Blowhard, Esq. writes:
The City of Los Angeles has been holding listening sessions the past few weeks on the revision of its zoning code. I haven’t been able to attend any of them, but if I did it would be to remind The Powers That Be of this:
To put it even more simply:
Go here to download the chapter on The Three Rules from David Sucher’s City Comforts.
Blowhard, Esq.
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Who else finds it too claustrophobic and distracting to have to walk along a path that’s squeezed between the building walls and the traffic-choked street?
If you have wider sidewalks, or narrower / low-traffic streets, then it doesn’t feel that bad. But most urban areas are going to have a decent amount of traffic. And sidewalks wide enough for 10 people to walk abreast are just a deeper setback in disguise, since the storefronts aren’t within 5-to-10 feet of the street.
You really need two parallel walkways — one along the street, for transporting yourself from point A to point B, and another one along the storefronts that are set back somewhat (but not too much, e.g. behind a sea-sized parking lot), for strolling and browsing. In between, it’s nice to have some kind of buffer, so that when you’re strolling along the walkway close to the set-back storefronts, you don’t see, hear, or feel cars and bikes zooming by you. Nothing takes you out of the moment like having to attend to basic security on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis, which you need to do in order to navigate traffic.
True, that buffer keeps you from feeling up-close and personal to the storefront and the goings-on inside when you’re walking along the street-side walkway. But as long as the buffer isn’t a huge parking lot, the storefronts don’t feel so far away. They feel like more of a destination calling you from your utilitarian transit path along the street.
The same applies for customers / browsers inside of the stores. I like people milling around outside the store, but I don’t want to see, hear, or feel traffic zipping by just outside the windows or entrance. A small buffer, maybe a parking zone deep enough to fit one or two rows at most of cars does the job fine. You can still take in the sight of cars in motion, but it’s from farther back and not as disturbing to your wandering mind. You won’t hear their horns as much either.
The buffer doesn’t have to be functional like a small parking zone, though. Green landscaping works well too (not trendy rock-based landscaping, which is off-putting).
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As for point 2, the most relevant rule today should be “no ads on surfaces facing major walkways.” Cutting back on the presence of mirrored glass and blank concrete walls would be nice, but only a handful of building types use that approach in the first place — really large office buildings and parking garages / warehouses / etc., respectively.
The majority of store types offend the eye instead by plastering ads of one sort or another on their windows — so much for permeability. Again, that’s not just offensive to pedestrians outside, who can’t see the bustling activity inside the Wendy’s, but also to the Wendy’s patrons who would like a nice uninterrupted view of the activity outside the building. Nothing makes me want to throw a chair through a window more than sitting down for a meal and having my seat choice severely constrained by which areas aren’t in front of an ad-plastered window, and even then having to further micro-position my chair and body so that my line of sight is only minimally interrupted (since the ads are everywhere).
That chapter on the Three Rules doesn’t mention ads once — the main obstructions are thought to be blinds and the like covering windows, rather than poster-sized ads. This whole (New) Urbanist evangelism I find disturbing because they’re not in touch with basic, obvious realities like that. They’ve had enough real-life experience with nice places to abstract some of the underlying patterns of what’s good and what’s bad, but they seem to be too in love with the abstract, hence blind / negligent toward what challenges actually face us in America 2013.
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It’s a great, and hyper-useful, book. Wish I could send a copy to all our politicians, and then force them at gunpoint to read and master it.
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Just remembered that I interviewed Sucher back at the old blog.
Part one: http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/000981.html
Part two: http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/000983.html
No idea why a bit of the typography in those postings has gone flooey, but they’re readable despite it. No idea either why the postings now say that Friedrich von Blowhard did the interviewing.
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Okay, now I see why Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, CA is so much more walkable than the commercial streets in the rest of the San Fernando Valley: no parking lots between the sidewalk and the shops.
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