The Inimitable Tiff

What’s “striking,” in the view of the authors, is that retail activity in some of the walkable cores was up to four times greater than it should have been, based on the population of the district itself. That means that the commercial cores of walkable districts are attracting a wide sphere of merchants, including those from outside the immediate neighborhood. The findings challenge the conventional wisdom that street geometry facilitates walkable districts; on the contrary, commercial density may play a larger role:

The inwardly focused street geometry of [walkable] centres may facilitate walking, but a more important factor is the concentration of business activity in the compact commercial core in the centre.