I meant to bring up before about the Olive St. side of the new-construction (garage/hotel/possible res.) part of this whole gig.
From this *
video*, the Olive St. side appears to get the blank wall/utility/service treatment. Understandably, Ross Ave. gets a lot of love and with the positioning of the hotel, Harwood St. gets some activity. I can't tell what the last side has in store, but, maybe another service entry?
Anyway, the Olive St. treatment checks with chart for so much of the street. Starting at Elm and let's just head up to and end at Cedar Springs, you have nothing but parking lots, garage entrances, loading docks or drives, blank walls, narrow sidewalks with sometimes crumbling infrastructure and street furniture along it, a highway exit with no yield or stop w/faded diagonal pedestrian crossing, etc. for almost the entirety of this stretch. Sheraton is a mild, brief exception around a couple of entrances across from each other. The tracks/Cancer Survivors Plaza zone has some decent pedestrian activity who are passing through to other places nearby. Klyde Warren Park is an obvious exception, although Olive St. being open through it is another story. McKinney & Olive Tower and intersection is an exception, or will be more of one maybe, when the M&O Tower retail fills in (which they are still not in a hurry to do). The Ritz doesn't appear to be in any hurry to ever open up their fortress wall. The Cedar Springs intersection is bizarro, yet, gets rather good business-hours pedestrian activity at some points throughout the day.
The M-Line runs along so much of this uninteresting stretch of road, too. . . sometimes blocked by the rolling trash can at the Nasher sitting on the tracks, truck drivers not familiar with the service roads around an active and ambient PARK atmosphere between the service roads and blocking the box (and therefore tracks) as they travel on the North side, delivery vehicles parked on the tracks at 2000 McK., and a traffic signal that breaks often at the M & O intersection.
Just preaching to the choir. OK, all the obvious was stated. The plus side is, it still slices through some good stuff, too, fronting the perpendicular streets. Not hard to just walk around the corner and find some good things to do. So there's that.