this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
869 points (96.8% liked)

Technology

59636 readers
2911 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Sure, and I've seen some good projects, and less than good projects.

In my city, they took a street and closed it and redid it as pedestrians only. Worked great, more foot traffic going from any establishment to any other, and car people only had to walk an extra block or two to get to things.

There's a section where they made a highly walkable environment from scratch, with car access basically through entering a big mostly underground parking deck, so the surface was reasonably car free.

On the flip side, the city loved these efforts so much they mandated mixed use zoning for all new construction. And the three big projects I've seen play out under this new scheme all followed the same recipe:

  • Proposal with 90% residential, and 10% "retail/commercial"
  • The proposal is phased, with hyper detailed residential plans and a vague box for the "retail/commercial" phase "to come later"
  • The residential is built, and then the company withdraws their plan for further development.

One that did go in for the true mixed use early on suffered because no commercial tenant would tolerate streetside only parking (which was effectively part of the deal, given how the regulations were written parking lots/decks were not viable for these "walkable neighborhoods" when they could just have a parking lot or deck nearby by setting up their business somewhere else)