Re: Market with active rail line running straight through it.
Ken Johnson
> It could also be due to lack of real estate (well, affordable real
> estate anyway) for these people to set up shop in. I doubt
> they want to have a train run through their shops, but they
> have to do what they have to do.
In the 1970s pedestrianised city centres enjoyed a brief vogue. I was
in "Motorway Mad" Newcastle upon Tyne at the time. While motorways
were built over Jesmond, Sandyford and the Town Moor at one end of the
city, Grey Street and Blackett Street at the other end were paved
over. Local shops complained about having no "passing trade," that is,
the shopkeepers were persuaded that much of their trade came from the
passing motor traffic. This of course was nonsense, like everything
the motoring lobby ever says: the passing motor traffic couldn't have
parked at the kerb outside the shops if it had wanted to: 100% of the
people entering the shops arrived on foot, but that's not the point.
In the late 1970s construction began of the Tyne and Wear Metro, a
local underground and suburban railway network. Here was the solution
to the shopkeepers' problem. Instead of burrowing underground, the
metro should have run down the paved streets. Then the shopkeepers
should have built extensions to their shops bringing their shop
windows and doorways within inches of the moving trains. If nothing
else, it would allow passengers to see clearly what the shopkeepers
had to offer.
Curiously enough, the reason the council didn't pedestrianise the
whole city centre was that the traffic would add "excitement." (I
remember this distinctly from a rather silly brochure they printed in
the 1960s, when Desperate Dan was their chief executive.) Well, if
you're a woman with a pushchair and a child and two or three heavy
bags of shopping, you're certainly in need of a bit of excitement.
Imagine how exciting it is to stagger across the road through four
lanes of moving traffic. A Metro train flattening you and your
shopping against a shop window would be even more exciting than that.
Ken Johnson