Month: December 2011

Why Charlotte needs that ‘noose’ study

As expected, the Charlotte City Council on Monday approved the measure to allow a study of the uptown loop and all its interchanges. As I wrote in Time to neuter that noose around uptown Charlotte? the idea to put a cap onto part of Interstate 277 (leaving the highway there, but creating usable space above it) has been proposed since at least 1997.

During discussions for the Center City 2020 Vision Plan, the idea was broached of converting the section of the loop at the north end of uptown into a boulevard, although the final plan only recommended further study.

I checked with Charlotte Department of Transportation’s manager of planning and design, Norm Steinman, about the I-277/I-77 study. He pointed out that the study – which might or might not end up making recommendations for a freeway cap or boulevardization – is needed for a more essential reason. It’s been at least 40 years since the I-277 loop was designed, with its early alignment concepts more than 50 years old. “Obviously,” he said in an email, “a lot of growth has happened since then.” The NCDOT and the Federal Highway Administration essentially have said no more changes can happen to any of the I-277 interchanges without a study.

“For the first time in 50 years we’re taking a look at what should be done,” Steinman told me.

I have in my possession a copy of the 1960 master highway transportation plan for the city of Charlotte, prepared by Wilbur Smith and Associates. It shows the route for I-77 and for a loop around uptown a lot like what eventually opened in the 1980s. (It also shows the Independence Boulevard Freeway, which remains unfinished. Gee.)

Atop this blog is a not-great-quality cellphone photo of that map. Notice how similar it looks to today’s configuration. The study is dated April 1960, so the designs for I-277 must be more than 50 years old. Goodness knows how old the original concept is.

Another highway-street design tidbit: Monday night the council also OK’d a “roadway classification study” for the Brookshire Boulevard and W.T. Harris Boulevard. This is deep in the weeds of transportation policy, but it could be potentially significant. The classification for roadways affects lane widths, speed limits and whether, for instance, they’d have bicycle lanes and sidewalks, which aren’t appropriate along a freeway. The study is necessary, the agenda says, because these two roadways today contain a variety of different roadway classifications, and “are being affected by discrete land development and transportation investment decisions.”


And, let me add, both are high-volume city corridors that, today, look like highways but cut through neighborhood and commercial areas that maybe would be healthier if they weren’t next to freeway-style highways?  But that’s just me ….

The huge significance of the Red Line proposal

MOORESVILLE – “Revolutionary is not too strong a word for plans being laid out today to a room full of government officials, consultants and interested laypeople. We’re at a “summit” to discuss ideas for reviving a long-stalled proposal to build a commuter rail line to Iredell County.

For starters, the plan involves regional cooperation. Second, the current public money crunch has forced a creative new way of thinking about transportation financing.

Even for a region that’s had plenty of regional “discussions” for decades, what’s being proposed is a major leap forward for working across county boundaries. The complicated proposal depends, in part, on seven governmental bodies agreeing to form a new legal entity, called a joint powers authority. Members would be Mecklenburg and Iredell counties, and Charlotte, Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson and Mooresville.(The JPA wouldn’t have taxing authority.)

Not since the great Mecklenburg annexation/spheres of influence agreements of the 1980s and the formation of the Mecklenburg-only Metropolitan Transit Commission in the 1990s have so many local governments been asked to come to a formal, legal agreement of this sort. And this time the agreement must cross county lines. That’s a rare proposition around here, where crossing the county line can put you into a place with an entirely different political culture, and where most of the counties outside Mecklenburg harbor, if not fear, then at least wariness of Charlotte’s behemoth footprint.

But if there’s to be any hope of prudently guiding this huge and sprawling metro region away from financially unsupportable growth, it’s going to have to come with a large dose of inter-county cooperation. The choices at hand are these: Cooperate, and continue to progress? Or maintain geographic silos and find the region bypassed by other, more cooperative metro regions?

Viewed that way, what happens to the Red Line proposal could well be a harbinger of the region’s future.

The other reason today’s summit and the Red Line plan carries major significance is this: For the first time since the 1998 transit sales tax campaign, the MTC and member governments are putting on their thinking caps about financing.

Here’s a link to the slide show presentation Tuesday.

Until now, most people here pretty much figured transportation money – including roads, not just transit – would eternally flow down from the feds and the state. For transit, you’d also add in the local revenue stream from the half-cent sales tax, collected only in Mecklenburg. (Individual cities, of course, also use local tax money for local street projects that aren’t part of the vast state road network.)

Even before the 2008 financial crash, it was starting to look as if the MTC couldn’t build out its five-corridor plan in 25 years without more money than it could expect from the half-cent sales tax and expected state and federal funds. Since then, the recession and continuing high unemployment have battered the sales tax revenue. Until a year ago the MTC appeared to believe it had few options beyond delaying transit construction for decades, pushing for a politically unlikely sales tax increase or passively hoping the sales tax revived.

Finally, with help from the N.C. Department of Transportation and some savvy consultants, it has gotten smarter and more creative about finding money. They have looked around the country at other metro areas that are building transit systems. Two important words arose: Value capture.

That means recognizing that building infrastructure such as highways and transit lines makes nearby property more valuable.  (It’s why land speculators like to buy property 20 years before the state highway goes through.) Instead of letting public spending enrich private landowners with little monetary benefit to the public, why not “capture” some of that increased value for public purposes?

A value-capture set-up would use some of the new, higher tax revenues from the now-more-valuable property to pay off bonds sold to build those same infrastructure improvements. The Washington Metro, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit System and the Portland, Ore., streetcar system have all used value capture in their construction.

The Red Line plan proposes two value-capture techniques. One is tax-increment financing (TIF) – using some of the expected higher property taxes to pay off bonds.  Another is a special assessment district, formed when a majority of the income-producing property owners (i.e. not owner-occupied residential homes) along the Red Line rail line agree to an extra property tax (.75 per $100 in assessed property value is what’s been proposed).  Most of that tax revenue would help fund construction, but 25 percent would go to the general fund of the local governments.

The proposals laid out today must undergo weeks of examination and discussion among elected officials before any decisions. And nothing is certain. For instance, Iredell County is a key player, yet not one Iredell County commissioner was at today’s meeting in Mooresville.  All other affected elected bodies had representatives in the room.  What does that mean for the proposal’s chances?

But even if the proposal ultimately fails, the precedents it’s setting, in pushing for smarter transit financing and in pushing for cross-county cooperation, will have far-reaching resonance.

Time to neuter that noose around uptown Charlotte?

Is Charlotte finally making a move toward taming the uptown noose – I mean, the uptown loop? The freeway encircling uptown, made up of Interstate 277 and a section of Interstate 77, strangles uptown, eliminating easy pedestrian and bicycle connections and creating bottlenecks for traffic flow into and out of the center city.

It was Feb. 15, 1997, (but who’s counting?) when I first heard the idea to cap the below-grade section of I-277 between South End and the south part of the center city. The idea keeps being proposed, and being dismissed as too expensive, or too difficult. But it’s a great idea that deserves serious study.

Now, at last, something may be happening. The Charlotte City Council tonight is supposed to vote on an agreement with the N.C. Department of Transportation to launch a study of the whole uptown freeway loop. Here’s a link to the city council agenda. Go to agenda page 19.

Despite misgivings, capping a freeway, or more precisely, sending it through a tunnel, is comparatively inexpensive and has been done in many other cities. It’s neither revolutionary nor extreme.  It is NOT as expensive as digging a tunnel, a la Big Dig in Boston. The digging took place years ago, before I-277 opened in the 1980s.

Other cities are going further, pushing to turn old freeways into high-volume boulevards, which can move plenty of traffic but are designed so that shops, restaurants, housing and workplaces can grow along their sidewalks. The classic example of a high-volume boulevard is the Champs Elysees in Paris. Here’s a list of other projects, some still in planning phases.


Uptown needs better connections to neighborhoods around it, and this includes street connections. If you ever drive in from south Charlotte on a weekday morning you’ll probably hit a tie-up on Providence Road as it nears uptown, and on Third-Fourth streets  or Seventh Street. You may wish longingly for more connecting streets into uptown, which would divert some of the traffic load onto those other streets. (Morehead usually isn’t as crowded, nor is Stonewall, but they apparently are too far from the center of uptown to get as much of the traffic load.) We could use more connections via Second (MLK Boulevard), Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth streets, but I-277 and its spaghetti bowl interchanges block those possibilities.

Back to the freeway cap: I know the date was Feb. 15, 1997, because I first heard the idea at an all-day workshop organized by the old Charlotte Urban Forum public interest group. Open to the public, the event was to draw up possibilities for redesigning uptown. The impetus was an ill-considered plan to build a new arena uptown (that part was OK) and “development,” drawings for which resembled a suburban shopping mall plopped into the city.

The workshop had no official purpose, but we did get then-Mayor Pat McCrory to drop by, as well as some planning commission officials (the commission was one of the sponsors) and some of the developers and uptown boosters calling themselves 24-Uptown Partners. The Partners’ goal was to build that arena and shopping center-esque “entertainment complex” – well-intended but clumsily suburban in its proposed execution.
 In order to write the preceding paragraph, I looked back at the 1997 articles I wrote for the Charlotte Observer and spotted some interesting notes of what had been proposed at that workshop. How about the idea of a NASCAR museum? Hmmm. That may fall in the category of “be careful what you wish for., because you may get it.” The list contains so many projects that were built in the next 10 years that in hindsight I wonder how many of the architects and developers there already knew what they were planning?

Among the other discussion topics were, and I warn you that these will sound familiar:
• Put more housing uptown.
• Mix uses, not just on the same block, but within a building, so that the vacant areas of uptown fill with five- or six-story buildings with retail space on the street, offices above, and housing above that.
• Expand the trolley system.

But here’s a list of some of the ideas that, at the time, I characterized as not among the predictable ones:

• Bury I-277 where it crosses South Tryon and fill the land created atop it with mixed-use, five-or six-story buildings.
• A NASCAR Museum next to the NFL stadium, with condos topping the museum. [The NASCAR Hall of Fame opened on Brevard Street in 2010, and has drawn far fewer visitors than projected, losing money.]

• Put housing back into Second Ward, where the old Brooklyn neighborhood was demolished for urban renewal. [A development deal to do this stalled after the crash of 2008.]
• Move the Amtrak station from North Tryon to West Trade. [This is in N.C. DOT rail plans.]• Put a convention hotel next to I-277. [Done.]
• Convert the old convention center to a museum or city market. [Old convention center was demolished to build the EpiCentre, a slightly more urban-style entertainment complex than was envisioned in 1997. It’s tied up in an acrimonious bankruptcy case.]• Rehabilitate the Carolina Theatre.[Not done. But not demolished, either.]
• Concentrate retail on South Tryon Street. [Other than art museum gift shops, little retail beyond restaurants has come to South Tryon Street.]
• Build a zoo. [Insert quip of your choice here.]

In looking at my 1997 articles I noticed that other sponsors of the workshop were the UNC Charlotte College of Architecture, the Charlotte chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, my current employer.

Charlotte transit plan makeover goes beyond cosmetic surgery

The stalled-for-years proposal to build a commuter rail line from downtown Charlotte north to the booming suburban towns of Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson and Mooresville is getting a significant makeover, not just cosmetic surgery. The state and local officials involved are looking to find funding with freight-oriented development, a sort of cousin to the more widely recognized transit-oriented development (a.k.a. TOD).

The project has been stalled because it hasn’t qualified for federal funding, which typically pays half the cost of a transit line. After years of patiently sitting by, towns in northern Mecklenburg County and Mooresville in Iredell County formed the Lake Norman Transportation Commission, which succeeded in kick-starting a fresh look at the so-called Red Line (which honors the Davidson College school color).

A Wednesday meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Commission heard a detailed presentation of the financing plans. I couldn’t make it, but here are several looks at the presentation: The Charlotte Business Journal’s Erik Spanberg “Red Line rolls toward 2012 vote”  and DavidsonNews.net/CorneliusNews.net’s Christina Ritchie Rogers’ “Homeowners won’t see tax hike in Red Line plans, consultants say.”

Here’s a link to the various presentations and handouts from the MTC meeting.

Nothing’s been decided yet, of course. The Lake Norman Transportation Commission will hold a four-hour summit on the proposal Dec. 13 in Mooresville (10 a.m.-2 p.m. at the Charles Mack Citizens Center, 215 N. Main St.).

Then the different governments, who’d have to agree to create a joint powers authority, must study the proposal and decide whether to opt in. From my observations, I’d predict Charlotte, Mecklenburg County and the Mecklenburg towns are on board. The trickier discussions will be in Mooresville and Iredell County. Although many in Mooresville have favored the transit idea, Iredell County commissioners have traditionally been wary of anything that might be viewed as a tax increase.

This proposal would create a sort of self-imposed tax assessment on owners of income-producing property (that is, not residential property) along the line. A part of the tax revenue from the new development would be used to help pay the costs of the rail construction. A portion of the new tax revenue generated from rail-related development would go to local general funds. This proposal would create a sort of self-imposed tax increase on property owners along the line, although it would send a proportion of those extra revenues into local general funds. (2:50 p.m.: Wording refinement on details of the proposal.)

Adding the freight proposal, which takes advantage of a national boom in freight rail fed by rising gas prices rise and freeway congestion, makes the Red Line plan more clearly an economic development maneuver. Luring freight-oriented industry might be a strategy Iredell leaders can be comfortable with, as opposed to simply building a commuter rail line that will draw more Charlotte-bound workers, which will bring homes and children needing county-funded services.

Like the $5 million regional HUD planning grant, the Red Line joint powers authority proposal is one more example of the need to treat the Charlotte region as more than a disconnected set of individual governments, but as, well, a region.