04-24-2011, 06:39 AM
quote:
A major consideration was to prevent strip malls and not have 130 be shopping centers from Keaau to Pahoa.
Amen to that. Anybody who thinks unrestricted/unguided commercial corridor development is a good idea needs to take a drive from Bradenton to Naples, Florida on US41 - 120 miles, and I'd bet 100 miles of it is lined with shopping.
Even though my Grandmother built and operated a beauty salon from 1960 to 2000 in a similar strip of suburban blight, in my opinion, it's not the best, most attractive, environmentally friendly, walkable community way of building commercial space into a community.
Edit to add:
quote:
Puna needs to be a series of villages. The next build-out needs to be in HPP. None of it should be directly on the highway.
I took a bike ride through Denmark (Jutland and Fyn, the more rural 2/3 of the country) in 1989, and riding on the major roads I noticed several things:
1. There were very few cars on the road (or bikes for that matter, even in the summer it was cold and rainy) - $7/gallon gas was part of that, but there was more to the story.
2. There were almost no stores on the roads, even at major intersections.
3. It must get windy as hell there in the winter, a very common decoration was Danish flag pennants, 10 meters long and more.
For a couple of days, I looked for a place to buy one of those pennants. After about 3 days of riding, I finally realized that the commercial development was in town centers off the highway - there was much more car traffic in the town centers than on the cross-country roads, and an awful lot of people were doing their business without cars, too.