Reply to D.C. needs to get a lot more car friendly

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I guess it's good to know that drivers demands are pretty radical and unreasonable.  Usually they aren't this honest.[/quote]
What demands? The Wharf is a wildly successful pedestrian zone and it’s located conveniently close to an interstate highway and includes abundant car parking. These things are all related. There’s no demand. The developer clearly took this into account before investing.

Just closing down streets to pedestrianize them will not produce these kinds of results and the research and literature on this presents a number of explanations. Successful pedestrian malls remain the exception. [/quote]

I don't care too much about the Wharf.  What about the rest of DC?  You want to make it a drive through full of interstates?[/quote]
Where have I said that? You are projecting.

It’s quite bizarre to hate successful and beautiful urbanism that is an asset to the city because you have some utopian ideal that neither it, nor frankly anywhere else can meet.

What I have explained to you, based on a well established base of academic research based on decades of data and the experience of our community, are the conditions that help to make pedestrian zones successful.

Otherwise, and this is the data and urban planners talking, if you just drop pedestrian zones in areas without those conditions they turn into dead zones and most of them end up being reverted back to normal streets.

So the conclusion is that if you want vibrant urbanism, the main precondition is the motivation for people from outside that area to go there and spend their money and then go back home and the reality is that convenience is a big factor in that. The flip side of that is if you are intent on economically harming the business in your neighborhood that make it vibrant, make it inconvenient.

The interesting thing you will discover if you do the reading is that the typical trajectory of these pedestrization efforts follow the same pattern: initial success that tapers away over time until it becomes overwhelmingly obvious.

I’m a big fan of the Santa Monica 3rd Street Promenade. I was last in LA in 2019 and it’s a really nice place but even then a significant portion of the storefronts were closed. I’m reading that now since COVID, when you would think that such an amenity would be even more important, it now has 40% empty storefronts. Santa Monica has the same population density as DC and there’s a beach just a couple blocks away (the pier on the other hand is always super popular). The problem there and in Santa Monica generally is a lack of parking. People in LA just prefer to go elsewhere like Silver Lake or West Hollywood where parking is more plentiful.

You need to come to some senses that this utopian DC that you want is not possible the way you want it and in fact, the policies you want to bring about this utopian vision will actually hasten the city’s demise. [/quote]

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