Westgate Shopping Center — Attraction in Fairview Park

This place's parking lot was clearly designed by intoxicated furry primates. Coming in the main driveway from Center Ridge via left turn, you cannot legally go straight at the first "intersection" in the lot because of the solid line (which means "do not cross"). HATE having to get back into my vehicle for personal safety to get from one shop to another but the sidewalks and "crosswalks" are utterly stupidly laid out, they clearly only did enough pedestrian "planning" to satisfy the briefest of glances to appearance. I enter/exit via w.210 almost exclusively (it's stupidly designed but not nearly as bad as the Center Ridge entrance) and STILL have had many near-miss accidents with inattentive drivers or seen traffic backed up due to not enough space given for turn lanes (exiting to 210 can be an adventure, the line of cars wanting to make the left out is often 10x the volume of cars making a right turn out, but there's only enough space in the left turn lane for about 4 cars - meaning that even though it's legal to turn right on red, you're going to be stuck there for a while waiting for the folks that are waiting for the left turn lane's green-light availability... it's taken up to 4 light changes during the holiday season for me and that's WITH avoiding the place unless there's no other reasonable option). Not worth the bother, I often drive ~3x as far to go to the same stores at Great Northern or Avon Commons instead just to avoid the parking lot...

A lot to take in- and quite a few staples- like Target, Marshall's and Five Below, Kohls Home Depot Starbucks and fancy Applebee's (also Chick-fil-A if you don't mind the bigotry- and super high salt content) Books-a-million makes me a happy camper- because book stores are rarer than a shiny Umbreon. Little gems like Dolce Wraps (crazy good Mediterranean wraps and bowls) pop up between the doctors offices and phone stores- basically it's a middle class American casserole in plaza form. The one major demerit to me is the walkability... Nestled up to a highschool- so... decent crowd of non-drivers... but basically no crosswalks, or sidewalks except between stores on their little...

Dolce Wraps is the only reason I gave Westgate 3 stars rather than 2. Otherwise, it's a miserable ocean of parking lots that make it absolutely impossible to walk from one store to another. This should be a centralized location for gathering members of the community. Instead, it's every automobile for itself navigating to the stores they need to get in and out of as soon as possible. It's architectural layouts like this that do no favors for the lack of community suburban America suffers from.

All that said, and it only gets worse when you consider the fact they tore down an indoor shopping mall (a place where people could actually walk, talk, and hang out) to build...