The objective I presume is to create a more interesting and attractive sidewalk ambience … an area more functional and attractive to the restaurant customer, the future shopper, and the casual visitor. This makes good sense, but the relatively narrow streets make it difficult.
The ideal … a fantasy … would be to have twice as much space between the buildings along a street so that there would be enough space for two lanes of vehicle traffic, parking, pedestrian sidewalk traffic, many more trees for shade, and some landscaping, and a generous area for people to enjoy outside tables. The parklets is an attempt to squeeze this kind of environment into an area fundamentally too small because of the narrow streets.
Actually, ssky makes a good point about the sidewalk heat, which gets unbearable on many hot days along Laura, especially on the east side of the street in the afternoon. Of course, much of the year, the heat is not oppressive. Abundant trees would do wonders …. If there was enough room for them.
The good thing about Adams, along the sidewalk in front of the Zodiac, the sun is blocked much of the year by the buildings.
The solution would be to move each of the buildings about 20 feet back from the street. Impossible … so onward to a possible. In order to create space for the desired ambiance, we might look at closing the “core” area of certain streets, and rerouting to two selected main arteries for each direction … east, west, north, and south.
Too radical? A related option would be to maintain the streets, but to select some to make each only one lane … one-way of course ... forcing through traffic to other streets. Adams would become one lane for westbound moving traffic, would maintain the same parking arrangement, and thereby offer much more space for trees, landscaping, and outside tables … all positive attributes for the pedestrian, the shopper, the diner, and the casual visitor.
This kind of solution would be more realistic if and when an effective mass transit system is in place … thereby removing the pressure for accommodating the daily mass of automobiles. In any case, it would be a much better solution than moving all buildings 20 feet back from the streets.
