College Park is fine now and will be fine after the development.
"Downtown" College Park is very walkable, and prone to the occassional riot. There is the University of Maryland which is quite walkable and there are two bicycle trails going through the area.
The development could possibly link the southern College Park commerical strip with the middle-ish Berwyn strip by making use of an empty space that isn't used much by students (except as a cut thru). The northern end (north of Greenbelt Rd) is just too spread out.... and needs sidewalks... and needs to have more crosswalks before it can come anywhere near being walkable.
Could Downtown Silver Spring become an example for the new College Park? Should it? Check it out: Just Up The Pike.
One to avoid, I hope... see my comments in the Just Up the Pike entry. Also see http://www.arch.umd.edu/URSP/
Res...lver_Spring.pdf
I'm going to have to disagree with Mari.
I lived on campus for a while and was very active in the area for years.
I find the area to be only marginally conducive to foot traffic. Especially with the crazyness of Rt.1 right there. You never know when you're going to be run over. The restaurants are only ok (instead of great) and the retail is a joke (except for the comic shop, but I'm kinda partial to it. 
). And the fact that there's no grocery store there? That's simply a travesty.
I hope that putting stuff in East Campus makes a vibrant community instead of the waste of the support buildings and the crappyness that is Leonardstown. They could use a good grocery store, a few good restaurants of all price ranges (from a nice place to take your date to "I've got $1.95 in my pocket and I'm hungry and am sick and tired of eating ramen"), some really good retail (books, games, gifts, perhaps a thrift store/vintage clothing store type place), a coffeeshop or 3 (independent, of course), and a few bars that don't cater to the frat & frat-like crowd (and, of course, a few that do. I mean, frat row is right there).
Commenting by HaloScan
