Comment Re:Seems like a great idea (Score 1) 82
The actual economic problem of American-style shopping malls is the fundamental conflict between car transport and foot traffic.
Retail thrives on foot traffic, but you can't have foot traffic and car traffic at the same time/place. It has to be car-free because walking or eating is not relaxing with traffic zooming by, and having parking lots for every store makes everything too far apart and too stressful to be walkable, and makes the density of storefronts too sparse to be sustainable. Cars destroy any sort of pleasant, walkable, economically viable shopping district. The American shopping mall is an attempt to make a fake walkable shopping district surrounded by a sea of parking, so that people can drive to it, because car transport is the only available and allowed form of transport in America.
We see this all the time either with enclosed malls or the outdoor ones where they create a fake classic walkable city shopping district or plaza (like a fake 5th avenue, San Antonio Riverwalk, Ginza/Shinjuku, or any number of small-town main streets and town squares that were build before automobiles), but they tried to do it in a way compatible with car transport. But surrounding it with a sea of parking and arterial roads to serve it makes it fundamentally fake, the economics don't work out, and it fails. In a real city, you get a real economy, including people living there. They sometimes try to add apartments to the fake lifestyle center things but nobody wants to live in what's essentially a strip mall that they still need a car to escape from. If they still need a car, they are better off to live in a nearby car-dependent residential enclave and drive to the mall like everyone else.
The irony is we could have just not destroyed our walkable cities, and our cities could just BE like shopping malls, except with real economies, which they used to be before cars destroyed everything, but there is no sacrifice too great for the altar of car worship.
You can either have "efficient" car travel (highways, giant parking lots, drive thru queues), or you can have pretty much anything else valuable (housing, nature, pleasant walking and shopping, etc.), but you can't have both, because car transport basically destroys value.
America has take the car transport to its logical extreme and it turns out that the logical extreme doesn't support things like pleasant shopping malls that generate lots of foot traffic. Every walkable area you build requires an even bigger parking lot. The more actual destinations you build, the more roads you must build to serve them so the petri dish basically runs out of resources.
Retail thrives on foot traffic, but you can't have foot traffic and car traffic at the same time/place. It has to be car-free because walking or eating is not relaxing with traffic zooming by, and having parking lots for every store makes everything too far apart and too stressful to be walkable, and makes the density of storefronts too sparse to be sustainable. Cars destroy any sort of pleasant, walkable, economically viable shopping district. The American shopping mall is an attempt to make a fake walkable shopping district surrounded by a sea of parking, so that people can drive to it, because car transport is the only available and allowed form of transport in America.
We see this all the time either with enclosed malls or the outdoor ones where they create a fake classic walkable city shopping district or plaza (like a fake 5th avenue, San Antonio Riverwalk, Ginza/Shinjuku, or any number of small-town main streets and town squares that were build before automobiles), but they tried to do it in a way compatible with car transport. But surrounding it with a sea of parking and arterial roads to serve it makes it fundamentally fake, the economics don't work out, and it fails. In a real city, you get a real economy, including people living there. They sometimes try to add apartments to the fake lifestyle center things but nobody wants to live in what's essentially a strip mall that they still need a car to escape from. If they still need a car, they are better off to live in a nearby car-dependent residential enclave and drive to the mall like everyone else.
The irony is we could have just not destroyed our walkable cities, and our cities could just BE like shopping malls, except with real economies, which they used to be before cars destroyed everything, but there is no sacrifice too great for the altar of car worship.
You can either have "efficient" car travel (highways, giant parking lots, drive thru queues), or you can have pretty much anything else valuable (housing, nature, pleasant walking and shopping, etc.), but you can't have both, because car transport basically destroys value.
America has take the car transport to its logical extreme and it turns out that the logical extreme doesn't support things like pleasant shopping malls that generate lots of foot traffic. Every walkable area you build requires an even bigger parking lot. The more actual destinations you build, the more roads you must build to serve them so the petri dish basically runs out of resources.