Last week I had a delightful opportunity to meet my friend Mandy for lunch at a restaurant in Brier Creek. Not being familiar with the shopping center, I managed to park a short distance from my destination and spent a good 10 minutes walking from building to building to find it.
The walk made me realize just how vehicle-centric Brier Creek truly is. There are few or no sidewalks anywhere in the parking lots. There are no crosswalks at its internal intersections, either. The whole time I was on foot I felt like a sitting duck as cars whizzed by me. It seemed that shopping centers like Brier Creek fit an outdated mold of shops plunked down amidst acres and acres of parking lots. Sure, the stores are shiny and new but the paradigm is a dinosaur.
Today my family made a trip over to North Hills, a project built roughly the same time as Brier Creek. At North Hills you have a very pedestrian friendly layout, with parking decks below, mixed uses included, and (get this) crosswalks that actually give the pedestrians in them precedence over cars. As I walked through one of these North Hills crosswalks today I couldn’t help but chuckle. The odds of finding a similar, pedestrian-preferred crosswalk at Brier Creek are exactly zero. It was laughable just imagining it.
Both of these shopping centers appear to be successful today. It will be interesting to compare them in a decade, however, as demographics shift away from the car-centric culture and the price of gas continues its inevitable march upward.