For $4.5 million, I was expecting more. Not gratitude exactly, maybe just a little hospitality.
When taxpayers are willing to spend that kind of dough to deliver customers to your shopping center – ones who don’t require valets or even parking spaces – it seems only polite to make nice.
But Park Meadows (motto: If we wanted customers from Denver we wouldn’t have built in Douglas County in the first place) has snubbed RTD too long to start being gracious now.
When the southeast light-rail line opened in November, riders were met with signs warning “no pedestrian access” to the mall. Only after hundreds of outlaw transit riders made the 15-minute dash along the freeway across several lanes of traffic and through the sprawling parking lot to the mall did the management agree to help pay for shuttle service – if only on weekends.
The shuttle made sense. It was just a matter of time before somebody got creamed on Park Meadows Drive and ruined the ambiance.
The bus was only temporary because a pedestrian bridge at the County Line station is to be completed in 2008 and with it comes the promise of convenient access to the mall.
Or maybe not.
It seems that retrofitting a shopping center to provide transit access is a whole lot messier than it would have been to work with RTD planners from the start. So even when the fancy pedestrian bridge with the gleaming glass elevators is done, only the most intrepid transit riders are likely to venture into the cars-only zone that is Park Meadows.
Which may have been the objective all along.
After last week’s RTD meeting when the proposed pedestrian route was revealed, board member Daryl Kinton said he couldn’t help feeling that “the mall doesn’t want us. They handed out this map showing the walkway, and it’s this circuitous route around and through the parking lot. For everybody it’s annoying; but for anyone with health or mobility issues, it’s a real problem.”
Houston “Tex” Elam said the proposed route “certainly doesn’t encourage customers or transit riders to want to go there.” The director of Community Mobility Services for Centennial said the attitude of the mall managers toward transit riders is “so mean-spirited it’s hard to even talk about it.”
But marketing manager Stephanie Jackson defended the plan.
The route “actually directs pedestrians to the entrance that makes the most sense,” she said. Instead of sending them along a direct route – across the parking lot and into Nordstrom’s east entrance – the proposed walkway would meander along the east edge of the parking lot, then turn west into the mall entrance near the food court.
Jackson said it is the safest, most accessible route. Traffic management is better there, she said, and the mall entrance is open earlier and later than Nordstrom.
She’s right, of course. There really is no good way to get to the mall on light rail.
If Park Meadows’ managers had collaborated with RTD back in 1996 when the light-rail line was being planned, it wouldn’t be this way. The station could have been located conveniently for mall workers, shoppers and store owners.
Now it’s too late.
A meeting with representatives of Park Meadows, Lone Tree and RTD is scheduled today to discuss the pedestrian walkway. (Lone Tree and Park Meadows are sharing the cost of the pedestrian route.) Kinton plans to raise his concerns about the route.
Ultimately, he said, pedestrians will jaywalk their way through the parking lot no matter what the final plan looks like.
“You can design any path you want and people will still always take the shortest route,” he said.
The design may be revised, Jackson said. “We’re still kind of finessing everything.”
Stay tuned.
Incidentally, no barbed-wire fences, border enforcement or patrols by the Minutemen militia are in the plan.
Yet.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
