Quote:
Originally Posted by McBane
My solution for the Vine Street Expressway is to rezone both sides of Vine Street to make it easy for developers to build here. Remove height limits (realistically, no one is going to pitch 1000 footers here), FAR requirements, parking ratios, and all the other crap that developers fight over in their variance requests. Also, eliminate the million and one committees that review a typical project so as to expedite the process.
Let's face it, Vine Street is not attractive, it's not historic, and it's never going to be a quiet, pleasant-to-walk-on street, so why bother trying? If developers want to line the street with towers on parking podiums with no retail or other street level pleasantries, it would still be 1000x better than what's there now. And with the expressway right there, autocentric highrises would be attractive to many buyers who want to be in the city, but also need easy access to the burbs (this is the lure of buyers to Waterfront Square).
Rather then spending money to cap the expressway, this solution would cost the city nothing. Just takes innovative thinking and political will.
Regarding the Parkway, it's a clusterfk and there is no intuitive way for pedestrians to go from the Art Museum steps to Logan Circle/Love Park. Maybe about once or twice a year I find myself on the Parkway and always wind up in spots where the sidewalk just ends and I have to dodge speeding cars to get to where I'm going. It's not never a pleasant experience at all.
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I agree mostly regarding the VSE, but I'd take it a step further. Yes, no one cares about noise and height restrictions (I live here, anytime someone pitches a fit they're from five blocks north or a completely different neighborhood). I would love to see the VSE lined with high rise apartments, and offices if corporations want to join the party.
But I don't think its walkability is doomed, and I think lining it with parking podiums would undue a lot of the mental integration between Center City and Callowhill. It's not great, but it's got more potential than some think.
The VSE was created to alleviate traffic on Vine Street, but Vine's surface street was widened with the VSE's construction. In seven years living on Vine Street I've never once seen all its lanes backed up. For some reason (I have no idea why), NJ commuters tend to use Race Street.
Even if they were pushed to Vine (and they should be), adding better street parking, maybe even eliminating a traffic lane for parking, would really boost the pedestrian morale of Vine Street. Right now it's a highway, and it shouldn't be.
Other than that, bring on the high-rises.
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That headline shoulder have read: "WuXi AppTech Not Fleeing The City For The Suburbs"
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