Let's talk window shopping

The Caldwell Street item sparked some interesting back-and-forth (here's a link) about whether one-way or two-way makes much of a difference for pedestrian comfort.

One commenter points out that the newly reconfigured intersection of Stonewall and Caldwell is so wide that it isn't pedestrian friendly (or bicycle friendly or even motorist friendly) at all. Others say sidewalk width and street-level retail are more important.
Here's my take: They're all important.

If the sidewalk is narrow (one commenter mentions Seventh Street uptown between Seventh Street Station parking deck and Tryon) pedestrians will be turned off.

If there's nothing interesting to look at – that is, if you're walking on a wide sidewalk but you're going past a vacant corporate plaza, a surface parking lot, a parking deck, a blank office wall, or even windows into office buildings – pedestrians will be turned off.

And if the cars are zooming past, as they tend to do on one – way streets when the lights are timed to let you cruise at 35 and hit them all green – then pedestrians will be turned off.

So reverting one-way to two-way is a good first step but if it's the only step it may be a waste of time. I continue to maintain that street-level retail shopping (or as the late jeweler and City Council member Al Rousso used to cry, "Window-shopping! We need window-shopping!") is what's key for uptown, and it's going to be incredibly difficult to achieve because:

• We've spent two decades demolishing storefront buildings until the few that remain are too far from each other to create any retail synergy.

• The city's uptown zoning still allows new development without street-front retail. It requires ground-floor retail, not street-front. Thus we get Founder's Hall and the shops inside office towers. To window-shop requires leaving the sidewalks and streets entirely. Unless you're in an urban scene as dense with stores and lively sidewalks as, say, New York or Paris, that's anti-urban.

Streets like Paris, eh?

So I'm sitting in this windowless room in the belly of the local transportation bureaucracy: sixth floor, city-county government center. CDOT offices. (Charlotte Department of Transportation for you non-geeks.) It's only 8 a.m., so I'm pretending to be awake. And I start to notice what's on the walls:

A white board with markers and erasers. Above it a clock (analog). A calendar. A poster of the 2004 Mecklenburg-Union Metropolitan Planning Organization's Thoroughfare Plan.

Then I spot a print of Gustave Caillebotte's 1877 "Rue de Paris, Temps de Pluie" with people in umbrellas crossing a rainy street (copy above). A print of a Monet scene of a railroad in the snow in Paris. A poster with a photo of the Pont Alexandre III over the Seine. And a Michelin map of the city of Paris.

Do you realize how significant this is?

Let me explain. Charlotte is not Paris. Our traffic engineers (including the NCDOT folks) move traffic. They value speed, efficiency and "safety," not beauty or the value of the experience. Limited access highways through historic neighborhoods would be just fine by too many of them.
Paris is a city with high-volume, high-speed and beautiful boulevards that retain fabulous street life alongside the traffic. Walking down a Paris sidewalk is a magnificent experience. Even the traffic islands are magnificent. They don't have Independence Boulevard or South Boulevard. They have true boulevards. I have said for years that our traffic engineers and transportation planners needed to visit Paris and bring home what they learn.

But CDOT has been changing. It redesigned the city's street standards. It pushed the City Council to adopt a Bicycle Plan. I was there this morning to hear about its proposed Pedestrian Plan. (More on that at a later date. It will be discussed at a City Council Transportation Committee meeting Wednesday (Dec. 10) at 2 p.m., Room CH-14 of the Gov Center).

The windowless conference room, I'm told, has been dubbed "the Paris room."

Someone at CDOT gets it.