Month: August 2014

‘Do not try to design neighborhoods through a computer screen’


The photo at right arrived about 10 days ago from Davidson-based transportation planner John Cock.
Cock and I were among a group of fans of the late Warren Burgess, who died at age 56 in May 2005.
The plaque was installed a few weeks ago beside a bald cypress tree that had been planted in his honor in Davidson’s Roosevelt Wilson Park shortly after Burgess died.
Burgess – or Warren, as I’m more comfortable saying – was for more than 20 years an urban designer on the staff of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission. He was Davidson town planner from 2000 to 2003. To this day, he has a fan club of sorts, people like Cock and former Davidson planner Meredith Judy whom Warren mentored, as well as other urban designers and planners in the area, like David Walters, the just-retired head of UNC Charlotte’s Master of Urban Design program.
You may have noticed over the years that there are some occupations that lend themselves to memorial plaques,
statues, road-namings and the like. City planner is not typically one of them. But Warren was cut from a different bolt of cloth, and gave so much of his heart to Charlotte and Davidson that it’s only appropriate that it be noted somewhere.
After seeing the plaque photo, I looked back at two columns I wrote about Warren when I worked at the Charlotte Observer.  The first was in 2000, when he left Charlotte city hall for Davidson. I noticed something unusual at the sheetcake-and-punch ceremony for him at the government center. As I wrote then:
“Among the people saying nice things were Dottie Coplon, a relentless neighborhood activist who has battled both planners and developers, and Bailey Patrick Jr., lawyer and lobbyist for some of Charlotte’s most successful developers. It’s not often those two are singing from the same song sheet. But getting people together is one of the things Burgess does best.
“… The Thursday event symbolized something important about him. …  When you think about it, Warren is really just a bureaucrat, but he’s a bureaucrat with a difference: He wears his heart on his sleeve. … Sometimes, when people talk about “fighting City Hall,” it’s planners and zoning laws that they’re fighting. Burgess , who works at City Hall, understands that, but he still tries to help.” 
 He always walked over and over through neighborhoods where he was doing a plan, to get to know its terrain, its history and its residents. He sketched relentlessly, making drawings at meetings to supplement his notes. He cared – as the plaque notes – about trees, but also about creeks, front porches, sidewalks, plazas and parks, all the things that make up a city. He had these words of advice to other planners:
“A city is made up of people,” he told the farewell party. “Do not try to design neighborhoods through a computer screen.” 
When Warren died in 2005, I wrote: 
“Burgess left his fingerprints all over this city, in the plans he drew, the enduring vision he had for his city and the people and places he touched.
“Cities need catalysts, and Warren was a catalyst. He was always putting one person in touch with just the right other person, and dropping a good idea in just the right place, and in doing so altering the course of the planet.”
He spoke for the trees. But just as important, he spoke for the people who plant the trees, for the people who make up a city.

Here’s one list Charlotte isn’t on – and ought to be

Syracuse is yet another city where advocates are pushing to tear down a section of elevated interstate highway (in this case I-81) and turn it into a boulevard. “What we’ve done is take an incredibly important piece of this city off of the development map,” developer Robert Doucette tells Governing magazine. “This highway runs through the part of the city that should be some of the highest-producing parcels of land in the region.”  (See Why Would You Have a Highway Run Through a City?)
The article lists New Orleans, which got federal funds to study removing the Claiborne Expressway, Cleveland, New Haven and Detroit as either moving toward or studying urban highway removal. Among the comments, one mentions Buffalo as also discussing the fate of its skyway, which cuts through a waterfront area. (The whole comments section itself is an interesting pro-con discussion.)
The article notes that one factor in the teardown trend – or more accurately, the teardown wannabe trend – is the age of the highways. Most were built in the 1950s and 1960s and are aging out.  Charlotte’s uptown freeway loop

was planned in the 1950s, and many of its interchange designs are notoriously outdated. The first leg, the Brookshire Freeway, opened in 1971. The other leg, the Belk expressway, finally completed the loop in the 1980s.

City planners and uptown boosters have puzzled over creative ways to try to turn those bleak underpasses below I-277 into something more welcoming than the current concrete spaces. (The one near Johnson C. Smith University has some colored lights.) And the gulch where the Belk expressway goes below grade, between uptown and South End/Dilworth, cries out for a freeway cap.
Before anyone moans about there being no place for the traffic to go, remember that when cities tear down elevated freeways, they usually replace them with other high-volume streets, designed for use by pedestrians as well as motorists. In other words, folks, there WOULD still be streets to carry the traffic.
Despite intermittent grumbling among planners and a study by Charlotte’s DOT during the Center City 2020 Vision Plan process of whether the Brookshire section could be boulevard-ized (CDOT was dubious), there’s been little push to tear down the loop highway strangling uptown Charlotte. Too bad. That’s one list it would be great to get on.

Can a place progress from Dead-End-Ville to Connectivity City? It’s tough

 Corneliusnews.net reports that the town of Cornelius in north Mecklenburg is proposing connecting a neighborhood street, Floral Lane, to Statesville Road (U.S. 21).

One of the most politically fraught decisions any elected or government staff officials can make is to connect streets that used to be dead-ends. It’s easy to understand why residents protest, as the Floral Lane residents are doing.

The first house I bought was on a dead-end block in Charlotte’s Chantilly neighborhood, where my street ended at Briar Creek. I liked the lack of traffic on the street, with only residents and their guests traveling in front of the house. I felt my cats were safe to go outside there. People who live on cul-de-sacs have the same welcome lack of cars going past.

But when a whole city is overloaded with dead-ends and cul-de-sacs, that sends huge numbers of cars onto the few streets that do connect. The result: far more congestion than you’d otherwise have.

Consider Providence Road in south Charlotte. It’s horrifically congested, especially the farther you get from uptown. One reason is that all the vehicles heading from south Charlotte towards uptown have to travel on comparatively few thoroughfares, because south of Myers Park and Eastover, the neighborhood streets don’t connect to any other neighborhoods. If the same number of vehicles that clog Providence Road daily were spread through dozens of interconnected streets, rather than all jamming Providence Road, the congestion problem would ease considerably.

But how does a town or city progress from Dead-End-Ville to Connectivity City? That’s the hard part. If you simply open one new street connection, that street will absorb far more than its share of the traffic. What to do?

I’ve said for years that Charlotte (and I’d add Cornelius and other cul-de-sac landscapes to this statement) needs to connect dozens and dozens more streets to each other. But whenever the city does that, it owes the residents of those streets the ability to co-exist with more traffic. That means building sidewalks, crosswalks – signalized if necessary – and installing traffic calming devices like humps or roundabouts.

Connect the streets, but build the necessary infrastructure so that people can live with the cars. It’s not rocket science. It’s just more expensive.