To Bypass or Not to Bypass (2024)

A question we hear often from Strong Towns readers concerns highway bypasses around small towns. Are they good? Bad? How should we decide when a bypass is a worthwhile investment? Is it ever? Or is #NoNewRoads as good a mantra here as anywhere?

There is a plausible argument on each side. The "con" argument is the more familiar one. A bypass is often assumed to be the kiss of death for the economy of a small town, as travelers will no longer stop to patronize its shops or restaurants. There's no shortage of real-world examples of this. (I recently wrote about the case of Idaho Springs, Colorado, which entered a long period of decline after Interstate 70 was built.) And it's pervasive in pop culture, too—consider forlorn Radiator Springs in Pixar's Cars, modeled after numerous Route 66 desert towns left behind by the Interstate.

There’s a “pro” argument too, though, and it’s based on the incredibly negative effects that a high volume of through traffic can have on life in a small town.

Consider a place like Starke, Florida. Due to a quirk of geography, the fastest route to the Tampa Bay area from I-95 southbound, and by extension from the entire eastern seaboard, includes a 70-mile stretch of U.S. 301 that is not part of the Interstate Highway System and is not built to freeway standards—meaning it has plenty of cross-streets, curb cuts, and stoplights. This crucial connector road gets a lot of traffic and is infamous for its series of speed-trap towns, ensnaring thousands of vacationers and retirees a year (and financing through ticket revenue some truly spectacular small-town corruption).

Starke is the biggest town on that stretch by far, at a whopping 5,422 residents. It is not exactly a charming tourist town, nor is it a prosperous place. Over one third of children in Starke live below the poverty line. The whole string of towns along Route 301, in fact, is characterized by visible signs of economic hardship, a far cry from the Florida that drivers experience along I-95 with its golf resorts and billboards advertising discounted theme park tickets.

If being right smack-dab on the best route from the whole Northeast to Florida's booming Gulf Coast was ever supposed to fuel local prosperity, Starke seems to have missed the memo. Instead, the only priceless memory most travelers have taken away from Starke is of an interminable slog through a charmless several-mile strip of Jiffy Lubes, fast-food joints, and cheap motels, beset by the smell of 18-wheeler exhaust, and frequently gridlocked, to boot. Enduring the drive through Starke was an exercise in Zen equanimity.

I say "was" because in 2019, Starke was bypassed by the Florida Department of Transportation at a cost of $90 million. You can now cruise at 70 miles per hour on a lightly trafficked seven-mile freeway, Alt. 301, and never catch a glimpse of the town.

That’s an awful lot of money for seven miles. But is the end product a good thing or a bad thing for Starke? I lean toward good, but a lot will depend on what Starke chooses to make of it.

The bypass was deeply controversial locally, as WUFT Gainesville reported in a 2019 deep dive titled, "How 7 Miles Divided a Small Florida Town." The debate fell along the narrative lines I've already described: "The bypass will cost local businesses needed revenue and customers," versus "the bypass will free us from the nightmare of daily gridlock and constant truck noise and exhaust."

For what it's worth, the evidence so far seems to support the optimism of the pro-bypass crowd. Multiple local business owners told WUFT a year later, as well as Jacksonville's News 4, that, far from hurting business, the bypass has been a boon to the ability of actual locals—their most reliable customers—to patronize their shops. From the WUFT story:

The predictions of pessimists seem a far cry from a booth at Grannie’s Country Cookin’. On game day morning, Pam “Grannie”Synderrings up tickets at the cash register....

Her unequivocal answer to how the bypass is affecting business: “It’s not.”

For years, during construction, she worried the new road might mean fewer folks coming in for “Cali’s Crazy Breakfast Stacker,” a smorgasbord hash and egg dish named after her granddaughter and topped with gravy. But now, Synder realizes the opposite is true. Without passersby clogging up Starke’s dozen-stoplight town, residents are free to travel to the other side without fear of brutal traffic.

The locals, after all, are her most valued customers. Not even a bypass could dent their game day traditions, let alone their loyalty to her.

The reporting around the controversy paints a picture of Starke that I never would have guessed at as one of the many thousands who have sat in traffic cursing the place. It portrays a community with character and quirk, beloved local haunts with devoted regulars. None of that is visible from the bypass, but none of it was visible from the awful clogged stroad that the bypass rendered obsolete, either.

If there's a takeaway here, it's that a place like Starke deserves better choices. Highway-oriented strip development is not the foundation of a sound local economy, and never was—even if it's the basis of what passes for economic development in thousands of small American towns.

A more prosperous future for Starke will come from recognizing that its people are its greatest asset, not U.S. 301. Craft a strategy to incrementally identify those locals' needs and build a place that works for them. Everything else, including your transportation strategy, should be secondary to that goal.

A Bypass is Only as Good as What You Make of It

A bypass is not categorically good or bad for a town. A lot depends on what you make of it (or what you do in lieu of one). To approach the question in a way that actually serves the goal of local prosperity and quality of life, we must understand the crucial distinction between a road and a street.

A road is what the U.S. 301 bypass is. Its purpose is to move travelers at high speed from one productive place to another (in this case, from Jacksonville to West and Southwest Florida) with a minimum of friction or interruption.

A street is a platform for building local wealth. A street should be a destination, and it should be a welcoming place to linger. Traffic should be slow, and people on foot, or just hanging out, should be given priority in its design.

When we try to achieve the goals of a road and a street simultaneously—move traffic quickly but also provide access to local destinations—we end up with a stroad, which does neither of those things well. U.S. 301 through Starke, prior to the bypass, was the stroad to end all stroads. It was a horrible experience for locals, a horrible experience for travelers, and a place that was dividing the town and draining its wealth.

Get Downtown Right: Streets, Not Stroads

The best reason to build the bypass was to make it possible to fix the stroad. Now that the big trucks in particular are mostly gone, Starke will hopefully find that a feasible proposition. From here on out, future street investments should focus on making the core of town the best place it can be. Narrow the old U.S. 301 and calm traffic. Spruce up the public realm, and support the growth of local entrepreneurs. The longer-term goal should be to see Starke mature into enough of an attraction that leisure travelers on 301 will choose to come into town and grab a bite to eat or take a stroll around.

Fail to make these investments—that is, continue to prioritize traffic speed and throughput and cater to auto-oriented chain businesses—and Starke will be squandering the opportunity the bypass has given it.

Get the Bypass Itself Right: Road, Not Stroad

There's an important flip side to this. If the in-town streets should be true streets and not stroads, then the bypass needs to be a true, no-frills road, not a stroad.

This means that the bypass is not a platform for development: no Circle K, no Wawa, no Burger King, no Subway, no Walmart, no Home Depot. No superfluous access points. The point is not to generate commerce (which will only compete with and suck resources away from the downtown).

The point is to get heavy trucks past the town so they're not generating safety and health risks for locals just trying to live their lives. Full stop.

The Right Choice for the Wrong Reasons

Part of the problem with the whole bypass debate is that, more often than not, bypasses are a priority for state DOTs (not necessarily local officials) for two bad reasons: (1) the desire to speed up traffic by some infinitesimal (in the grand scheme of a long-distance trip) fraction, and (2) the desire to generate commerce—invariably of the fast-food, gas-station, big-box variety—and call it economic growth.

Reporting on the Starke bypass project suggests that both of these things were on FDOT’s mind. If so, FDOT may have done the right thing, but they did it for utterly wrong reasons. And almost certainly spent way too much money on it when a simpler design would have done just fine. If your goal is literally just to move traffic, particularly trucks, then the ideal bypass looks something like this one in Puyo, Ecuador:

The above cost $90 million. A two-lane road with at-grade intersections would have been a small fraction of that.

Beyond the overbuilding issue, I’m skeptical that, in the 2020s, there are very many small towns where a bypass is really the low-hanging fruit. There are a lot more where highway departments are hell-bent on building them to keep the Infrastructure Industrial Complex humming and save drivers theoretical seconds.

Starke is exceptional for the crippling amount of truck traffic it was experiencing. A town without this issue—one that is either significantly smaller, or has significantly lower traffic volumes—should never need to entertain a bypass like Starke's in the first place. It can just slow and narrow its main street to a proper street, and let drivers put up with the extra 30 or 60 or 90 seconds it takes them to get through town in exchange for a nicer place.

Catering to the comfort of drivers is a dead end as an economic development strategy. But sometimes, you really do need to get the drivers out of the way in order to move forward.