I attended a meeting with a few other downtown business owners and one of the problems downtown faces is an overabundance of destination stores. Most of the businesses in downtown are restaurants or bars or hair stylists. While people do pub crawl, with the other two, their customers visit and leave. There are not a lot of shopping options in downtown. Customers leave my store or Priority Sports with their purchases, hop in their cars and leave
Route 13 is a highway. I don't want to walk next to it or cross it.
ReplyDeleteThey did a great job with making the strip (51) more walkable and it feels safer. Now we just need more stores but downtown Carbondale isn't truly fixable until route 13 (in both directions) is reduced by a lane, a bike path installed and the city/state do some drastic traffic calming measures. No one wants to walk next to trucks cruising through town at 40mph.
The great news is that there is already space to do this!
No property or land needs to be acquired...its just a matter of restriping/repaving and putting in new lights, perhaps some flowers, etc that make it more appealable and other calming measures.
Also - the parking situation is terrible. Some spaces outside a business is great and much needed but there needs to be a central lot that all people park at thus forcing them to use the sidewalk, create pedestrian traffic flow which leads to more people WANTING to walk downtown.We kind of have this but no one will use it when they are forced to walk next to trucks going 40mph.