A solution for Main Avenue?
Maybe careful redesign can serve the needs of
H-E-B and its neighbors at the same time
October 30, 2013The question of the moment in San Antonio: Should the city close about a fifth of a mile of South Main Avenue so that H-E-B can consolidate its expanding headquarters campus?
For familiar urbanistic reasons, the answer is No. The street serves a useful purpose for vehicular circulation, and superblocks have a deadening effect on their surroundings.
At the same time, H-E-B does have a legitimate interest in facilitating safe and convenient pedestrian circulation across its campus when the grocery company expands to property west of Main.
I think a solution exists that could satisfy both H-E-B and the King William neighborhood opponents of the street closure. To find the solution, all you have to do is drive a short distance north on I-35 to … St. Paul, Minnesota.
There you will find my alma mater, Macalester College. Today, as when I attended back in the late 1960s, the campus straddles Grand Avenue, a fairly busy commercial street. When I was a student there, the dining hall and several of the dorms were north of Grand. Nearly everything else was south of Grand. Students and faculty crossed the street constantly, on foot, every day. We managed, though not without a rare mishap.
map to
see if the situation had changed. It had, very much for
the better. Grand Avenue still slices aross the campus, but the street has been redesigned. It pinches in to replace parking lanes with parkways on both sides, and a landscaped median has been added. As before, there is one traffic lane in each direction. The landscape and hardscape design funnels pedestrians to three crossing areas that line up with the campus’s sidewalk grid.
A similar approach could work on South Main. It might not even be necessary to redesign the entire length of the street as it passes through the campus. The company’s new office space is planned for the area immediately across Main from its existing facility, so a stretch of about 400 feet or less would do the trick. There's room for one 12-foot vehicular lane in each direction with an eight-foot median between them, and room left over to widen the sidewalks on both sides. Bike lanes would have to be eliminated or rerouted, but I think that's possible.
A narrowed roadway together with a landscaped median would have a traffic-calming effect, make pedestrian crossings safer and more pleasant, and help unify the campus visually across Main Avenue. Pedestrian crossings could be placed atop speed humps for an extra degree of safety.
If that kind of solution works for 2,000 college kids — not necessarily the most mature, sober or wakeful population — surely it would be sufficient for the responsible adults working for H-E-B.
An ancillary subject: The small grocery store (plus gas pumps) that H-E-B proposes building at the corner of South Flores Street and César Chavez Boulevard.
Some have objected that the store, currently projected at 10,000 square feet, would be no more than a “gloried convenience store.“ As the typical convenience store covers only about 4,000 square feet, the description cannot be considered accurate.
I’ve seen stores that size in Manhattan that offered an excellent selection of fresh, canned and (obscenely wonderful) prepared foods. Aisles were narrow and shelving was high, as were the prices, but it worked.
The problem for the store H-E-B proposes is not the size of the building, but the size of the customer base. A 10,000 square foot grocery in Manhattan or Brooklyn might have 10,000 residents within a quarter-mile, five-minute walk. How many people live within a five-minute walk of H-E-B's proposed store? A few dozen? Extend the circle to a half-mile, and the number of residents within walking distance rises to only a few hundred.
Thus the store cannot survive without lots of customers who arrive by car, which is why the site plan devotes three times as much space to parking as it does to the store itself. A bigger store could require more customers and, in the absence of a dozen 30-story apartment buildings within walking distance, more parking. And more space devoted to parking lots is the opposite of what downtown’s fringe needs.
I do have one complaint about the site plan, however: The plan would put the gas pumps at the corner of Flores and César Chavez, and the store would be placed about 150 feet south, fronting on Flores. The plan should be reversed, putting the store at the corner to make the intersection more pedestrian-friendly.
Mike Greenberg
Grand Avenue, as it slices across Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. Narrowed roadway, landscaped median and carefully placed crossings allow cars to coexist with pedestrians.
Apple Maps image