street

Etymology

The word street has its origins in the Latin strata (meaning "paved road" – an abbreviation from via strata); it is thus related to stratum and stratification. The first recorded use of word stratæ referring to the road has been made by Eutropius. Ancient Greek stratos means army: Greeks originally built roads to move their armies. Old English applied the word to Roman roads in Britain such as Ermine Street, Watling Street, etc. Later it acquired a dialectical meaning of "straggling village", which were often laid out on the verges of Roman roads and these settlements often became named Stretton. In the Middle Ages, a road was a way people travelled, with street applied specifically to paved ways.

Role in the built environment

The street is a public easement, one of the few shared between all sorts of people. As a component of the built environment as ancient as human habitation, the street sustains a range of activities vital to civilization. Its roles are as numerous and diverse as its ever-changing cast of characters.

Streets can be loosely categorized as main streets and side streets. Main streets are usually broad with a relatively high level of activity. Commerce and public interaction are more visible on main streets, and vehicles may use them for longer-distance travel. Side streets are quieter, often residential in use and character, and may be used for parking.

Circulation

Circulation, or less broadly, transportation, is perhaps a street's most visible use, and certainly among the most important. The unrestricted movement of people and goods within a city is essential to its commerce and vitality, and streets provide the physical space for this activity.

In the interest of order and efficiency, an effort may be made to segregate different types of traffic. This is usually done by carving a road through the middle for motorists, reserving pavements on either side for pedestrians; other arrangements allow for streetcars, trolleys, and even wastewater and rainfall runoff ditches (common in Japan and India). In the mid-20th century, as the automobile threatened to overwhelm city streets with pollution and ghastly accidents, many urban theorists came to see this segregation as not only helpful but necessary in order to maintain mobility.

Le Corbusier, for one, perceived an ever-stricter segregation of traffic as an essential affirmation of social order—a desirable, and ultimately inevitable, expression of modernity. To this end, proposals were advanced to build "vertical streets" where road vehicles, pedestrians, and trains would each occupy their own levels. Such an arrangement, it was said, would allow for even denser development in the future.

These plans were never implemented comprehensively, a fact which today's urban theorists regard as fortunate for vitality and diversity. Rather, vertical segregation is applied on a piecemeal basis, as in sewers, utility poles, depressed highways, elevated railways, common utility ducts, the extensive complex of underground malls surrounding Tokyo Station and the Ōtemachi subway station, the elevated pedestrian skyway networks of Minneapolis and Calgary, the underground cities of Atlanta and Montreal, and the multilevel streets in Chicago.

Transportation is often misunderstood to be the defining characteristic, or even the sole purpose, of a street. This has not been the case since the word "street" came to be limited to urban situations, and even in the automobile age, is still demonstrably false. A street may be temporarily blocked to all through traffic in order to secure the space for other uses, such as a street fair, a flea market, children at play, filming a movie, or construction work. Many streets are bracketed by bollards or Jersey barriers so as to keep out vehicles. These measures are often taken in a city's busiest areas, the "destination" districts, when the volume of activity outgrows the capacity of private passenger vehicles to support it. A feature universal to all streets is a human-scale design that gives its users the space and security to feel engaged in their surroundings, whatever through traffic may pass.

Vehicular amenities and roadside hardware

Often, a curb (British English: kerb) is used to separate the vehicle traffic lanes from the adjacent pavement area and where people on bicycles are considered properly are used to separate cycling from traffic as well. Street signs, parking meters, bicycle stands, benches, traffic signals, and street lights are often found adjacent to streets. They may be behind the sidewalk, or between the sidewalk and the curb.

There may be a road verge (a strip of grass or other vegetation) between the carriageway (English: roadway) and the pavement on either side of the street on which grass or trees are often grown there for landscaping. These are often placed for beautification but are increasingly being used to control stormwater.

Utilities

Although primarily used for traffic, streets are important corridors for utilities such as electric power; communications such as telephone, cable television and fiber optic lines; storm and sanitary sewers; and natural gas lines.

Street numbering

Practically all public streets in Western countries and the majority elsewhere (though not in Japan; see Japanese addressing system) are given a street or road name, or at least a number, to identify them and any addresses located along the streets. Alleys, in some places, do not have names. The length of a lot of land along a street is referred to as the frontage of the lot.

Interaction

A street may assume the role of a town square for its regulars. Jane Jacobs, an economist and prominent urbanist, wrote extensively on the ways that interaction among the people who live and work on a particular street—"eyes on the street"—can reduce crime, encourage the exchange of ideas, and generally make the world a better place.

Identity

A street can often serve as the catalyst for the neighborhood's prosperity, culture and solidarity. New Orleans' Bourbon Street is famous not only for its active nightlife but also for its role as the centre of the city's French Quarter. Similarly, the Bowery has at various times been New York City's theater district, red-light district, skid row, restaurant supply district, and the centre of the nation's underground punk scene. Madison Avenue and Fleet Street are so strongly identified with their respective most famous types of commerce, that their names are sometimes applied to firms located elsewhere. Other streets mark divisions between neighborhoods of a city. For example, Yonge Street divides Toronto into east and west sides, and East Capitol Street divides Washington, D.C. into north and south.

Some streets are associated with the beautification of a town or city. Greenwood, Mississippi's Grand Boulevard was once named one of America's ten most beautiful streets by the U.S. Chambers of Commerce and the Garden Clubs of America. The 1,000 oak trees lining Grand Boulevard were planted in 1916 by Sally Humphreys Gwin, a charter member of the Greenwood Garden Club. In 1950, Gwin received a citation from the National Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution in recognition of her work in the conservation of trees.

Streets also tend to aggregate establishments of similar nature and character. East 9th Street in Manhattan, for example, offers a cluster of Japanese restaurants, clothing stores, and cultural venues. In Washington, D.C., 17th Street and P Street are well known as epicenters of the city's (relatively small) gay culture. Many cities have a Radio Row or Restaurant Row. Like in Philadelphia there is a small street called Jewelers' row giving the identity of a "Diamond district". This phenomenon is the subject of urban location theory in economics. In Cleveland, Ohio, East 4th Street has become restaurant row for Cleveland. On East 4th is Michael Symon's Lola Bistro and other restaurants.

As distinct from other spaces

A road, like a street, is often paved and used for travel. However, a street is characterized by the degree and quality of the street life

which it facilitates, whereas a road serves primarily as a through-passage for road vehicles or (less frequently) for pedestrians.

Buskers, beggars, boulevardiers, patrons of pavement cafés, peoplewatchers, streetwalkers, and a diversity of other characters are habitual users of a street; the same people would not typically be found on a road. A stroad is a thoroughfare that mixes - often unhappily - the characteristics of a street and a road.

In rural and suburban environments where street life is rarer, people frequently use the terms "street" and "road" interchangeably. Still, even here, what is called a "street" is usually a smaller thoroughfare, such as a road within a housing development feeding directly into individual driveways. In the last half of the 20th century planners of suburban streets often abandoned the tradition of a rigid, rectangular grid, and instead designed systems to discourage through-traffic. This and other traffic calming methods provided quiet for families and play space for children within a streetscape. Adolescent suburbanites find, in attenuated form, the amenities of street life in shopping malls where vehicles are forbidden.

A town square or plaza is a little more like a street, but a town square is rarely paved with asphalt and may not make any concessions for through-traffic at all.

Nomenclature

There is a haphazard relationship, at best, between a thoroughfare's function and its name. For example, London's Abbey Road serves all the vital functions of a street, despite its name, and locals are more apt to refer to the "street" outside than the "road". A desolate road in rural Montana, on the other hand, may bear a sign proclaiming it "Davidson Street", but this does not make it a "street" except in the original sense of a paved road.

In the United Kingdom the inhabitants of many towns will refer to their main thoroughfare as the High Street (in the United States and Canada it would be called the Main Street—however, occasionally "Main Street" in a city or town is a street other than the de facto main thoroughfare), and many of the ways leading off it will be named "Road" despite the urban setting. Thus the town's so-called "Roads" will actually be more like streets than like road.

Some streets may even be called "highways", even though they may carry no highway designation at all: This may arise when an historic road that was built to connect distant towns was named a "street" but originally never was in the truest sense. Some roads of this type which later became designated as numbered highways, became identified as said highway and may continue to colloquially be labelled as such from force of habit even if sections of it are subsequently urbanized and become an actual street and has its highway status decommissioned. Hurontario Street in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada (which was formerly Ontario Highway 10, but predates it), is an example of this.

In some other English-speaking countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, cities are often divided by a main "Road", with "Streets" leading from this "Road", or the cities are divided by thoroughfares known as "Streets" or "Roads" with no apparent differentiation between the two. In Auckland in New Zealand, for example, the main shopping precinct is located around Queen Street and Karangahape Road.

Streets have existed for as long as humans have lived in permanent settlements

(see civilization). However, the development of modern civilization in much of the New World was driven by transportation provided by motor vehicles. In some parts of the English-speaking world, such as North America, many think of the street as a thoroughfare for vehicular traffic first and foremost. In this view, pedestrian traffic is incidental to the street's purpose; a street consists of a thoroughfare running through the middle (in essence, a road), and may or may not have pavements (or sidewalks) along the sides.

Culture

Streets may be used as cultural spaces, for socializing and street parties, or for public festivals.

In India, some cities have designated one or more streets as "happy street" or "fun street", closing them for motor traffic for a few hours or a day, in order to make it possible for the inhabitants to use their street for recreational activities. Cities implementing this initiative include Kolkata Madurai, Visakhapatnam and Bangalore.

In the United States, "open street" events have been arranged in Detroit and New York City.