1. Downtown Waynesboro and Walmart
I once witnessed a conversation between Waynesboro, VA's Director of Planning Michael Barnes and a citizen. The citizen asserted that at Walmart, there was always lots of parking right in front of the store, whereas you had to park and walk if you went downtown. He responded something to the effect of: "I bet if you drew a line from the middle of the Walmart parking lot to the door, walked around the store, checked out, and walked back to the car, you'd have gone farther than if you parked in Constitution Park lot [a parking lot in downtown Waynesboro that is never full] and visited every store on the 300 block of Main Street."
He was absolutely correct. The sense we have of space while in a vehicle is radically different from the sense of space we have as a pedestrian. Walkable places have an entirely different scale - a density of connections and destinations that provide a full city experience within a very short physical distance - often a quarter to a half mile (or a five to ten minute walk). Automobile-oriented places provide the same grid of connections and destinations at a dramatically expanded scale. The time distance is still the same - everything is accessible in five to ten minutes. But that means something different in terms of space - more like five miles than a half mile.
There's no particular political agenda behind this post except to illustrate the difference in scale that exists between places that were meant to be experienced on foot and places meant to be experienced by car. The stores that are superimposed over the main street blocks are at the exact same scale.
2. Staunton (with Walmart and Lowes)
4. Winchester's pedestrian mall (with both Winchester Walmarts)
5. Harrisonburg's Court Square (with the townie Walmart)
6. Warrenton (Walmart and Home Depot)
7. Danville
8. Leesburg (Target, Costco, and Dockers)
9. Norfolk's Granby Street (you can also see Scope and MacArthur Mall), with the Battlefield Walmart, Sam's Club, and Garden Ridge - I almost stuck Kohl's in too because its parking lot is so huge when put together with the others.
10. Culpeper - Davis and Main Streets at the Amtrak station.
