New Crown Food Mart Strip Center Lacks Required ADA Acess Route
Just North of downtown at Cass & North 13th (map link) an entire block has become a Crown Food Mart strip center with gas station & car wash. Food choices are very limited in the immediate area so this will serve a need. The problem is the auto-centric/suburban design.
I’m not talking about the design of the building. I’m talking about the site design. The site is surrounded on all sides with streets. At one time buildings were built up to the street. A modern example is the strip at Grand & Arsenal — store in front, parking in back.
The sidewalks are generous and have street trees. They’ll see lots of use too because the area is surrounded by residential with residents that don’t all have cars. Besides, why drive to a place you can see just a few blocks away?
The problem for the pedestrian is the sidewalk is great if you want to walk around the perimeter of the site but not actually approach any of the stores. Like so much new construction, this development completely ignores the concept of an ADA access route. In the short time I was taking these pics I saw a woman walking North and a man heading toward the development in a wheelchair. He was on Florissant Ave because the area’s sidewalks are in such poor condition, if they exist.
But the incompetent designers of this development wrongly assumed that all customers would arrive by car and that real pedestrians would not use their new sidewalks to get to the businesses. You may recall the wheelchair bound woman who was struck & killed by a motorist on Delmar at Jefferson after leaving the Crown Food Mart at that intersection. The city was to blame in that case because the sidewalks were non-existent or not passable. But like this new location, that location doesn’t have provisions to get from the public sidewalk to the front doors of the businesses. Pedestrians are subjected to enter/exit in the same spots as cars.
Cars & pedestrians are not mutually exclusive, or at least they shouldn’t be. The way we do it here is we design for cars at the exclusion of pedestrians. Good design designs for both pedestrians and motorists. It is possible. It just takes that as a goal — or a requirement by the city.
- Steve Patterson
