Suburban Office Parks Increasingly Obsolete; Businesses Choose Walkable Areas
I don&#x27;t understand why they make office parks so overtly pedestrian unfriendly -- I worked in an office park for a while, there were sidewalks along the front of our building, which ended abruptly just after the driveways. The building next door had the same thing - sidewalks to nowhere that never connected to anything.<p>There was a pretty decent deli in the building behind ours, but rather than having a convenient walkway, there was a fence between the two properties, so reaching it meant taking the long way around 2 parking lots. The building across the street had a downstairs area that used to be another deli&#x2F;coffee shop, but at one point but when rents went up, the owner couldn&#x27;t afford rent and closed, but it had been sitting vacant for around 3+ years by the time I worked there.<p>The roads in the office park had relatively narrow lanes with wide 20 foot green medians - I suppose the green grass in the medians looked nice, but the narrow lanes meant that bike riding was pretty dicey, there was not really enough room for cars to pass cyclists, and the 40mph speed limit meant that cars traveled at 45 - 50mph, making biking much more dangerous than it needed to be.<p>They had a shuttle to the nearest train station, but it ran on a fixed schedule that didn&#x27;t even try to sync up with the train schedule, which led to 20 - 40 minute delays while waiting for the shuttle on the way to work or waiting for the train home. I suspect that the management was either required to run the shuttle or got a grant for it, and only ran it because they had to, not to provide a service to workers.<p>My company moved out of the office park as soon as they had enough money to rent space downtown.<p>It wouldn&#x27;t take too many changes to make office parks more &quot;livable&quot; - add sidewalks, bike lanes, encourage retail&#x2F;restaurants with lower rents.