Downtown and the malls

With a lot of street trees and old buildings downtown Bellingham has a friendly feel. 

Downtown is in transition. Much of Bellingham's retailing sprawls out along the freeway while the downtown is starting to get more offices, housing and currently a lot of empty spaces. 

Mall the moon?

Also pictured is a parking lot near some malls.  The space needs for parking has contributed to Bellingham's retail sprawl.  If the automobile could be folded up and placed in one's pocket, when not in use, the space wouldn't have to be devoted to parking and businesses could be closer together; like in the old downtowns.

A nice transit terminal in downtown Bellingham serves as a hub for Whatcom County transit buses. One can go anywhere the bus goes for only 50 cents. Buses can even carry up to two bikes. While the system is quite affordable, most people still drive their cars. Some complain that bus service is very limited at night. Like most cities, the majority of people commute by car and traffic keeps getting worse. Some of Whatcom County's unincorporated areas are growing faster than Bellingham and attempts to control urban sprawl run into "property rights" arguments. There are a lot of people concerned about preserving the environment, but as in most places, it seems like everyone thinks it's the "other guy" that is causing all the problems.

Photo shows old bike rack.  Since then a new and much better style of rack has been installed on the buses.

This is the message I would put on a billboard in Bellingham's Meridian St. area, if I had the money to rent billboard space and if anyone would rent it to me for this kind of message.  Billboard would say, "Welcome to the sprawling Meridian St. Area."  "For a taste of Los Angeles in Bellingham."

But the moon was too far from the freeway

Merchants in the Bellis Fair neighborhood, in Bellingham, seem to do their planning with only two factors in mind. One factor is parking space and the other factor is freeway access.

I am convinced that many of those merchants decided, at first, to locate their businesses on the moon because of its undeveloped parking space, but changed their minds when they discovered how far the moon is from the freeway.

With parking and freeway access considered so important, pedestrian circulation to and around shopping areas gets neglected. Meridian is one of the few major streets in the city with no sidewalks along much of its length. Poor pedestrian circulation between businesses destroys the sense of "one-stop shopping." People should be able to find a wide selection of goods within walking reach from one-stop, so they don't have to keep restarting their cars and fighting traffic between errands.

The Meridian neighborhood, with its busy streets and sprawling parking lots, does a poor job of providing one-stop experience.

Bellingham's retailing is sprawling and unfocused so the city is starting to resemble Los Angeles. When Bellis Fair is built, it will try to counteract the sprawl problem by putting a large selection of business in one mall. This might help some, but it would be a lot better if the large areas of business around the mallwere better tied to the mall with such things as better walk ways and possibly an overpass across Meridian.