James Gittemeier sees the future at a particular point on Woodland Avenue.”When we counted it, it’s eight hundred to a thousand people a day are walking on that trail going to destinations,” said Gittemeier, principal planner for the Duluth-Superior Metropolitan Interstate Council.He was talking about the pedestrian foot path from the campus of the University of Minnesota Duluth to the BlueStone housing and retail development. A well-marked crosswalk, controlled by traffic signals, bridges heavily traveled Woodland Avenue to connect the two where a drive enters the shopping area.To be successful, the BlueStone development needed more than the traffic on Woodland Avenue, Gittemeier said; it needed the UMD population. That happened, but not in the conventional way.”In the old paradigm they would have said we absolutely need a road going to UMD because we need people to drive from those apartments and those businesses into UMD and back,” he said. “(Instead), the design is about people biking and walking between those two.”
Source: Group seeks more walkable Duluth | Duluth News Tribune