Trainwreck at the edge of the water - (un)walkable density

[phantom power]

I realize that a lot of people just aren't sufficiently interested in walkability as a goal. But even among planners and politicians who seek walkability, there seems to be a deficit of basic understanding wrt what makes an area walkable. In a sentence, mixed-use zoning.

So this is infill development, really close to Manhattan, instead of way the hell out in Suffolk County or the Highlands. Why does it make me sad? Because it might as well be in Suffolk County. There are almost no walkable streets in the area. River Road has hardly any pedestrians and you can't blame people because it has wide car lanes, too many of them, and narrow sidewalks, and virtually none of the shops, restaurants or residences engage with that sidewalk. There is a semi-continuous riverwalk, but it zigzags around the piers and buildings, past windows and terraces that do not interact with it. Despite all this development, River Road does not make the frequent network map because you're very likely to wait more than fifteen minutes for a bus.

River Road is one of the reasons I'm so skeptical about "density" being an important factor in transit use or walkable streets. It's got density, or something resembling density. I don't know the numbers, but all of this new construction is apartments and townhouses, with no detached single family houses that I could see. But all that development was designed for driving.

...


Every housing complex has tons of parking, often obscured by an overhanging apartment or townhouse ... structure (it's hard to call them buildings because the architecture is so fragmented). Sometimes the parking is in its own big ugly building, and sometimes it's designed so that it's immediately adjacent to the apartment or townhouse of its occupant. The new shops and restaurants are all the same kind of strip development, overloaded with surface parking that would be equally at home in Scottsdale, Arizona as on Tonnelle Avenue on the other side of the Palisades.

So here we have dense infill development a short distance from one of the most walkable job centers in the country, and still it's just as car-oriented as Phoenix. I'm guessing that the two biggest factors involved are the zoning code and outdated standards followed by the New Jersey Department of Transportation, which together have built one of the densest driving-oriented suburbs I've seen.

http://capntransit.blogspot.com/2012/09/trainwreck-at-edge-of-water.html

[NYC_SKP]

1. I'm all for it, NYC is very walkable. nt