Month: October 2011

Charlotte Trolley to roll through new neighborhood?

The nonprofit Charlotte Trolley has won a $15,000 grant from Wells Fargo to work toward putting historic Car 85 back on track, this time through the Wesley Heights neighborhood just northwest of uptown.

The organization hopes to start another demonstration project, like the one along South Boulevard that in the 1990s ignited enthusiasm for light rail. This time, the route would be the rail line adjacent to the Stewart Creek Greenway, said Charlotte Trolley board president Greg Pappanastos. It was the site of an original line of the former Piedmont & Northern electrified passenger railroad. Charlotte Trolley is exploring how it could use that still-existing pathway.

Here’s why Charlotte Trolley’s role is more than just that of a bunch of history and rail buffs.

As I wrote in a piece for Grist.org last year:

Back in the 1980s, many of top leaders of both political parties in Charlotte knew regional transit was needed. But any suggestions for taxes to fund it were DOA at the rural-dominated state legislature, whose permission was needed. Two barriers had to fall: Convincing a conservative electorate that transit wasn’t a frill, and finding millions to build it.

Enter Charlotte Trolley, a volunteer group of rail buffs and enlightened developers who decided to restore an antique trolley car (found being used as a rental home outside Charlotte) and run it on an unused railbed near downtown. In 1996, after eight years of fundraisers, Charlotte Trolley launched a 1.8-mile ride, drawing throngs who loved the taste of old-fashioned streetcar travel. Keen-eyed developers built rail-oriented mixed-use projects, betting light rail service would follow.

Car 85, the last Charlotte streetcar to be put out to pasture in 1938, wasn’t allowed to run on the Lynx Blue Line tracks for safety reasons and was put out to pasture again. The Charlotte Area Transit System, in a budget-cutting move, scrapped the trolley service that was using replica cars.

“Their [Wells Fargo’s] support helps us pursue our mission to engage the community and put a vintage trolley back on tracks,” Pappanastos said. “We’re excited about the possibility of running historic Car 85 again, and believe we have a viable prospect for doing that on the city’s west side.”

The group will hold a “Vision Launch” on Wednesday, Nov. 2, at the Trolley Museum to celebrate the Wells Fargo grant and kick off planning and neighborhood outreach for the new line.

A reminder for rail purists: A streetcar runs in the street. A trolley runs from an overhead electric wire. Sometimes a trolley is also a streetcar. But if it doesn’t run in a street, it isn’t.

(Disclosure: Until a few months ago my husband, Frank Barrows, was on the Charlotte Trolley board, an unpaid volunteer position.)

Suburbia, dissected

Jason Griffiths writes a short essay, “Colonial Vista,” to the suburban Colonial-style house he found in a subdivision in Charlotte – a style ubiquitous in these parts. It’s part of his slide show on “Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing” on the online forum, Places.

Griffiths is an assistant professor of architecture at the Design School at Arizona State University, hence the prominence of Arizona landscapes in his slide show. He was in Charlotte a few years back, he reports, to help review work at UNC Charlotte. (Want his book? Here’s a link.)

The Colonial-style of housing, he notes, is perhaps more appropriate in North Carolina (which was, for a time, an actual colony) than other places, but, he points out the oddity that “the most abject facade of this building enjoys the most commanding view while the actual front elevation is stubbornly fixated by an abbreviated prospect of the road and the house opposite.”

What do they (the creatives) really want?

What is that big armadillo-like edifice, and will it really attract the creative class to Kansas City, Mo.? Philip Langdon of the New Urban Network poses that question in his article, “Injecting spontaneity into urban development.”

He writes: “I peered at The Atlantic’s photo of what Kansas City is building to lure the creatives, and thought for a moment I was viewing a gigantic armadillo. Oops, my mistake. The picture isn’t of an armadillo inflated to enormous size (though it certain looks like one). It’s the Kauffman Center, a $326 million performing arts facility [designed by architect Moshe Safdie] — purportedly a means for enticing talented young people to Missouri’s second-largest metropolis.

“Excuse me, but aren’t gigantic performing arts centers the sort of thing that cities were erecting thirty years ago? My understanding of the Richard Florida take on urban development is that bright young workers are less interested in vast cultural and entertainment institutions than in having access to stimulating everyday locales — places they can walk to from their workplaces or their homes.”

I hope that message from Langdon and others can get more traction in Charlotte, where building big cultural institutions draws plenty of support and attention, (and don’t get me wrong; I love the new Mint and Bechtler museums and Gantt Center uptown) but preserving “everyday locales” has gotten short shrift. The remaining walkable, everyday locales (Plaza-Central district, NoDa, Elizabeth, a few parts of Dilworth and by some measures the Q2P2 corner) have survived mostly out of neglect by large corporations and officialdom combined with strong neighborhood support.

The city even, for a time, had a plan to raze almost all the retail spots in the gentrifying Belmont neighborhood and build a suburban-style strip shopping center to replace the stores. Thank heavens that plan got scrapped in 2007 after then-Mayor Pat McCrory vetoed a 10-1 council vote. The next week the council voted 10-1 to study the proposal. (It had arisen without going through the council’s committee system.) It’s those small, human-scale retail spots that, when fixed up and cleaned up, become the spaces that neighborhood residents walk to – what Langdon termed “stimulating everyday locales.” This city needs more of them.

And finally, a short word of thanks that our new arts campus uptown doesn’t look like the Michelin Man mated with an armadillo. I don’t know that anyone has completely fathomed what it takes to attract young artistic and creative residents. Maybe, in fact, they are looking for large Dasypus novemcinctus. But somehow I doubt it.

A planning and ‘public input’ dilemma

Is it just me, or have others also been spotting an increasing trickle of  articles that might be viewed as anti-planning. Consider this one: “The false hope of comprehensive planning,” from Michael Lewyn, an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Fla., on the Planetizen.com website.

Lewyn uses the Jacksonville comprehensive plan to point out that a city plan can be a sprawl-promoter or a sprawl-fighter. The devil is in the details. Just having a comprehensive plan for your city doesn’t mean your city will necessarily grow in a prudent way. This has been one of my concerns about Charlotte and much of this metro region. The city’s plans say all kinds of wonderful things, but the underlying zoning ordinances allow much that the plans don’t call for – examples being the very suburban-style, highway-oriented retail development along North Tryon Street, which has been a designated light rail corridor since 1998.

But how can planners even hope to do a good job of listening to their communities AND promoting sensible provisions for growth, when apparently the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want to see ANY development?

Andres Duany, the visionary architect and planner who was instrumental in founding New Urbanism and in changing the way many professionals write zoning codes and transportation plans, has been pooh-poohing the idea of too much public involvement, especially when the NIMBYs carry too much weight (not traditionally a problem in development-happy Charlotte, let me add). In this piece in January’s Architect magazine he discusses the relative merits of top-down planning (more efficient) and bottom-up planning (involves people but takes a lot longer and is more expensive. Here is a counterpoint from Della Rucker, in NewGeography, who still trusts the public to know what’s best in the end.
 But what if the public really doesn’t want any development at all? A survey from The Saint Index found that 79 percent of Americans said their hometown is fine the way it is or already over-developed. Some 86 percent of suburban Americans don’t want new development in their community. The anti-development sentiment is the highest in six years of Saint Index surveys.

So if you try to involve the community and listen to what they want, do you end up with a plan that forbids growth? How smart is that? Should planners heed community wishes, even if they know what the community wants is impossible or imprudent?  If the community wants cul-de-sacs and single-family subdivisions and no retail near where they live and also hates traffic congestion (the inevitable result of spread-out development that requires you to drive everywhere, and of cul-de-sac street patterns that funnel everyone onto a few arterials), what’s a planner to do?

Duany used to say that people hate growth because for the past 50 years it’s mostly been soul-searingly ugly and has, indeed, made life more unpleasant for the neighbors. I think he’s onto something. When people today imagine “development” the image they have is  big-box strip centers, single-family subdivisions, grassy and boring office parks or apartment complexes scattered around a site like dead earthworms. No wonder they’re NIMBYs.

The challenge for planners, it seems, is first to educate people on the repercussions of their choices and then, to show them choices for other ways to develop: tree-lined urban streets, with shops and shop windows on the sidewalks, to choose one example. But the planners can’t stop there. Step Three has to be to make sure the supporting ordinances and standards require the good and disallow the bad. Without Step Three, too many plans will, as Lewyn points out, produce development that pleases neither the planners nor the NIMBYs. 

N.C.’s mayors: Who won, who’s still campaigning?

Courtesy of the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, here’s the skinny on mayoral elections so far this fall in N.C. cities:

Election results are in.  Nancy McFarlane is the new mayor of Raleigh, and Raleigh voters passed bond referendums for transportation and housing.  Cary Mayor Harold Weinbrecht and Monroe Mayor Bobby Kilgore each won re-election.  Durham Mayor Bill Bell and Fayetteville Mayor Tony Chavonne won their primaries.   Incumbent Greensboro Mayor Bill Knight will face off against City Council Member Robbie Perkins next month.
 The following mayors will stand for election on Nov. 8:  Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly, Burlington Mayor Ronnie Wall, Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton, Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, Greenville Mayor Pat Dunn, Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain, Jacksonville Mayor Sammy Phillips, Salisbury Mayor Susan Kluttz and Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo.  

N.C. a gas-tax donor state? No more

N.C policymakers for years complained justly that this is a net donor state when it comes to federal transportation taxes paid versus federal transportation money spent in the state.

A new analysis by the General Accounting Office of 2005-09, reported by Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, in “Can highway spending ever be fair?”  finds that, when looking at how much federal highway money each state gets, per dollar of gas-tax revenue that the state’s motorists pay, it turns out every state gets more federal highway aid than it is paying. Here’s a link to the GAO report.
“There’s not a state in the union where federally funded highways ‘pay for themselves,’ ” Klein writes.

I’ve reproduced a map here (via a screenshot) from the GAO report and Klein’s piece. If my count is correct, compared with other states North Carolina remains at a big disadvantage, although it gets $1.09 back for every $1 paid in.  Only five states (Texas $1.03, Arizona, $1.07, Indiana $1.07, South Carolina and New Jersey, both at $1.08) get less. Two other states (Maryland and Colorado) also get $1.09.

Klein muses on whether highway spending can ever be “fair,” in part because what’s “fair” can be construed in different ways. And his commenters point out one of many reasons that’s true: Northern states where hard freezes and salting damage the pavement will need more repair and maintenance money. (Tell that to New Jersey and Indiana.) But even if perfect fairness will always be elusive, for a state that is both geographically large as well as in the Top 10 most populous, it does seem that North Carolina has been on the losing end for too long.

Carroll Gray to leave N.Meck transportation group

DavidsonNews.net tells us former Charlotte Chamber CEO Carroll Gray has told the Lake Norman Transportation Commission he’ll leave the commission’s executive director job at the end of this year. Gray, 71, of Cornelius helped launch and lead the regional lobbying group over the past three years. He told DavidsonNews.net he has mixed emotions about the decision, “but I think it’s time to move on.”
The LNTC has been effective in getting the long-planned and long-sidetracked proposal for commuter rail service from uptown Charlotte to Davidson (and possibly Mooresville) back into the mix for the Metropolitan Transit Commission, the group that oversees the Charlotte Area Transit System.

See my earlier posts on changes afoot in the strategy for funding the Red Line:
“Charlotte transit plans due for a makeover?”
and
“New strategy for transit to North Meck”

What’s that P in APA? Hint: Not ‘process’

Journalists and planners share many interests – community wellbeing, policymaking and government, for instance – but here’s one thing they don’t share: A fascination with process. Most journalists I know get twitchy whenever people start talking about “the process” or about “creating a framework.”

Maybe we shouldn’t, because after all, the democratic process is just that. But truth is, process is tedious and all too often, an excuse for avoiding difficult or controversial decisions. Plus, it makes for boring coverage.

So it was music to the ears today to hear the national president of the American Planning Association, Raleigh’s Planning Director Mitchell Silver, tell the state planning conference of the N.C. chapter of the APA that the P in APA should not stand for Process. “Very often people find comfort in process, not planning,” he said.

His Friday morning talk, “The value of planning in the 21st century,” was a rousing pep talk aimed at inspiring planners to start planning with a capital P, using plans to express their vision and values. “Sustainability,” as a term, he said, has a shelf life, but its intent to support the economy, the environment and equity will live on because they’ve always been at the heart of the goals of planning. But planning evolves.

Fall back in love with planning, he urged the group. “This is the most exciting time to be in this profession.”

I covered his talk via Twitter. (Silver is on Twitter as well, at @Mitchell_Silver.) So rather than blather on, I’ll just offer up my Tweeting stream:

– APA Prez + RA Planning Director Mitchell Silver: The P in APA should not stand for Process.

– @Mitchell_Silver To NC planners: Fall back in love with planning. Take your comp plan out for a romantic dinner.

– This one I didn’t Tweet because I got behind. But I would have said: People who say no to density are saying we don’t want creative workers.

– China is graduating 20K planners a year.

– By 2030 NC will see 124% increase in people over 65.

– By 2015 in US 15.5 million 15.5 percent of those 65+ will live in poor transit  areas. (Corrected, via later information from Silver.)

– By 2030 US will have 22M excess single-family homes. (I.e. built but no buyers.)

– Do we still want to build “Polaroid” communities (suburban subdivisions) for a digital generation?

– If you want Gens Y and Z at your public meetings, gotta use social media.

– Wachovia Center in dntwn Raleigh = 90 times the tax value/acre of the average suburban subdivision.

Huntersville mayor’s a winner

Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain won an award Thursday from the N.C. chapter of the American Planning Association for distinguished leadership by an elected official. The group held its annual statewide planning conference in Charlotte, Wednesday-Friday. Other awards for agencies in the greater Charlotte region:

Outstanding planning award for implementation (small community): Town of Davidson for its “Circles at 30” development at Exit 30 of Interstate 77.
Outstanding Planning Award for Implementation (large community): Iredell County for its land development code.
2011 Special Theme Award for community development: Town of Davidson for its affordable housing ordinance.
2011 Special Theme Award for sustainable community planning: City of Conover, for Conover Station, and the cities of Gastonia, Belmont and Bessemer City and the Gaston Urban Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (a.k.a. GUAMPO), for “Creating Opportunities for Active Living: An Action Plan to Promote Physical Activities in the Built Environment for Gastonia-Belmont-Bessemer City.”
The Town of Davidson won honorable mention for the Outstanding Planning Award for Comprehensive Planning (small community).
Not from this region, but the statewide winners for Outstanding Planning (large community) were the City of Raleigh’s 2030 Comprehensive Plan and the City of High Point for its University Area Plan.

Charlotte pedestrians – still waiting for that plan

Wilson has one. Durham has one. Charlotte doesn’t. Yet.

Those other N.C. cities have eclipsed the state’s largest metro in this way, at least: They’ve adopted pedestrian p.lans, both in 2006, to shape the way their communities plan for people on foot as well as planning for cars.  Charlotte’s proposed pedestrian plan has lagged for years, awaiting the city’s adoption of its Urban Street Design Guidelines – which took more than eight years to adopt as policy and then to codify in city ordinances – and then the re-adoption of its updated Transportation Action Plan.
To some extent that’s a reflection of the Charlotte Department of Transportation leaders’ deciding to focus on the USDG – which faced strong opposition from a few influential developers of suburban-style projects – and to back-burner the ped plan.
Charlotte’s pedestrian advocate, Malisa Mccreedy, was one of the presenters Thursday afternoon at the state conference of the N.C. Chapter of the American Planning Association, taking place Wednesday-Friday in Charlotte. Mccreedy says the new goal is to get a Pedestrian Plan adopted by the end of 2012. And it’s worth noting that even without a pedestrian plan, the city of Charlotte has pushed ahead with stronger programs to try to ensure that pedestrians’ needs are considered along with those of motorists.
Planners from Durham and Wilson both described working with the UNC Highway Safety Research Center to analyze pedestrian-auto collisions. After the analysis, both cities made a top priority of reducing child pedestrian accidents. Durham’s Dale McKeel said his city has the highest rate of child pedestrian accidents per capita in the state.
Both also made the No. 2 priority to raise drivers’ awareness of pedestrians and drivers’ compliance with traffic laws.  In other words, both education and enforcement of the laws are significant.