UK: More parking and more car traffic will save town centers from teh interwebz and superstores

dfwtinman said:

A fair point, though far less true in the Northeast. In the "sun belt" the grid patterns you mention are much more in evidence. Besides simply the relative "newness", legal descriptions of real estate in the wide open spaces of western expansion tend to be given in surveyed "lots, blocks and sections," breaking down square miles of land, rather than metes and bounds (as you often find in the UK). The "lots, blocks and sections" method lends itself rather readily to subdivision along grid patterns.

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I can see this issue is more nuanced than I had thought in my original, rather flip post.

Many cities in the northeast US do indeed have European-style small, tangled streets and difficult driving and parking conditions.

However, in many of those parts of the northeast they have excellent public transportation.

Where they have fallen down is in the highways-and-cars philosophy of the post-WWII years. For example, building an elevated six-lane highway right through the heart of downtown Boston in the 1950s (the infamous I-93) was a terrible blunder.

On the other hand, here in Chicago we have had experimentation with an ill-conceived and ill-advised pedestrian mall which effectively killed downtown trade for almost twenty years and which was reversed by reinstating automotive traffic.

State Street was for decades Chicago's premiere downtown shopping area, nine blocks lined with huge buildings containing massive department stores: Sears, Marshall Fields, Carson Pirie Scott, Woolworths, Goldblatt's, Bond's, Baskin's, Montgomery Ward, Boston Store, and Mandel Brothers. It also had dozens of smaller stores, many of them specialty shoe stores, jewelers, tailors, the prestigious Palmer House hotel, the famous Chicago Theater, and more theaters within a block on each side. The street was busy and bustling for an entire century, full of cars and people.

In the 1960s huge malls started to open in the suburbs, white people began fleeing the city for the suburbs, and customers began draining away. State Street got quieter as fewer people came to shop.

The city hoped to attract shoppers by making State Street into a pedestrian mall in the late 1970s. But when it closed the street for construction almost all of the big department stores moved away because no one could reach them.

The pedestrian mall opened in 1979, but it was a sad failure. There was very little shopping left, and what had moved in were (when I first moved to Chicago) pawn shops, porn shops, discount electronics shops and things like that. Marshall Fields and Carson Pirie Scott were all that was left of the department stores, and CPS had become dank and shabby, without even enough money to keep the store clean or fully stocked.

The worst thing is that the mall was never really for pedestrians. All cars were banned, but bus traffic -- huge, hot, smelly, loud, fume-belching polluting buses -- were channeled right down the center of the street.

In 1996 Chicago threw in the towel, tore out the extra-wide sidewalks which were supposed to attract pedestrians (with no benches or places to rest, no amenities of any kind except bus stops), and restored traffic to the street.

State Street has limped back. Sears, much diminished, has returned. Now the street is lined with H&M, Old Navy, Loehman's, and big downmarket stores like that. The beautiful old Carson Pirie Scott building is now inhabited by a Target.

But it is a place to shop, and it is clean, and it is welcoming. And it seems to work through a combination of a human-friendly environment, moderated automotive traffic, some parking, and really really good public transportation.

But without the first and the last, it seems like the middle two are not enough.