Of malls and men
Of malls and men
It's important to know that the mobility habits of humans in a shopping mall are similar to what you observe on a busy street corner.
Transport professionals have persuaded the general public that human behavior is as neat and orderly as the input-output process of a computer model. Open the modeling program, enter the 1s and 0s, and click “run.”
Humans are anything but the neat and orderly portrayal of traffic models.
You've been inside a shopping mall. Some people move slowly while others are in a terrible rush. Most are polite while some use their elbows or bags to shove through a crowd. But the entire interaction—the system—is disorderly.
The mobility habits of humans in a mall are similar to what you observe on a busy street corner. As Jane Jacobs famously said:
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.
The complexity of city street life—of mall walkers—has everything to do with traffic engineering.
From a satellite view, people follow general paths. Up close, it's a complex dance. The humans who create the sidewalk ballet are the same humans who operate motor vehicles on public streets.
Standard traffic engineering predicts traveler behavior as if the travelers aren’t human. The result is that there’s no accounting for people changing their habits based on external circumstances or the whims of personal preference.
Can a pandemic change commuter patterns? No.
Can a bridge collapse change commuter patterns? No.
These are the inevitable conclusions drawn by smart and credentialed planners and engineers. The best laid plans of malls and men often go awry. But knowing people adapt in real life (outside the models) should free you, the smart and/or credentialed professional, to design delightful places.
Stop assuming the new store will generate 300 car trips a day and require a ton of surface parking. Accommodate walking and bicycling as the primary means of travel for short trips and watch the glorious result of people walking and bicycling.