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The apartments and condos in the Rio Vista West neighborhood in Mission Valley don’t live up to the development’s walkable-neighborhood billing, says a resident of the neighborhood in this article, posted on urban planning website Planetizen.com.
Environmental journalist Diane DeRubertis penned the piece, lamenting the neighborhood’s latent discouragement of pedestrians:
For starters, Rio Vista West is enclosed by huge, multi-lane thoroughfares, which feed rapidly-flowing traffic to Mission Valley’s freeways and malls. Compounding the problem is Rio Vista’s main retail component – a big box shopping center set upon acres of asphalt surface parking.
The immediate surroundings are also scaled for cars, not people, including an expanding 1960’s-era mall and a new office park. Pedestrians who venture into the adjacent areas not only face daunting intersections, but also find themselves lost among parking lots and traffic. As a result, the Rio Vista West development is not walkable beyond its own driveways.
The piece is worth a read, and those commenting in the thread beneath it get into an interesting discussion of the San Diego City of Villages plan (their sense: on the whole, it has failed) and a discussion of whether the Little Italy neighborhood is a successful model.