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bingo. This is precisely correct.

Additionally to all of this the university itself is the biggest competitor to dollars that Main Street seeks. There are so many offerings on campus to students that unless wanting something specific, or going drinking, the 8,902 population of students just next door has little need to regularly use Main Street businesses.

Add that to the decentralized land-use that Blacksburg follows and you have a recipe for bankrupting businesses at the core. They are seeing the short term development dollars and not the long term redevelopment costs of such a strategy.

VTInferno asks "what's the solution?". Blacksburg needs to do 2 things: 1) Grow some balls, and 2) make some townies rich and piss off a whole lot of others.

As benw92 suggests downtown is not planned to be a car centric community. It is meant to be a small town main street. Because of the reasons he and I listed Main Street simply cannot compete. It has little to offer other than food and beverage, and even those will struggle.

Here is my aggressive but necessary solution that I have titled: BLACKSBURG PROGRESS 2020

The point here is to create density, centralization and a strong commercial footprint that works for walking and driving. Classic TOD (transit oriented design).

1. A legit Shopping Mall destination in downtown Bburg with Hotel. This entire block should be built with it's own basement level or multi-story parking structure. Density here will increase dramatically but is important so that people are drawn north to south. Creating the prototypical dumbbell shape for commercial success. This shopping mall will have well known fashion brands, supermarket, movie theater, some big box store (like a target or something) included within, as well as nice plaza space and/or rooftop parks for leisure.
2. High Density Mixed-Use Development along Progress Street for 2 blocks. This will include street frontage commercial, with 10 - 15 floors of apartments above for rent. Always add to daily pop when trying to revitalize an area.
3. Centralized Parking Lots along Progress Street that will serve as feeders for Main Street as well as additional gameday parking. These can be built up into structures later if necessary.
4. Pedestrianized Main Street Commercial Core: This will be controversial but I believe that pedestrianizing the core of Main Street will help it tremendously. It will of course still be used for emergency access but this will allow f&b to breakout into it's middle for outdoor dining and night time drinking. On the weekends a farmers market/homemade crafts type of thing could fill the street, as well as mixing in various festivals and events throughout the year.

Which means that Progress Street needs to now live up to it's name and deliver on some tangible progress. Thru traffic will divert to Progress and it will feed back to Main Street after the Pedestrianized Core. I forgot to draw the line but I think there could easily be a North-South linear park walk in the center of the blocks between Main and Progress. Once this plan happens you will see the commercial frontage where Taco Bell and north along Main increase density because the value will be too high to waste that much space as they currently do.

This will make those that own land here quite wealthy and those private home owners that own land adjacent to likely be at odds with the plan. But it will save Main Street making it a destination for centralized and walkable living.

I believe something like this would be successful. I would have to really get into it, run the numbers as a development feasibility but I have used variations of this successfully in several countries.