OK, urban design folks. Help me understand something.
1) This place (map) is, as a whole, Bad. Big box stores, mall, ocean of parking. However, the outparcels down the center (red oval) in *theory* do some key things right for future retrofit-ability to something more urban.
Conversation
2) This is assuming that in a less car-centric future, developers gradually fill in those parking lots with mixed-use development around a grid of pedestrian-friendly streets. Which is a lot of "if"s, but something to shoot for. Anyway:
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3) I'm trying to understand why I hate the central strip of restaurants + shops as much as I do. Because on paper, it checks a lot of the right urban design boxes. Photos attached.
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4) Sidewalks are wide and comfortable. Street parking and planted median calm traffic (observed speeds 20-25 mph). All restaurants have outdoor cafe seating. Facade transparency is pretty good (lots of windows) and frequent, easy-to-find front doors open to the sidewalk.
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5) This is a big improvement over most shopping-plaza outparcel development, where the front door faces the parking lot, there's zero interface with the sidewalk / street, and the street is a nasty high-speed stroad.
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6) No pedestrians here, because there's nowhere to walk *from* to this strip—this is in deep suburbia and everyone gets here by car. But even aside from the deserted-ness, it just feels uncomfortable to me—like some sort of uncanny valley of walkable urbanism.
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7) So the question is: If the surroundings were infilled, and there were actual people here, would this pass as an adequate walkable shopping / dining street? Or is the design fatally flawed? And if the latter, I'm having trouble pinpointing the exact WAYS in which it's flawed.
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8) Maybe it's that the road / ROW is too wide? Certainly the roundabouts are way too big and the one signalized intersection is a daunting expanse of Nope. But there isn't high-speed or frightening traffic. And certainly boulevards this wide can work in a more urban context.
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9) So I'm looking for insight as to what more subtle design features are making this place WAY less appealing as a pedestrian than my checklist of essential features tells me it should be.
TL;DR: "Tell me why this sucks." /thread
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Forgot to include Google link for interactive exploration. Here: goo.gl/maps/XDeWfvupc
Note that Google's imagery is not up-to-date as this is very recent development (my aerial photo at the top was from the county).
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There are some good comments already. I'll add that the road geometry gives autos first priority, and the frontages are boring. says "ideally, the shops should be narrow enough that your view changes every 4 to 8 paces."
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