Clark Akatiff

(This is how inhospitable the area is towards pedestrians. On the mile long walk from campus to Palo Alto, there’s a stop light at every intersection — and the walk signals won’t go on unless you hit a button. By default, that is, pedestrians can’t walk on a green light. Crossing El Camino in Palo Alto things actually get worse, where pedestrians by default can’t walk across funny intersections where stop lights prevent any car from possibly getting in your path.)

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=11019

While I disagree with Peter Smith on almost everything (even the bike lanes, which I don’t think are appropriate in this scenario), he has a point with the El Camino and Caltrain crossings. Upgrading these crossings would be a costly endeavor, but until Palo Alto can make biking from Stanford and walking from the Caltrain station safer and more attractive, this proposal would lose a key demographic.

Palo Alto merchants would also have to tackle the whole issue of affordability, since most college students cant afford $15+ meals.

The lesson there does seem to be that while well-planned car-free spaces can be successful, using a pedestrian mall to attempt the “rescue” of an already flailing area probably won’t be successful.

Today, the city is in the process of bringing back cars to this stretch of Main St. with the hopes of returning vitality in an area that has been discarded. Unlike the case of Buffalo, Palo Alto has a thriving commercial district. Let’s hope the pedestrian mall project only enriches the experience.

The great thing about this sort of project is that ambitious visions like Palo Alto’s are divisible into smaller experiments. Perhaps in the case of Palo Alto, a 1-2 block mall would be enough to create a bustling space, while still reducing through traffic on University, and encouraging motorists to use Embarcadero or another route to 101. These projects are also relatively easy to pilot, to test out different versions.

http://paloaltopedestrianmall.weebly.com/plan.html

notice the pedestrian mall in charlottesville (UVA) is completely devoid of human life, while University Ave in Palo Alto actually has cars and people on it.

Freudian slip?

There’s a bigger problem, though. It’s almost impossible to get from the University side of El Camino Real to the downtown/cool side of University Ave on foot or bike. People do it, but it’s hellacious, dangerous, uncomfortable, scary, frightening, impossible, terrifying, whatever words you like. That’s the real problem, not University. The students should do some planning to figure out how to get people to and from the University and downtown, first. After that’s solved, then a pedestrianized downtown/University Ave might stand a chance.

I would also like to see some new approved designs for bike lanes, on streets like University, which would have a tremendous calming impact, and would really increase the vitality of the street instead of murdering it. Right now, we just don’t have enough tools in the toolbox — it’s either full bike lanes or nothing, and that’s just not working.

http://www.bikeblogs.org/images/take_the_lane_bike_lane_Suggestivstreifen_wide.png

Also, if you read the post carefully, you’ll see that nowhere does it say that 17th Street is a pedestrian mall. Indeed, it certainly isn’t one. Nor do I really spend any time at all comparing Palo Alto to 17th Street, and there’s no reason to, because the Palo Alto proposal is vastly different. That’s self-evident upon a two-second cursory examination of the plan, so let’s not make too much about that. What they share is the fundamental goal of taking away space for cars and reallocating it to pedestrians.