Month: January 2012

New transit rules from the feds, part II

John Muth, chief development officer for the Charlotte Area Transit System confirms that yes, as I speculated in “New transit rules from the feds” yesterday, the rules changes being proposed by the Federal Transit Administration do “cover how fixed guideway projects such as commuter rail, light rail, and bus rapid transit are evaluated for possible federal funding.”  He said in an email that he hadn’t yet reviewed the notice of proposed rule-making but will do so.

“We will be using most of the time between now and the March 26th deadline to review the guidance, compare notes with others in the industry, and prepare our comments,” Muth reports.
The latest news on the Red Line proposal is that the consultants are saying the letter from Norfolk Southern railway is not the final word on the project. Here’s a report from DavidsonNews.net.
Interesting tidbit inside that last link: Note that on Feb. 8, Randall O’Toole from the conservative/libertarian Cato Institute is giving a presentation and analysis of the Red Line plan at 9 a.m. at Cornelius Town Hall. That’s, er, interesting.

New transit rules from the feds

We’ve been waiting months for the Federal Transit Administration to pop out with some supposed new guidelines for how the FTA will evaluate its transit projects. Is this it? “FTA proposes New Starts streamline,” from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s official blog, Fast Lane, says proposed new rules “will speed up the New Starts process and focus more on transit options that fit local needs.”

Here’s the press release.

I’m checking with CATS folks to see if the proposed changes might, for instance, help the proposed Red Line commuter rail to north Mecklenburg (and maybe Iredell but that’s iffy), compete for federal funds. Currently it does not. Commuter rail projects, in general, have not met the FTA’s standards for cost-effectiveness. That’s the big reason CATS and the N.C. Department of Transportation and the Red Line task force have created the idea of pairing commuter rail with freight rail-oriented development. 

And by the way, the fact that Norfolk Southern says freight and commuter rail are incompatible may not mean the railroad is not willing to partner. Or it may.  It’s worth remembering that the railroads have a reputation for driving a very hard bargain. Or being great negotiators, if you want to put it another way.
 

Grid love: NYC’s brutal 1811 plan survives, adapts

Drawing from New York’s earliest years shows now-leveled hills

NEW YORK – It brutally assaulted the land’s natural features. It rejected contemporary ideals of strong city planning in favor of helping business and real estate interests. Its disrespect for existing property lines and uses would be reviled today as government overreach.

In 1811, a three-man commission created and imposed a relentless street grid onto almost all of Manhattan’s then-undeveloped land. The grid ignored hills, ponds, creeks and swamps. With only a few exceptions it mandated that all of the island generally north of Houston Street would hold rectangular blocks – no curving streets, quirky intersections or irregularities to ease the eye. It offered only a few spots for parks or squares, and those generally weren’t built as planned anyway.

But viewed from 200 years later, the famous New York City street grid turns out to have been stunningly resilient, in contrast to the faddish and already failing cul-de-sacs and freeways of the past 60 years. It has accommodated dramatic changes in transportation habits. By creating short blocks and multiple street corners it boosted commerce. By making it easy for people to walk places, and to bump into each other at those same corners, it enhanced the proximity effect – the way random encounters among smart people in a city can spark partnerships, innovations, creativity and build new businesses. That, too, boosted New York’s growing role as the country’s top business hub.

With numbered avenues and streets logically marching northward and westward, the easy-to-navigate map also helped the city welcome and assimilate newcomers: foreign and domestic immigrants as well as millions of tourists. Its ease of use projected a subliminal welcome mat. Contrast that with the you’re-not-wanted-here feeling that Charlotte’s confusing maze of Myers Park streets projects to outsiders.

I spent a large chunk of Saturday afternoon at the new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York: “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan,1811-2011.” It might sound boring. It was anything but.

The exhibit calls the plan “a vision of brazen ambition” and one that “required vigilant enforcement.” The grid was not hailed as brilliant planning, in an era that saw more sophisticated plans for the District of Columbia, Paris and Savannah. And one of the interesting insights I gained was the recognition that, if I’d been writing in 1811, I would probably have criticized the plan for its disdain of natural features, its disregard for existing farmland and its general lack of elegance, in favor of enhancing commerce. But as the New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman writes, “It’s true that Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces. But it has evolved a public realm of streets and sidewalks that creates urban theater on the grandest level. No two blocks are ever precisely the same because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street.”

If you can take it in before the exhibit closes April 15, I recommend it.

And if you’re from Charlotte, it’s worth thinking for a minute what this city would be like if its development, like New York’s, had taken place under the guidance of a plan that assumed – admittedly with arrogance and grandiosity – that a small village was destined for big growth and would need city streets, city blocks and city corners, multiple route choices for traffic (whether horse and buggy or Hummers) and a layout to make walking as convenient as driving.

It’s too late for Charlotte. Retrofitting will be necessary over time, but that’s hugely expensive, contentious and politically fraught. Notice what happens when the city tries to connect streets between neighborhoods. People go nuts at the prospect that city streets near them will carry traffic. In the largest city between Washington and Atlanta, they are shocked at the thought of traffic. Go figure.

Better to have done it differently from the get-go.

We love parks, but do we love parking more?

2005 aerial photo in west Charlotte (Photo: Nancy Pierce)

Two lengthy and thought-provoking articles about parking are making the rounds this month, sparking what I hope will be a lot more thinking about, and innovative approaches toward, that mundane but ugly creature, the parking lot.

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, in “Paved But Still Alive: It’s Time To Take Parking Lots Seriously, As Public Spaces,” lists some astounding numbers: Estimates of the number of U.S. parking spaces range from 105 million to 2 billion, a third of them in parking lots. Eight parking places for every car in this country. Houston has 30 parking places per resident. If you estimate the country has 500 million parking spaces (as author Eran Ben-Joseph of MIT does), they cover a combined 3,590 square miles, an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together.

Kimmelman writes about the so-called Pensacola Parking Syndrome (a term possibly coined by architect Andres Duany in Suburban Nation), in which a city tears down its old buildings to create parking spaces to entice more people downtown, until people no longer want to go there because it has become an empty lot. He suggests that more cities should set limits on the number of parking spaces and urges New York to abandon what he calls “outmoded zoning codes from the auto-boom days requiring specific ratios of parking spaces per housing unit, or per square foot of retail space.” And he tells the interesting tale of the parking lot of the Dutchess County Mall in  Fishkill, N.Y., and the planning firm Interboro. Well, you can read that yourself.

Longer, quirkier and even more interesting, is Dave Gardetta’s “Between the Lines,” in Los Angeles magazine. He has his own set of amazing stats, such as this:

In Los Angeles, at least, building a spot in an above-ground deck costs developers as much as $40,000 per parking spot. With an underground deck, it’s more like $140,000 per space. And he makes the point, or at least, he lets UCLA planning professor and parking expert Donald Shoup make the point, that building so much parking for Disney Hall – space for 2,188 cars below ground, costing $110 million, paid with county bonds – was remarkably poor planning. “Like any parking lot entrance,” Gardetta writes, “the one on Bunker Hill sucked air from street life. ‘L.A.,’ says Shoup, ‘required 50 times more parking under Disney Hall than San Francisco would allow at their own hall.’ “

It’s a conundrum faced all over the country, and one Charlotte’s planners wrestle with continually. When institutions such as churches, hospitals and schools locate in neighborhoods and especially when they grow, they build large surface parking lots and start gobbling the neighborhood. Squabbles over lots and decks (but mostly lots) have erupted for years in Myers Park, Dilworth and, more recently, in Wilmore, where Greater Galilee Baptist Church wanted to expand and build a bigger parking lot.
Cities, including Charlotte, need to be leaders on this issue. That’s tough, especially politically. People may say they love parks, but what really has the tightest grip on their hearts appears to be parking. Every one of us who drives seems to have an instinct to find The Best Parking Space, an impulse so powerful I think it must be hardwired into our brains, the search for the direct route and prime spot. I think it’s related to the hardwiring that propels us to jaywalk instead of go to the corner to cross and to create goat-paths across the grass instead of taking a less convenient paved walk. Whatever it is, letting city neighborhoods be consumed by parking lots is terribly unwise.
But unlike New York or Los Angeles, which have extensive public transit systems, a Sun Belt city like Charlotte can’t just assume that if parking becomes too inconvenient people will take the bus or the subway. Here, lousy parking can kill a business. Yet, as Kimmelman points out, many parking lots are built that then aren’t full. Garages near the new Yankee Stadium, built over objections of Bronx neighbors, are never more than 60 percent full, even on game days, he reports.
I’ve long wondered if the city of Charlotte couldn’t somehow create a parking deck revolving fund, to build decks (lined with businesses or apartments so they’re not ugly; excellent examples to be found in Gateway Village on West Trade Street) that churches and offices and smaller businesses could share, as a way to cut down on surface parking lots. The city has helped large developments with parking decks, but that requires a big development; most of the city’s development is much smaller-scale.
Decks are expensive. Surface lots aren’t, except for buying the land to put them on. That’s why the city needs to take the lead on building decks and using revenues to pay down construction costs, or maybe pay to improve transit. (“Free” parking isn’t really free anyway, so why not make its cost more visible to users?) I’m not a banker or a developer so the aforementioned scheme probably has lots of holes in it. But smart, creative people could figure out a scheme that would work – IF we had city leaders willing to be out front  on the issue.
I checked with Planning Director Debra Campbell to make sure the city hadn’t already done some studies of the overall parking dilemma that I had missed. It hasn’t. “We have revised some standards for certain areas and for certain districts,” she answered, via e-mail. Surface lots are no longer allowed as a primary use in areas zoned UMUD (the uptown mixed-use district), for instance. Transit areas have lower parking requirements.  
And, she said, “We may look at this issue [parking] pending the results of a project we are calling the Zoning Ordinance Assessment that will be launched this summer.”

Why greenways matter

UNCC student Jamie Prince and her dog, Tolstoy

I took a brisk walk today on the Ruth G. Shaw Trail along the Toby Creek Greenway through the UNC Charlotte campus. It was part of my job. Really. I was taking photos of the greenway for an article we’ll be publishing, with luck this week. (Update: It’s now posted here.)

It was warm-ish for January, and as I walked to where the trail intersects with the Mallard Creek Greenway I saw runners, bicyclers, one skateboarder, and a woman with a child in a stroller. Except for roller skates and hand-powered wheelchairs, I think I saw just about every non-motorized mode of transportation. Which makes the point: Greenways are a transportation venue as well as a recreation venue.  If I had had the time and inclination, I could have used the greenway to head south instead of north and I’d have arrived at N.C. 49, aka University City Boulevard, at a light where I could have crossed to get to the strip shopping center at Harris Boulevard which has many useful businesses: grocery, drug store, bank, restaurants, etc.

Greenways are good for exercise and recreation, and most of the people I saw today were using it that way. But they’re also a good way to get from one place to another without using gasoline or creating carbon emissions. In the University City area and other suburban-developed places that lack sidewalks and pedestrian crossings and lights, greenways can provide essential, off-road walkways and bikeways.

But while the Mecklenburg County greenway system (sections of which are part of the larger Carolina Thread Trail) are welcome and much-needed, here’s something that makes me sad. Most of the greenways run alongside creeks, on land that A) is difficult to develop anyway, and B) parallels the county sewer system’s sewage lines. That leads to unpleasant sights such as this one:

Pipe crosses Mallard Creek near the Toby Creek Greenway

This is a sewer pipe that crosses Mallard Creek just below the spot where the Shaw trail intersects the Mallard Creek trail. It’s not a pleasant sight, especially with the debris clogged against the column holding the pipe up. The many raised concrete cylinders holding manholes along the Shaw trail don’t exactly make one’s heart soar, either. It all makes me wish that the county and its taxpayers valued greenways enough to find the money to build more of them through places where our sewer system isn’t quite so noticeable. Not that I’m not grateful for what we have … just wishing.

(One more greenway note: In watching Showtime’s series “Homeland,” filmed in and around Charlotte, I noted that one key scene, in which one important character kills someone, appears to have been filmed in one of the spots along the new Little Sugar Creek Greenway near uptown, where the path goes through a concrete tunnel under a street. Given the nature of the scene, it’s clear the spot was chosen for its eerie sense of being a concrete-flanked, urban no-mans’-land. I had to muse over the situation: We Charlotteans  are celebrating the arrival of our wonderful new uptown greenway, yet an out-of-town location scout has chosen a piece of it for a scene of creepy ugliness. Hmmm.) 

Is sustainability for Commies?

Here’s something I keep wondering: If you drew a Venn diagram with one circle being people who say they believe free markets need little intervention and that government has no business telling people what to do with their property, and another circle being people who think there’s a liberal conspiracy to force apartment buildings and stores into suburban residential neighborhoods now restricted to single-family houses on large lots, how big would be the part of the Venn diagram where the two sets overlap?

My guess: Huge.

Somehow some people have gotten the idea that land in a city (and suburbs) would, if left to the natural laws of economics, shape itself into quarter-acre and half-acre lots with one house sitting in the middle. They don’t seem to get it: Valuable land, without zoning restrictions, would attract higher income-producing uses. Apartment buildings. Stores. Office towers. It’s government intervention that is keeping all those high-priced neighborhoods near Charlotte’s SouthPark mall as single-family homes. Large-lot subdivisions are often built in times and places where that’s considered the highest and best use (to use real estate speak) of the dirt. But as cities evolve, a lot of those neighborhoods hold land that becomes more valuable for other uses. Examples: Myers Park, Dilworth, Elizabeth, Barclay Downs. Keeping those valuable areas zoned for single-family residential may or may not be wise public policy – that’s a debate for another day – but it’s clearly not letting the free market have its way. So why have some parts of the tin-foil cap crowd decided that efforts to build more high-density neighborhoods, i.e. “sustainable development,” is a global socialist plot using a U.N. policy called Agenda 21 to co-opt municipal governments all over America?

Think about it: Wouldn’t big-government socialists be the ones wanting regulations to override private ownership, via single-family-housing zoning?

It’s part of a larger mystery.

Why did preserving the environment come to be seen as “liberal” instead of just, well, smart? Seems to me the liberal-conservative battles ought to be fought over the best methods with which to ensure resources aren’t depleted and water and air remain clean. After all, those things are important necessities for human life, not to mention long-term local and national economic health. Some would argue government regulations are the best method. Others would argue that regulations don’t work, or aren’t enforced, or that a private market approach works better, as in cap-and-trade programs. But why would anyone argue that to be a true conservative you shouldn’t care about the environment?
 
After all, the environmental movement has had plenty of Republican champions, including President Richard Nixon. Former N.C. Govs. Jim Martin and Jim Holshouser and Charlotte’s long-time U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan are all Republicans who understood the importance of conserving land and using government to try to ensure clean air and water.

Indeed, after Republican City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chaired the council’s Environment Committee, lost his seat in November, I called longtime Charlotte environmental activist Rick Roti to get his sense of Peacock’s role. “He has been, especially for a Republican, a more balanced leader,” Roti said. Understand, Roti doesn’t just blindly compliment politicians. He has served on multiple stakeholder committees, chaired the Charlotte Tree Advisory Commission and is now president of the nonprofit Charlotte Public Tree Fund. He has seen the sausage being made, from up close, and probably has psychic scars to prove it.
So what I’m about to say probably betrays my own inadvertent stereotyping. Out of routine, I asked Roti what party he was in. “Republican,” he said. “People are often surprised when I tell them that.” Uh, yep.
He favors Republican financial policies, he said. “When it comes to the environment, they’re [the Republican party] not where where they need to be.”

What does this have to do with sustainable development and Agenda 21? Only this: One of the key goals underpinning advocacy of sustainable development is to improve and protect the environment by helping people live in ways that use less energy: Less driving, more walking and bicycling and transit. Living closer together, to save building energy and make transit easier (see the part about less driving). Of course, one hugely important reason to do this, in addition to saving a lot of money and energy, is to try to combat human-caused global climate change. But for some reason, that, too, has become a red-blue litmus test. If you believe the world’s climate scientists, you must be a liberal elitist.

Again, it seems to me the liberals and conservatives ought to be arguing over what’s the best way to fight climate change, not about whether it exists.

Here’s a final thought about the relationship between sustainable development, and policies, and politics. It’s in an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “A frugal answer to zoning pitfalls, needlessly slashed,”  in which Paul McMorrow, an associate editor at CommonWealth magazine, writes about the congressional move to de-fund an Obama initiative, the Sustainable Communities program. Lodged in Housing and Urban Development, the program was trying to get multiple federal agencies – EPA, HUD and the Department of Transportation – to work more efficiently together and to promote policies to curb sprawling development. (Clarification, 1/6/12: I consulted with officials in the HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, which coordinates federal policy with DOT and the EPA. They say the office remains very much alive, as is the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the collaboration among the three agencies. What lost funding is the grants program, which in 2011 awarded a $5 million regional planning grant to the Charlotte region, among $96 million in regional planning and community challenge grants around the country.)

 
McMorrow notes that sprawl is fiscally wasteful for governments: “If we’re going to build new homes and businesses anyway, we should at least construct them in a way that’s not deliberately wasteful,” he writes. “This wastefulness applies to the open space that sprawl consumes, as well as the enormous cost of developing and maintaining the infrastructure serving new suburbs and exurbs.”

Locust beer and scuppernong petards

An article about locust beer on the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s website – Ruth Ann Grissom’s Locust trees (and locust beer) from Nov. 10 – brought this intriguing reminiscence from reader Richard Lasater of Raleigh, recalling other Tar Heel wine-making from years gone by. Lasater’s emailed note:

I’m from Durham and most of my grandfather’s generation had been raised in the country and went to Durham to keep from being farmers. He was a great fan of making locust beer
and other folk beverages. According to my father, locust beer was only slightly alcoholic, but was fizzy from fermentation. Usually, men were the beer- and wine-makers. 
North Carolina voted for Prohibition by county before WWI. When temperatures dropped into the teens, people would set out locust beer (and scuppernong wine) in shallow pans on the porch overnight to freeze. The frozen slush was then put into cheesecloth and suspended over a pan. All of the alcohol would drip out first, producing a very potent brandy. This is called freeze separation.
Pod from honey locust, used for beer
Back then, nobody had home freezers. My father said that every house in the neighborhood would be freezing locust beer or wine on a very cold night. I have read that this is also done by French Canadians using red wine or fermented maple sap. Supposedly, freeze separation doesn’t separate out the unwanted “fusel oils” that can be removed during distillation (save only the middle part of the distillate) which will cause hangovers.
My other grandmother ran a boarding house and bought chickens, butter and eggs from a farm family behind what’s now Northern Hill School on Roxboro Road. Pearl and Sam Moore had the biggest scuppernong arbor that I’ve ever seen. When I was very small, I couldn’t reach around the main vine. My grandfather would make a batch of scuppernong wine every fall using a stoneware churn. He would put a weighted plate on top of the fermenting grapes to keep out air until fermentation had stopped.
Pearl made “roasting ear wine” by taking a lot of fresh corn cobs and packing them in a stoneware churn. She would cut off the corn kernels, but not scrape the cobs. She would then fill the churn with boiling water and cover it with cheesecloth until fermentation started. Then she would put a weighted plate on the top until it quit working. The end result was clear as water, but strong! The wine was then bottled. 
One year, our family had to go to Baltimore suddenly because of a family emergency. My grandfather’s wine was in mid-ferment  Someone told him that if he could cover the churn and keep out air after it quit fermenting, the wine wouldn’t turn to vinegar. He cut a piece out of an automobile inner tube that had an air valve in it and secured it over the churn’s mouth with string and wax. After pulling out the valve stem, he connected a piece of air hose and put the other end of the hose in a bucket of water. This let the carbon dioxide from the fermenting grapes bubble out but kept out air.
When they got back a week later, they entered a dark, very quiet house. They didn’t hear the gas bubbling up from the hose. When they cut on the kitchen light, they saw that a grape hull had floated and stuck in the hose, and the piece of inner tube had swollen like a balloon. You could see through it. My grandmother told my grandfather that she wasn’t going into the kitchen to cook until he defused his bomb. When he touched it, it burst, throwing grape hulls and wine everywhere. There were grapes stuck to the ceiling.  All wine-making was thereafter banished to the coal shed.

Photo from Ruth Ann Grissom