We Have Always Been at War with Pedestria
Sep. 10th, 2008 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluKevin Drum thinks the Woodbridge development in Irvine is about as good as it gets for walkable suburban neighborhoods.
In comments, I disagree:
I used to live in Irvine. Not, I admit, in Woodbridge, but we visited Woodbridge regularly. By car. Based on my time there, I'm afraid I disagree completely that Woodbridge is "about as good as it gets" or even close, when it comes to walkable suburban environments. You've been drinking the Irvine family Cool-Aid too long.
For one thing, one of the things that makes for good walkability is mixed use -- the genuine co-mingling of living spaces and work places and stores, cafes, and markets. Woodbridge isn't mixed use at all. Like the rest of Irvine, it's carefully segregated into zones that don't interpenetrate each other.
One of the things things we used to laugh about was the Irvine Worship Center -- three churches clustered around a parking lot -- because that segregated, car oriented, mini-mall approach to development is a perfect metaphor for how Irvine space usage as a whole is "planned".
Because of that lack of mixed use in Woodbridge, anyone who is walking to public amenities will have to walk the full distance between their house and a mall before they reach any destination of interest. The comfortable radius for people to actually use walkable amenities about .5 miles. So for the majority of Woodbridge residents, the amenities are *not* within their radius of likely walking use, in part because all of the amenities are cordoned off into a separate reserve instead of being interspersed among the residences.
By contrast, I live in a house in a leafy suburban neighborhood. The local historical museum is about a block from my front door. There's a Thai restaurant two blocks away, and in the block beyond that, a dry cleaner and a bodega that sells Mexican pastries, among other things. There's a new Chinese market coming in two blocks from that, and in between, a one-of greasy spoon cafe that makes sublime waffles. In another direction, there's a large municipal park a block and a half from my house. Movie theaters, restaurants, my public library, a particularly fine bakery cafe, my commuter train station, and an outpost of the local community college are all within about a half mile radius of my house. With mixed use, it is easily possible to do a lot better than Woodbridge does. All the vaunted planning does is create large suburban wastelands with nothing of interest to the ambling pedestrian to look at.
For another thing, the only sensible way to *get* to Woodbridge is by car, which means the only people there are people who drove there, and have a car handy anyway. Woodbridge, like any other "neighborhood" in Irvine, is bounded and bisected by huge arterials that would count as freeways in any other city -- the speed limit is often 55 mph, and nothing faces them -- all the houses and businesses crouch behind their beige walls and their over-watered hobbit hills and face inward, toward a parking lot. Nobody enjoys walking those arterials -- they're long, boring, noisy, and scaled for travelers moving at 50+ mph. Meanwhile the transit options in Orange County in general, and Irvine in particular, are genuinely terrible. Buses are infrequent, poorly connected, and bus stops are few, and isolated.
And in addition, because the only workplaces in the area are in the retail strip in the middle, where businesses don't pay well enough to support the Woodbridge lifestyle, virtually nobody who lives in Woodbridge works there, and vice versa. Most of the residents are already acclimated to driving long distances to reach the (again, segregated, parking-lot surrounded) business parks where they haul down the big bucks to be able to afford to live in Irvine in the first place.
So anybody in Woodbridge has already been forced to have a car handy anyway, and to use it regularly. Naturally they're going to be the sort of people who are habitually disposed to pile in the car to get to anything.
Another thing about Woodbridge is that the vast majority of retail businesses you find there are corporate, homogenized, chain operations that you could find in pretty much any other giant parking lot mall in Southern California. Being blandly interchangeable makes the malls themselves rather less interesting as walking destinations in the first place. There is no mystery, there is no adventure, there is no quirky new local artisinal discovery to be made. I think quirkyness is probably outlawed by civic ordinance in Irvine, along with non-beige housepaint and leaving your garage open too long so people might glimpse your crap. If you want quirky, you have to pile in the Lexus and drive down to Laguna.
Woodbridge is splat in the middle of one of the most aggressively car-centric, car dominated suburban messes on the planet. Of course nobody walks there. (A professor of mine at UCI was in fact stopped by the police for walking.) I think the only reason you could think that Woodbridge was an example of a good, walkable suburban space is because you've never actually seen a good, walkable suburban space. You can be forgiven for that. There aren't any in Irvine.
(Edited slightly to amend repetetive adjectives)
In comments, I disagree:
I used to live in Irvine. Not, I admit, in Woodbridge, but we visited Woodbridge regularly. By car. Based on my time there, I'm afraid I disagree completely that Woodbridge is "about as good as it gets" or even close, when it comes to walkable suburban environments. You've been drinking the Irvine family Cool-Aid too long.
For one thing, one of the things that makes for good walkability is mixed use -- the genuine co-mingling of living spaces and work places and stores, cafes, and markets. Woodbridge isn't mixed use at all. Like the rest of Irvine, it's carefully segregated into zones that don't interpenetrate each other.
One of the things things we used to laugh about was the Irvine Worship Center -- three churches clustered around a parking lot -- because that segregated, car oriented, mini-mall approach to development is a perfect metaphor for how Irvine space usage as a whole is "planned".
Because of that lack of mixed use in Woodbridge, anyone who is walking to public amenities will have to walk the full distance between their house and a mall before they reach any destination of interest. The comfortable radius for people to actually use walkable amenities about .5 miles. So for the majority of Woodbridge residents, the amenities are *not* within their radius of likely walking use, in part because all of the amenities are cordoned off into a separate reserve instead of being interspersed among the residences.
By contrast, I live in a house in a leafy suburban neighborhood. The local historical museum is about a block from my front door. There's a Thai restaurant two blocks away, and in the block beyond that, a dry cleaner and a bodega that sells Mexican pastries, among other things. There's a new Chinese market coming in two blocks from that, and in between, a one-of greasy spoon cafe that makes sublime waffles. In another direction, there's a large municipal park a block and a half from my house. Movie theaters, restaurants, my public library, a particularly fine bakery cafe, my commuter train station, and an outpost of the local community college are all within about a half mile radius of my house. With mixed use, it is easily possible to do a lot better than Woodbridge does. All the vaunted planning does is create large suburban wastelands with nothing of interest to the ambling pedestrian to look at.
For another thing, the only sensible way to *get* to Woodbridge is by car, which means the only people there are people who drove there, and have a car handy anyway. Woodbridge, like any other "neighborhood" in Irvine, is bounded and bisected by huge arterials that would count as freeways in any other city -- the speed limit is often 55 mph, and nothing faces them -- all the houses and businesses crouch behind their beige walls and their over-watered hobbit hills and face inward, toward a parking lot. Nobody enjoys walking those arterials -- they're long, boring, noisy, and scaled for travelers moving at 50+ mph. Meanwhile the transit options in Orange County in general, and Irvine in particular, are genuinely terrible. Buses are infrequent, poorly connected, and bus stops are few, and isolated.
And in addition, because the only workplaces in the area are in the retail strip in the middle, where businesses don't pay well enough to support the Woodbridge lifestyle, virtually nobody who lives in Woodbridge works there, and vice versa. Most of the residents are already acclimated to driving long distances to reach the (again, segregated, parking-lot surrounded) business parks where they haul down the big bucks to be able to afford to live in Irvine in the first place.
So anybody in Woodbridge has already been forced to have a car handy anyway, and to use it regularly. Naturally they're going to be the sort of people who are habitually disposed to pile in the car to get to anything.
Another thing about Woodbridge is that the vast majority of retail businesses you find there are corporate, homogenized, chain operations that you could find in pretty much any other giant parking lot mall in Southern California. Being blandly interchangeable makes the malls themselves rather less interesting as walking destinations in the first place. There is no mystery, there is no adventure, there is no quirky new local artisinal discovery to be made. I think quirkyness is probably outlawed by civic ordinance in Irvine, along with non-beige housepaint and leaving your garage open too long so people might glimpse your crap. If you want quirky, you have to pile in the Lexus and drive down to Laguna.
Woodbridge is splat in the middle of one of the most aggressively car-centric, car dominated suburban messes on the planet. Of course nobody walks there. (A professor of mine at UCI was in fact stopped by the police for walking.) I think the only reason you could think that Woodbridge was an example of a good, walkable suburban space is because you've never actually seen a good, walkable suburban space. You can be forgiven for that. There aren't any in Irvine.
(Edited slightly to amend repetetive adjectives)
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