreed and created one of the most ambitious city design projects in the history of the country that included a network of parks throughout the LA basin that would put Boston's emerald necklace to shame. But the plan called for a park authorities that would rival the authority of the city, and the city council scrapped the plan like it never happened. Probably the most tragic bit of history for the city of LA. City Beautiful should do a video on this.

There's a great example of a new multi-way boulevard just outside of Seattle in the suburban city of Bothell, WA. Just a few years ago, the city redesigned State Route 527 (also called Bothell Way) into a really nice multi-way boulevard as part of a larger re-do of they city center along with a bunch of new well-designed development projects.

It's awesome to see transportation design solutions that _aren't_ unapologetically adversarial to automobiles. I feel like the default proposition these types of channels always make is to remove traffic lanes, remove parking, and discourage non-public transportation in general. It's proposed with the best intentions, but it's really impractical, idealistic, inorganic, and tone-deaf to what most normal Americans actually _want_ in their community. As a traffic planner myself, this is a plan I can actually see the general public unifying behind in support.

Taipei has a really good example of boulevards including a concentric traffic circle where two boulevards meet. Look for Renai Dunnan Traffic Cir, Da’an District.

Could you make a future video about the "L.A. River Masterplan"? I think it's an interesting project, especially for the US. :)

If you want to fix the tree/dendritic road network problem you can add vines. Vines wrap around the the twigs, and connect different branches too each other, through circuitous and filtered bridges for different animals. And flanked boulevards actually work really well, with a fully enclosing vine, where it’s connected into the twigs and forms a coat around the central trunk, allowing access to the streets which allowing the trunk roads to flow through uninterrupted. Edit- ivy might be better for boulevards

Lubbock TX does this on a few different arterials, but they don’t run the whole length of either. And the two largest examples of this connect only to residential areas, so where the traffic is the lightest already.

Glad to see that you're covering Octavia BLVD, one of my favorite areas (extending to Patricia's Green) in SF. There is still lots of room to connect the bike network on Octavia to Page street. Angled parking (or a variation of what you mention) is common where I went in London suburbs. They have the arterial street but with the cut-out parking lot. If we can figure out how to integrate Muti-modal parking lots (i.e. Cars, next to bikes, next to shared vehicles) - I think that will improve the existing separation between "parking lot" and "roads" that make many suburban town centers un-walkable.

I live on the Grand Concourse in NYC and there is so much potential for it! A couple of the primary issues right now are that pedestrian islands are too small (which is being addressed), people still drive too fast along the center arterial, and biking is still quite dangerous from a lack of dedicated bike infrastructure (there are bike lanes but no physical protection, which means that bike lanes are often taken over by double parked cars). Another issue is that merging between the center lanes and the local service road is via haphazard merge lanes, which creates a lot of potential for vehicle-vehicle and vehical-bike collisions. That being said, despite its warts (especially in actual execution), i think that the boulevard has more potential compared with stroads!

i think the point is that a boulevard is 2 items on the list at once, and i think it would benefit most streads, seggregating the access roads away on slower speed side streets

With roundabouts, you need fewer lanes.

I lived a block from here last summer. It really was a lovely version on a large street in the city. However, the traffic on it in rush hour was horrendous. Good thing I took the bus to work!

I won’t understand why urban planners will reject designs that are obviously safe and efficient and accept those that are dangerous and harmful to people.

There’s a KZfaq video by “rethink I-35” advocating turning that road into a boulevard in Austin Texas it’s good I recommend it

You might want to look at Texas interstate systems I-35 from Dallas to Austin to San Antonio, and I 45 from Dallas to Houston. When these interstate highways enter into metro areas they have a network of "feeder" roads. Single direction roadways running parallel to the major freeways. These roadways have access to local business, and sometimes apartment complexes. This also makes your exit ramps and on-ramps 1 or 2 miles in length so you're not exiting right into the main roadway. It's an interesting concept that I personally have only experienced on Texas freeways.

I would love a video or even series on space constraints. In switzerland often due to well. how the city is built, you cant just build a wider road (to create e.g. pedestrian lanes etc. easily).. At least i would find that very interesting to hear some challanges that need to be tacklet when space is at a premium, everywhere, even on highways going around the city (e.g. due to law) .

Well, the 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires is not as bad as portrayed in this video for a few reasons: - First, the avenue is very functional since a lot of traffic goes through, including tens of bus lines, cars and several subway lines go under it to bring hundreds of thousands of people from the suburbs to the downtown, so is not just individual cars carrying one person each. - Secondly, pedestrians can actually avoid crossing the avenue if they use the subway walk-throughs that go underneath, but many of them are too lazy to take the stairs (the BA subway is really old and some parts don't use mechanical stairways). Plus, in the avenue there are 3 or 4 stops for pedestrians. - Third, this avenue is the main artery an amazing mix-used zone that brings thousands of people to use the local work places and touristic attractions. Let alone that many nearby boulevards (like Lavalle or Florida) are really close to the Obelisco and are pedestrian-oriented. And, most importantly, that area is aesthetically BEAUTIFUL. I mean if you take bus/subway lines that go through the 9 de Julio you could reach within half an hour some iconic areas like Retiro, the Presidential Palace, the Congress Palace, Colon Theater, Puerto Madero or La Boca. That's why I say in cases like this, big avenues make sense because we are talking of dense populated and mix-used areas and they are more useful to the people than the "strodes" you see in North America. With all this, I mean to say this big avenue is actually MORE FUNCTIONAL to the people than cars. If you say Paris is a good example to follow, well, Buenos Aires did exactly that in the early XX century, when Argentina was a wealthy country and her leadership decided to bring hundreds or even thousands of architects and urbanists from Europe and urbanized the city following the blueprints of Paris and London. Is no coincidence that Buenos Aires looks so European. Other than this, I agree with your content.

Buffalo, NY also has a Parkway system designed by Olmstead. The adjacent neighborhoods are still the most popular inner city neighborhoods to this day and a major asset of the city. Better still, they were never mangled like the Parkways in Brooklyn.

These types of road are very common here in Australia. Basically all multi-lane highways that have commerical uses on either side are boulevards of this type.

We should definitely have more, I was thinking that while going through one of the local stroads yesterday

Crystal City in Arlington, VA had a one sided boulevard for route 1. It starts as a spur route highway before turning into a 6 lane divided highway with a side street allowing access to the apartment complex there. It's not a very long stretch, and they made it shorter when they chopped off part of the side road. If you're new to the area, it's confusing as fuck because they could only make it so that the side street going south was along side the lanes on the divided highway going north. The biggest issue is that you often have people in crossing streets turn onto the wrong street, and the stop lights last forever. They used to have a pedestrian tunnel go under the highway, but it always smelled like piss and it was only ever used by the hobos. It didn't work. What needs to be done is to divided highways with limited access on and off the road or make it like the boulevard suggested but only have one directional access in sections between crossing streets on the highway, and do not have the side street intersect. Also need to make left hand turn lanes in accessible to traffic coming onto the highway from the side street but provide u-turn options down the road.

we have some of our smaller towns that were built with a major road passing through the middle that have a small local road parallel where all the houses are built off. Usually this is near the edge of the town, the older part of the town is built right on the main road.

The footage of Avenida 9 de Julio is from before 2013. It has change a lot since. Also, there's a subway that have the same course. I recommend you to read a bit more about it, it's very interesting!

St. Pete, FL offers an interesting approach for cities in which no street is wide enough to do this. Central avenue is for slow traffic with parking on both sides & wide sidewalks with businesses, and 1st Ave N & 1st Ave S are one way streets in opposite directions, and cars can move faster but there is still parallel parking and businesses along the way.

the city of boulder Colorado has some interesting suburban boulevards, like south Broadway. the side roads make it a lot more pleasant and safer to cycle, but these roads are excessively wide

I always wanted there to be a test to see if an Olympic sprinter could cross Avenida 9 de Julio in one light cycle.

I could imagine this working fairly well in Denver on many of the stroads there, at least.

There are several boulevards in San Francisco. , Sunset Blvd that runs from Lincoln Way - Sloat , Park Presidio Blvd that runs from Lake St - Fulton St, in addition to Octavia Blvd

We have those types of multi-lane boulevards in México City and Guadalajara, usually the lateral lanes are used for public transit and access to buildings, while the central lanes are pretty much arterial roads. They are way better streets than those wide stroads or highways, both for drivers and for pedestrians

Check out Melbourne, Australia. A number of major roads out of the city have a boulevard style, and include trams in the centre median.

As someone who live in the Sf Bay Area, Octavia is something of a pain to drive on and use, mostly because it gets a ton of traffic from both the freeway and Market street, which runs perpendicular to Octavia. I do think that Boulevards do offer a lot of benefits over the ubiquitous arterial, but unfortunately I don’t think Octavia isn’t as great as you make it look. The tale end of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley looks a lot more like the theoretical boulevard you animated and works a lot better than other parts of the road that adhere to the arterial road format.

The reason say Canada has so few boulevards is maintenance. Snow clearing and salt kill trees planted along the road, and the trees also end up being a dangerous hazard for motorists. You can either have a fast road (60 km/h) with few trees adjacent to the curb, or a slow road with lots of trees (40km/h). Now if you put in curbside trams then you’ll have lots more opportunity to plant trees, but curbside trams require density which most Canadian cities won’t get for another 20 years.

Many Chinese cities have this style of road, and they're able to efficiently handle large amounts of surface traffic with extreme populations densities.

The street I (mainly) grew up on is called a boulevard, even though it’s only two lanes and only has single family homes, one apartment complex (the one I lived in), an old folks home, a rec center and a few businesses.

An excellent suggestion or retrofitting our stroads with something more humane (and more efficient!). A good first step would just be to connect all the parking lots with 20mph connectors, and move the sidewalk away from the stroad and up across the fronts of the buildings. Would be nice to see more of this because it's something that could be done immediately. Good work

A few things though : 1/ a bike path should still be provided along the sidewalk, as a boulevard side-street could support some heavy trucks 2/ the central roadway should be as narrow as possible, ideally 2x1 lane outside junctions 3/ the side-street mustn't provide a shortcut for the main roadway. So you may have to control the exit of the side-street and have it merge with the main roadway ahead of any junction Otherwise, great video!

Multiway boulevard is very common in Turin, Italy, where almost all the arterials are multiway boulevard, or at least, boulevard with trees coverage that also reduce the road's temperatures during hot summers. In Turin we call them "corso" (plural "corsi") and they are typical of Turin's cityscape together with grid-city structure.

These type of street is really common in Indonesia. Apart from separating local and arterial traffic, they also separate cars and motorcycles.

The highest throughput road in a city that I've seen personally is, Peenya flyover in Bengaluru. It has a 4 lane viaduct for vehicles going in and out of city. And on the ground, a 4 lane road with barriers on each side so you can't stop and it acts like a highway. It's also wider than typical 4 lane city roads here. And beyond the barriers, 2 lanes each on either sides, which have parking space and access to shops on either sides, and connections to smaller streets which go off from there. And the metro viaduct also runs parallel to the flyover... Sounds pretty much like a boulevard with extra features. Minus the greenery.

I would love to see a video about Buenos Aires’s main boulevard called “avenida 9 de julio”. It’s the widest street in the world. I’ve been really amazed by it when I went there a couple months ago

At 1:37 - The effect *is* quite nice. I can't help but notice the Ghost bike right there on the left, and that the cars look to be going at least 5 over. For those who don't know - Ghost bikes are put up at the intersection where a cyclist died.

Good boulevard in Vancouver: West Blvd and East Blvd in Kerrisdale. Bike path in the middle. It's a pretty nice place to be, for a road.

Vietnam has a lot of these in newer cities. The smaller roads on the side are used by motorbikes and the big lanes in the middle trucks and cars. Da Nang's Ngũ Hành Sơn is a good example.

I just want to note that at 1:15 in your video @City Beautiful, there is a Ghost Bike visible while you describe this street/road amalgamation as "quite nice". The Ghost Bike signifies that a cyclist died at that spot. Maybe its not so nice, or maybe the effect is misleading people in terms of feeling safer than they are..

What is being described for a solution is what was once Mercury Boulevard in Newport News, Virginia - circa 1980s, although started earlier than that. They have since removed the local access roads. They even once had a rotary or two - now gone. The relatively dense original development now appears to be completely gone. (I say appears because I have not been there in many years and am only looking at satellite images.)

The diagonal parking bit reminds me of part of Westdale in Hamilton Ontario.

There were so many gorgeous buildings demolished to get that huge boulevard 9 de Julio. And the loss of architectural heritage continues at an alarming rate today in Buenos Aires.

Love seeing Olmsted and landscape architecture get a shoutout on a popular channel like this

One instance of a multi-way boulevard in the states is the aptly named Grand Boulevard in Detroit. Originally conceived of near the turn of the 20th century as a Paris inspired ring road it now sits somewhere in the middle of the city. Depending on which stretch you look at it varies from fully separated multi-way blvd to wide street with median to wide street with center left turn lane. It's difficult to evaluate the traffic/safety/quality of life impact of it these days because utilization is relatively light due to declining population and other issues but with portions of it very much on the rebound it's definitely one to watch.

I live on a street that matches your definition of a multiway boulevard. We have mixed parking and pedestrian, verge, dedicated pedestrian, verge, mixed bike and local traffic, verge, two lanes each way for cars, then the repeat on the other side for bikes, parking, and pedestrian. The whole thing is flanked by shops and restaurants. It is about 230 feet from side to side. Within the blocks, where the housing lies, is fully pedestrian with parking in basements under the buildings. Unfortunately, the city has been gradually widening major routes and removing the verges to create stroads. I was worried earlier this year when I saw construction fencing going up along the street sides and machines digging up the verges. However, when they finished work I found that they had actually removed some of the parking, widened the pedestrian zone, and added park benches and planters.

If you’ve never seen/heard of it already I’m gonna need you to look up NJ-17 at Kalisa Way. Any the two ‘exits’ just after. It’s a SUPER busy three lane highway that dumps right into a home depot parking lot.

You know... I haven't experienced this exact design for a boulevard (I've seen similar like College Ave in Fort Collins, CO), but I think I could live with this kind of boulevard like the Octavia St one. It appears to take care of the people that need a car to get around while also giving the ability for people to ride in other ways if they so choose.

Can confirm. I love highways running straight through my city!

Put the center lane on a mound so you can have a subway under the center lane at side walk street level and the hound is low enough you can still conect the center lane to the side lanes

At Palmas, TO, Brazil, the mostly part of avenues has this kind of boulevard. The traffic isn't so bad here.

I noticed patterns like this in the smaller centres in North Dakota and Saskatchewan.

melbourne australia has a few of these and were designed like that from the start, as it was a planned city. St Kilda Road and Royal Parade are two examples. Only difference is there is no central median as the centre lanes are tram tracks