Mr. Sun! likes the animated GIF:

(Click the image for a larger version)




(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.)

In fact he liked it so much he is showing it on his own site.

Which is great except it prompts two thoughts which I am executing right now:

1. Protect the image with the appropriate Creative Commons License

and

2. Send anyone who provides a serious suggestion about how to improve the graphic with a copy of City Comforts the book. (Adding a female nude to the image is not a serious suggestion and will not get you a book.)

So those of you who have already made suggestions, please contact me with your snail mail address and the book will be on the way. To those of you who have not made a suggestion, putting on those thinking caps! (Limit first 50 suggestions or until I get bored, whichever is first.)

In particular, I'd like to add a photo to illustrate each condition. That would make the graphic less abstract and perhaps easier to grasp for people unfamiliar with plans. If you have an exceptional photo, let's talk.

Comments

[TM Lutas]

You might want to rotate it a bit and make the building 3 dimensional so you're looking at a 3d scene from 45 degrees up and to the right.

[Glen Raphael]

I have a minor nit, which is that the way your parking lots
are striped is entirely wrong, especially for "suburban", such that it
didn't really look like a parking lot to me.

(1) Actual suburban malls tend to have rows of parking that
are /angled/ rather than perpendicular to reduce the time and
difficulty of pulling in and out so as to improve traffic flow. This
is a little space-inefficent, but real estate is cheap in suburbia.
Pulling into spots laid out the way yours are tends to snarl traffic -
each person painstakingly wedging into a space is a
chokepoint that prevents other drivers from getting in or out.

(2) Actual suburban malls always have some sort of right-of-way
in between the store and the bulk of the parking lanes rather than
letting people park flush up alongside the building(*). There are several
reasons for this. First off, look at your diagram and imagine you
drive in and take the last spot on the right. Now try to get out of
your car on the driver's side -- you can't do it without banging your
door against the building! That's a space that's hard to park in and
hard to get passengers in and out of with their purchases.
Second, people pulling backwards out of spots that close to the building are
likely to hit pedestrians exiting the store. Third, having a way
people can drive /past/ the front of the building helps for
handicapped access, for dropping people off, and for picking up
especially bulky purchases.

So my suggestion is to redo it with three smaller rows of parking
rather than the two large ones you have now, with angled spaces, where
the middle row of parking stops short on both sides such that people
looking for a parking space can drive down one aisle, pass the
storefront, and drive back up the other aisle. If this isn't clear, go
look at a WalMart for reference. :-)

(*) A row of parking /perpendicular/ to the building entrance
is sometimes done, of course. If you wanted to, you could
add a layer of that, but I think it would clutter the drawing
needlessly in this case.

[Glen Raphael]

Also, there should be two openings from the street to the parking area instead of one. Again, this improves the throughput situation; people entering the parking lot from the busy street will tend to use the first opening they encounter; people leaving the lot will tend to use the other opening. Thus, when there's a mass of cars trying to leave the lot at once (because the street is busy and the lead car is waiting for a suitable opening), this generally won't interfere with other cars trying to enter the lot; the design can handle both events simultaneously with little interference. Actually it's better than that, because cars slowing down to enter the store are running interference that makes it easier for cars a little further down the street to smoothly enter the flow of traffic.

[Chris D]

I have two suggestions:

1. Like you mentioned earlier, most people having difficulty grasping plans & even sections. Maybe the two could be combined into one bird's eye view axonometric (set to 45 or 30 degrees?). This would show more of the physical massing ramifications of each 'choice'.

1-b. Or a variation on #1, show it from person's-eyed view from the sidewalk/street level?

2. The current .gif shows one event. To me the impact really takes ona different meaning when it's multipled. Maybe in one of the previous options, zoom out, showing one ading to the first occurance, then another, etc...

2-b. Variation on #2, show both sides of the street - creating a street 'volume'. Maybe start with the one, add one next to it, then add one across the street, then another. Ending with 4, two on each side.

Like you said, the more real, or less abstract I think the better for each of us to understand it.
Hope these ideas help.
- Chris Derrington

[The Native Tourist]

Make the image an isometric (3-dimensional image) to illustrate the different approaches to windows and entrances.

[Jay Porter]

My suggestion is to enhance the drawing so that it shows not only the descriptive differences between urban and suburban, but also illustrates the consequences which flow from each choice -- and, particularly, addresses the question of the impact to drivers of making the street pedestrian friendly.

To accomplish this, I would suggest:

1) making the image 3-dimensional, as suggested above;

2) showing 6 identical buildings, three on each side of a 2-lane street...each which alternate between the two choices

3) showing, in both cases, smatterings of
a)people on the sidewalks,
b)cars on the street and in the lot, and
c)people walking between their cars and the buildings.

I think this would allow people looking at the GIF to easily picture themselves in each of the two environments, and get a sense for how this simple decision -- where to put the parking lot -- affects their quality of life when walking, and when driving.

The reason I think it's useful to show 6 buildings is the cumulative effect of a block where the buildings all do or do not front the street is in my experience much more compelling than the choice of any individual building.

Oh, also, I agree with restriping the parking lot to reflect a more typical case.

[Tatyana]

What is not clear in the *Urban* diagram is how the cars get from the street to the parking lot. Did you intend to say they can only access via back alley or there is a driveway along the side of the building?
I think, longer driveway to the parking for cars means pedestrians are given building access advantage over cars, and if you want to stress benefits for pedestrians, showing the driveway helps to illustrate the point.

Whatever your intentions are, however, point-to-point comparison between *Urban* and *Sub-urban* is incomplete since in latter case you've shown entrance to the parking and it's missing from the former.

Also, in case you decide not to do the perspective or isometric: to better illustrate difference between plan and elevation, could it be possible to use same "animated" change of image and to have two "flowing" projections for each scheme? As in: 1.*Suburban- plan gradually rotates and becomes an elevation 2. *Urban: same process.