Curbed LA got the scoop yesterday and the news has spread across the tech blogs: it looks like Apple is planning on building a fancy new retail store on the Third Street Promenade – just one block away from the future Colorado/4th Expo Line Station.
It’s not confirmed, but an application to the Santa Monica Planning Commission for the parcel on 3rd Street near Santa Monica Boulevard (previously a Borders bookstore) appeared with renderings (above) that look unmistakably like an Apple Store.
In addition to the store’s proximity to the planned Expo station, here’s another clue that this Apple Store will be transit-oriented: the application mentions a $100/month transit subsidy and a $20/month bike subsidy for full time employees who get to work using transit alternatives.
The new store would only be two blocks from the current Apple Store on the Promenade, but that makes it two blocks closer to the future Expo Station. Apple has not been one to shy away from transit – in fact the company spent $4 million to renovate a Chicago subway station near one of their retail stores.
There are currently 10 Apple Stores in the L.A. area and the only one that’s accessible by rail is the store in Old Town Pasadena – it’s about four blocks from the Memorial Park Gold Line Station.
San Francisco survived the closing of the Embarcadero Freeway. There was all this gloom about the amount of traffic that was going to pile on the streets surrounding the freeway with its closure. It never materialized. Im not saying its the same case here but I have a feeling that with Expo in Colorado the inconvenienced car traffic will shift to other modes, such as bicycles and transit that intersection will not be as disastrous as our intuition my lead us to believe.
Here is a video documenting the Embarcadero closure in SF
http://www.streetfilms.org/lessons-from-san-francisco/