Cars, bad. Mass transit, good. Underground parking, good. Underground roads, bad. ???

better to focus on humanizing streets through better development standards and deemphasizing the auto…

Impractical, I know, but I can dream too.

Branching off from [Josh]’s alley idea, it would be interesting to have a city that’s flipped the use of main streets and alleys. Put all of the cars, garbage, garage enterances, and utilities on the street side. Put all of the storefronts on the alley side and on cross streets. The result would be a fairly pedestrian-friendly city. You’d still have to cross the street every block, but you wouldn’t have to interact with traffic between blocks.

Sometimes there’s an angled mirrors and audible warnings. At a few garages take the extra step during rush hour to post cops to direct traffic.

To redirect (more) vehicle traffic to an alley seems like a dumb idea. The interface of alley and sidewalk is often has a blocked view for motorists and pedestrians alike which is more hazardous than what we have now.

Besides aren’t most alleys one and half lanes wide downtown? Increasing cars in the alley could be problematic with oncoming traffic, and changing them to one way is also nusiance. …and can we rely on drivers to avoid driving over plastic garbage bags now that we’ve eliminated dumpsters?

@3 Not all alleys would make happy, pedestrianized, green spaces. In fact, very few in Downtown Seattle would. Alleys serve a very utilitarian purpose by providing spaces for trash storage and pick-up, delivery, and where possible garage access. These things should happen in the alley, not within a pedestrian-oriented streetscape.

Also, the parking garage Dan shows above was built before the City’s ground-floor retail requirements. A parking garage built today would look quite a bit different. But it would still be a parking garage. The City still needs to work on limiting the size of garage entrances.

The garage at 3rd and Pine (across from Macy’s) is a great example of retail retrofit that activates the streetscape and adds visual interest, resulting the the garage itself becoming less visually prominent.

Also hard to say about cars in alleys, which are a mostly untapped resource for publicly owned open space with very little traffic. I’d like to see the greening and pedestrianizing of Seattle alleys. But I don’t want curb cuts either. Hey, how about a parking garage with no street access at all?

I am all for encouraging and incentivizing smart design (i.e. *my* smart design sense, not some other schmucks smart design dense, mind you), but there needs to be some leeway in special circumstances where the code might otherwise stifle or kill a project.

The two Boston examples above provide an excellent testimony about how even above ground parking garages with street frontage entrances can be part of a walkable city AND be easy on the eye. So what needs to change is either the “profit first, aesthetics who cares” attitude of some developers/project owners (yeah, good luck with that), or a concerted effort on the part of DPD to develop and enforce meaningful design standards that place priority number one on Joe Pedestrian.

Here’s my proposal for an interesting code requirement in a dense walkable city: force all new construction to have a storefront, residential lobby, or office lobby at least every 50 feet on all sides except the alley side. Car entrances are only allowed on the alley side.