Author: Mary Newsom

Feed the meter with a cell phone app

Short of quarters? Next week Charlotte launches a  program to let you use your cell phone to pay for on-street parking.

According to a city memo sent Friday to Charlotte City Council members, the program will have a “soft launch” Thursday and a “hard launch” in April. According to the memo:

The cell-phone-payment system will be available at both parking meters and the pay stations located on some uptown streets.

To use it, you have to register with the Pay by Cell service provider, at www.parkmobile.com. Registration is free, although each pay-by-cell transaction costs a 35-cent fee to Parkmobile USA.

To pay, you would:

Find a parking spot. Then either launch a mobile app, access the Internet or call toll-free, 1-877-727-5301. You enter the parking zone number on the meter or nearby sign or the pay-station stall number. Choose the parking time desired.
You could extend the time you choose, via another transaction, but not beyond the two-hour limit.
 

The city memo cautions that parking meters won’t display the payment and time remaining, although the city’s handheld ticketing equipment will let ticket agents know the customer’s payment.

Will the 35-cent fee deter people? Hard to say: I’m a penny-pincher and I try to keep my ashtray stashed with quarters. But if you’re facing a choice of on-street-with-fee or expensive parking deck, 35 cents may be an easy hurdle to take.

An aside: I first saw the pay-by-cell-phone parking fees in Sofia, Bulgaria, and wondered how long before Charlotte began using it. And I have seen pay-by-cell-phone signs posted in some of the privately owned surface lots uptown, so it’s clear the technology is finally arriving here.

Author: Redevelop in increments

Architect, planner and author Stephen Mouzon, did more than just give some lectures from his book, Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability, when he was in town recently. He also took a look at a section of south Charlotte that he thinks might be ripe for a different kind of long-range plan: The Park Road-Woodlawn Avenue neighborhood.

City planners are drawing up an area plan for that part of town, home to Park Road Shopping Center and Montford Drive’s burgeoning restaurant and bar scene, among other things.

Like many places in Charlotte, the area has most elements of a strong city neighborhood – houses, apartments, condos, shopping, offices, schools, churches, parks and greenways – but is suburban and auto-oriented in its layout and the way it functions. I’ve long thought it would be a good area to transition to a more urban flavor as it redevelops over time. But the zoning now in place for most of the area requires suburban-style building: stores and offices sitting behind huge parking lots, single-uses, apartments quarantined from single-family houses, and all the buildings too far apart to make walking practical, much less pleasant.

An aside: Don’t get me wrong; I love Park Road Shopping Center, despite its hopelessly car-focused design. It opened in 1956 as Charlotte’s first open-air shopping center, and for years has offered a mix of stores that works exceptionally well. I hope to heaven its new owners, Edens & Avant, don’t mess up a good thing.

Stephen Mouzon

Mouzon suggested the area could show how to do what planners and developers call a suburban retrofit: Taking an aging suburban area and making it a more village- or town-center type of area, with housing and stores and workplaces closer to one another. But, he said, most redevelopments require a developer buying up a big chunk of property and doing a big-footprint development. [Much of uptown Charlotte was redeveloped this way. Example: The EpiCentre.] Why not try something different, he proposed. Why not do it incrementally? Code every street frontage to its climax condition – that is, put codes in place that envision 30 years out and work toward that vision over time, as property changes hands and owners of small parcels redevelop and rebuild. Don’t wait for one deep-pocketed savior developer.

He said he’s going to draw up an idea and send it to the city. I asked him to share that with me, as well. I’ll write more on it, if this comes to pass.

During his public lecture, sponsored by the Charlotte chapter of the Urban Land Institute and by the Charlotte Department of Transportation, he expounded on many of the ideas in his book: Build buildings that are designed to be able to transition from one use to another over time; live where you can walk to the grocery story; don’t be afraid to look to the past for wisdom about how to design buildings and construct cities.

Indeed, Mouzon’s pitch is what many architects might scorn as nostalgic. He said his goal is for audiences to leave his lectures having no idea what his politics are.

How to get Americans walking again

Uptown Charlotte, one of the city’s few walkable areas

Yes, we in Charlotte are geeky enough that it’s exciting when the mighty BBC takes note of North Carolina. And the WalkRaleigh campaign that I wrote about Feb. 6 in “Guerrilla wayfinding and the Charlotte dilemma” has hit the big-time, so to speak.

Asking, “How to get America to walk?” the BBC’s piece on Raleigh features WalkRaleigh’s Matt Tomasulo, who was behind what he calls a “self-motivated and unsanctioned” posting of signs telling passers-by how many minutes it takes to walk places in Raleigh. Note, too, that in the video Raleigh’s chief planning officer, Mitchell Silver, appears disinclined to call in the sign police to take down the signs. [Update: Silver reported via Twitter that the signs came down Wednesday. He is in charge of zoning enforcement, he said. He talked first with Tomasulo and they are working on a longer-term strategy to make the signs either a pilot project or permanent, Silver said.]

But maybe the best snippets are from the jogging stroller exercise class, where women with children work out, in a gym, with their strollers because they can’t, or don’t, actually take the strollers out for exercise or a walk. In one great visual, a woman points to a sidewalk that ends abruptly, keeping her from walking to a nearby grocery store.

All of which leads to a question I keep bugging my friends and colleagues with: Why isn’t there a pedestrian advocacy group in Charlotte to do what the bicycle advocates have been doing so effectively? Charlotte Area Bicycle Alliance (aka charlottebikes.org) was founded in 1997 and has successfully raised the profile of bicycling.  Is this bicycle nirvana? Of course not. But CABA has worked diligently to be at the table for policy discussions, and has clearly made a difference. So where’s the pedestrian counterpart?

Yes, the Charlotte Department of Transportation did hire a pedestrian planner a few years back, to its credit. But where are the people who’ll hound CDOT about cracked sidewalks and ankle-threatening potholes? Where are the people pushing, pushing, pushing for motorist- and pedestrian-safety campaigns, for more crosswalks and more pedestrian lights and for those pedestrian push-button signals to react sooner than 5 minutes (or so it often seems) after you push them?

(Related news: On Wednesday two young children were killed when they were hit by a truck as they walked with their father to a day care center. They were on a stretch of West Tyvola Road that lacks sidewalks and has narrow shoulders.)  

I know plenty of people who care about pedestrian issues, not least of whom is the city’s pedestrian planner, Malisa Mccreedy. But city staff can’t be the effective advocacy group that Charlotte needs. How about a Walk Charlotte? Somebody?

Commuter rail to Gaston and Union counties?

Here’s an interesting snippet from deep inside a report to a Charlotte City Council committee. It suggests that some of the money from a proposed special tax on property along the proposed Red Line commuter rail would be set aside to help pay for commuter rail to Union and Gaston counties.

This is intriguing, but extremely preliminary.

The mention is in a memo emailed to council members of the Transportation and Planning Committee in advance of the panel’s Feb. 23 meeting (noon-1:30 p.m. in the city-county government center, room 280); the documents haven’t been posted online yet.

The Red Line proposal is complex, but in a nutshell it proposes setting up a special tax district near the would-be commuter rail line from uptown Charlotte to north of Davidson. Whether it would extend into Iredell County remains an open question; Iredell County commissioners have been relentlessly negative so far. Here’s a link to a slide-show presentation the city council committee heard last month. The idea is to upgrade the not-well-used existing Norfolk Southern tracks for both commuter rail and more freight traffic. You’ve heard of Transit-Oriented Development? The idea is to promote Freight-Oriented Development, luring industries and jobs in some spots, as well as mixed-use residential and retail development in other spots.

The special tax district flanking the rail line would assess 75 cents per $100 of property value on income-producing property, that is, not on single-family residential property. For most of the special tax district, 75 percent of the revenue would go to pay for building and operating the Red Line, with 25 percent going to the local municipality.

BUT, the Friday report emailed to the committee says, “At Charlotte Gateway Station, the proposal would:
• Direct 25% of the tax increment capture proceeds to the Red Line.
• Direct 75% of the tax increment capture to a reserve fund for future commuter rail projects to Union and Gaston Counties
The proposal presumes the future commuter rail projects to Union and Gaston Counties would terminate at Charlotte Gateway Station.”
The Gateway Station is the long-proposed new Amtrak station on West Trade Street, which would also be the end point of the commuter rail line. Some people, notably local planner and architect Michael Gallis, have criticized the idea of having two different rail stations, one at Gateway and the other, for the Blue Line light rail, six or seven blocks away at the Transportation Center. The Charlotte Area Transit System proposes running shuttles between the two stations.
But commuter rail to Gaston County? If you’re thinking that’s more pie-in-the-sky than anything you’ve heard recently, then consider this: The N.C. Department of Transportation has bought several chunks of the old Piedmont and Northern Railroad right-of-way that runs from uptown Charlotte through the Wesley Heights neighborhood, crosses Tuckaseegee Road, crosses the Catawba River near N.C. 27 and heads into Mount Holly. CSX owns much of the line in Mecklenburg County, but the state owns enough of the Gaston County sections that it is introducing freight traffic there. Hmmm. The old P&N was an electrified passenger rail line built and operated between Charlotte and Gastonia by a precursor of Duke Energy. When passenger service stopped it became a freight line.
Commuter rail to Union County, though, might be in that pie-in-sky category. 

‘Original Green’ author to speak in Charlotte

Steven Mouzon, whose book Original Green makes the point that environmentally sensitive living requires more than what he dubs “gizmo green” gadgets, will give a public lecture in Charlotte on Wednesday Feb. 15.

Sponsored by the Charlotte Department of Transportation and the local chapter of the Urban Land Institute, Mouzon’s talk will be at 6 p.m. in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, Room 267.

Mouzon, an architect and author, is founder of the New Urban Guild in Miami, “a group of architects, designers and other New Urbanists dedicated to the study and design of true traditional buildings and places native to, and inspired by, the regions in which they are built.”
One of the things I find interesting about Mouzon’s writing is that, to my mind, he’s an illustration of how New Urbanism can’t be so easily pigeonholed as “liberal” or “conservative.” He writes in his blog, for instance, that Original Green is what we had “before the Thermostat Age,” when “the places we made and the buildings we built had no choice but to be green.”

I’m not sure if trying to return to the building and living styles of old can be considered anything other than conservative, but as I wrote in “Is sustainability for Commies?” there’s a school of thought that anyone who mentions protecting the environment or conserving energy must be a Marxist who’ll rip people from their cars and subdivision houses and force-march them into Pruitt-Igoe-style high-rises. Note the Gaston County commissioners’ action late last month: “County leaders identify ‘insidious’ threat of Agenda 21.”

In an unfortunate architectural convergence, the UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, the Charlotte Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the Mint Museum of Art have planned another architectural lecture for the same night: Craig Dykers of the firm Snøhetta will give a lecture about his firm’s work. It’s at the UNC Charlotte Center City Building. A reception is at 5 p.m., and the lecture at 6 p.m. Both are free and open to the public, but require registration here.

Guerrilla wayfinding and the Charlotte dilemma

I spotted this article, from Atlantic Cities.com, “Guerrilla Wayfinding in Raleigh,” about mysterious signs that have sprouted in downtown Raleigh, to help pedestrians, courtesy of a project calling itself WalkRaleigh. The Raleigh piece is a follow-up to this article on wayfinding in cities.

All of which brings us to three Charlotte-related thoughts.

1. Why don’t we have more guerrilla urbanism here? Tom Low of Civic by Design has been trying to work on an idea for pop-up porches, which isn’t a bad notion but it begs the question: If you’re getting official authorization for your plans, is it truly “guerrilla”?

2. Why isn’t there a WalkCharlotte project out there, like WalkRaleigh, doing similar things, such as what Charlotte Observer editorial cartoonist Kevin Siers (@KevinSiers) suggested today via Twitter: “Maybe we need urban guerrillas to post pedestrian crossing signs in Charlotte, since the city doesn’t bother.”

WalkRaleigh is a project of CityFabric, “Wear You Live,” a clever idea and definitely place-centric. Has anything of that sort been launched in Charlotte? If so, I’d love to hear/see more about it.

3. While we’re on the topic of wayfinding, what’s with those supposedly helpful signs on freeways and streets heading into uptown Charlotte, dividing uptown into color-coded quadrants, N, S, E and W?

Do you know anyone who has found those N, S, E and W signs helpful?  I don’t want to trash them if I’m the only one who isn’t being helped. After all, I worked uptown for decades and have a pretty solid idea where things are and can ignore those signs.

The problem of finding your way around uptown is significant, I realize. Anything that helps people is a good idea, especially with the continuing problem of confusing one-way streets – thank goodness the city has restored some to two-way – and the existence of too many barriers between uptown and the rest of the city: I-77, I-277, the Indy Freeway, Irwin Creek, Little Sugar Creek and various railroads.

But the color-coded signs do not work for me.

Maybe it’s because uptown Charlotte is not laid out according to north-south or east-west, but on the diagonal. Tryon may be named “North” and “South” but it runs northeast-southwest. Trade Street may be “East” and “West,” but it runs northwest-southeast. So the only way your mental map can dovetail with an uptown map showing Tryon running vertically is if your mental map knows nothing else about any other parts of Charlotte. (I have even seen some maps that place Tryon horizontally, which is a perversion not only of the actual compass points but also of the long-established tradition in maps of north being at the top.)

The best way to find your way around uptown, as with almost any city, is to get out and walk around in it. To Walk Charlotte, if you will.  

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.”