I share your concern that without deliberate pedestrian crossings and signalization, Davol St could end up being a barrier that pedestrians find difficult or unpleasant to permeate. There’s no significant extension of the adjacent street grid into the corridor of redevelopment parcels, and that would have been a way to bring average vehicle speeds down and introduce more opportunities for pedestrian crossings.It's ambitious in scale, not so much in content.
My big question is how serious they are about "walkability." Particularly between President Avenue and Brightman St. where there appear to be no crosswalks, no signals, and Davol St. NB/SB are 2 lanes of one way traffic.
The street alignment as rendered largely in place already as the 79 project that created it nears completion. And in my experience, it's a speedway funneling traffic from the Braga Bridge/Battleship area to the highway portion of Route 79 that begins around the Veteran's Memorial Bridge. Without adding additional several controlled pedestrian crossings along that stretch, it's not going to be "walkable" at all. It'll just be another walled off neighborhood.
Without cross-streets, Davol St visibly frames the redevelopment parcels and frames them as a standalone corridor. The parcels themselves are then drawn to be much larger than the average lot size you see on adjacent neighborhood streets.
I’m not especially bothered by the massing of the buildings shown on the conceptual plans, but the massing PLUS the lack of street grid extension is probably going limit how well the new development integrates into its surroundings.