Wednesday, March 25, 2015

The case for Parklets on Lake Avenue in the little City of Lake Worth

Do you know what a "parklet" is? This is what Wikipedia has on parklets.
Picture of a "parklet" from the Wikipedia article cited.
Here from an article in Planetizen:

The study she [Emily Badger] writes about is the work of the University City District of Philadelphia, "a neighborhood development organization that sent interns out in the spring and summer of 2013 to exhaustively record what happened after a half-dozen of these tiny parks were placed."
     The result: a lot more people packed into these spaces than could ever be accommodated by a single car. [emphasis added]
     Not all of these people were spending money at these nearby businesses (that's a good sign — it means that people recognized they could treat these spaces as public parks and not private outdoor restaurants). But the sales data shared by these businesses suggests that the extra foot traffic — and the outdoor attraction — was a boon for business, even when it came at the expense of a little parking.
The takeaway is that the study provides additional evidence "that a parking spot isn't always the best use of roadside real estate, although we often treat it as such," writes Badger.

Here is an article by Eliot Kleinberg about parklets in West Palm Beach, our neighbor to the north. Lake Ave, of course, is a State Road managed by FDOT and we all know how open FDOT is to new ideas. However it's something to think about; possibly in other areas of the City.