Author: Mary Newsom

Local transportation planner: Outerbelt warning was prescient


My posting Tuesday on the death of long-time Atlanta Regional Commission executive Harry West, “Atlanta’s ‘Mr. Region’ (who warned against our outerbelt) has died” brought this memory from longtime local transportation planner Bill Coxe, Huntersville’s transportation planner who previously the transportation planner for Mecklenburg County, back when there was enough unincorporated county land to make work for a county transportation planner.

Coxe wrote:

Saw your blog on Harry West’s passing. Had the following knee-jerk reaction:

As a transportation planner intimately involved with Charlotte’s outerbelt since its original environmental study in 1979, I vividly remember Mr. West’s comments at that conference. And time has proved him true. This billion-dollar infrastructure project causes the market to distribute land use in its wake. And since it turned land that had been used to row-crop food into land that is used to row-crop homes that are followed by row-cropped retail centers, it in turn demands more infrastructure investment. But the distances involved now make the cost of that provision daunting.

I also recall XX [Coxe named a local planner; I’m checking with that person to make sure Coxe’s memory is accurate] making a presentation on his research that indicated outer loops did not bring more development to a metropolitan region, simply caused it to occur in a different fashion. Don’t know how you could ever prove or disprove this thesis.

Coincidentally, 1998 was also the year of the 2025 Transit/Land Use Plan, which recommended using rapid transit investment as a tool to engender a more compact and economically viable land use pattern.

Atlanta’s ‘Mr. Region’ (who warned against our outerbelt) has died

2009 photo of unfinished I-485 at Old Statesville Road. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Sad news from the Saporta Report in Atlanta: Harry West, longtime (1973-2000) executive director of the 10-county Atlanta Regional Commission, died Monday morning, reports Maria Saporta.

West, writes Saporta, “probably did more than any other person in metro Atlanta to create a regional mindset.” Read more about his role here.

I met West several times over the years, but his most memorable visit to Charlotte, at least in my memory, came in March of 1998. He spoke at a regional conference on the then-unfinished I-485 outerbelt loop. The conference was sponsored by the Centralina Council of Governments, the now defunct regional advocacy group Central Carolinas Choices and – perhaps amazingly – the Charlotte Chamber.

It was a time when some community leaders worried that building the outer loop would create so many miles of low-density sprawling development that Charlotte would go the way of Atlanta.

As I wrote in an April 11, 1998, column for the Charlotte Observer, West described what Atlanta’s Perimeter Highway, I-285, had meant to the city and what Charlotte might learn from Atlanta’s experience.

I-285 was finished in 1969, he recounted, and was intended to maintain a strong center city. Instead it attracted development, and what Atlanta got was sprawling growth “that doesn’t allow you to do anything but use your car,” as West put it.

Then came his advice: “If I thought you would listen to me,” he said, “I’d tell you not to build it.”
He didn’t mean not to build any more streets or roads or highways. He meant not to focus our transportation plans
around a loop highway. As I wrote then:
“He advised a serious focus on land-use planning along I-485, and requiring development that doesn’t force you to drive everywhere. ‘Decide what you want and stick to it,’ he said. ‘Don’t change it, don’t bend to the market forces.’

“Did he realize he was in Charlotte, the ‘Growth Is Good’ center of the universe? Market forces here eat land-use plans for breakfast.”
After the conference the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission did a land use study of all the outerbelt interchanges and set “plans” for those that had not been built yet, or that did not already have plans. The plans looked like colored blobs of single-use zoning: office parks in this area, shopping centers over there, single-family subdivisions here and apartment complexes over yonder.
None of those interchange plans, even if they had been followed, would have made any difference in stopping the outward-oozing sprawl. Almost all the the new development was designed so driving is the only way to get around. So much for the cure of congestion. Harry West understood that, and he tried to tell us. But we were not in a mood to listen.

Life along any urban highway. Do highways just induce traffic? Photo: iStock

  

Charlotte history, hiding behind a wall

Can you find the Jane Wilkes statue behind the brick wall along Morehead Street? (See below) Photo: Mary Newsom

One of the best statues I’ve ever seen sits atop Rome’s Gianicolo Hill. A series of Busts of Important Men lines an avenue, and there is the obligatory statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian hero of the Italian unification movement in the 19th century.

But a short walk away is another statue. It’s Anita Garibaldi. She is sidesaddle, atop a rearing horse, holding a small child in her left arm, close to her breast. With her right, she aims a pistol at the sky. What a woman!

Anita Garibaldi. Photo: “Blackcat” via Widkimedia Commons


Charlotte, in some ways being even more traditional than Rome, does not memorialize its women with statues. Heck, it barely memorialized anyone with statues – at least, not until the Trail of History project came along, since representational statuary today is about as fashionable among artists as bustles, spats and top hats. 

That’s a group of local donors and history buffs who are working to erect a series of statues of historic personages along the Little Sugar Creek Greenway. Their first was a monument to Capt. James Jack, who rode from Charlotte to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1775 carrying (according to local legend) a copy of the May 20, 1775, Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Meck Dec skeptics say he only carried the Mecklenburg Resolves, adopted May 31, 1775. Whatever.  There’s a guy on a charging horse, in a pool of water across Kings Drive from Central Piedmont Community College.
Now Trail of History monument No. 2 is up, and by golly, it’s a woman: Jane
Renwick Smedberg Wilkes. Read more about her here. She was a New Yorker who married her first cousin, John Wilkes, and moved to Charlotte in 1854. After the Civil War she was active in founding the first two civilian hospitals in Charlotte, including Good Samaritan, the now-demolished hospital for blacks during that segregated era.

Jane Wilkes. Photo: Tom Hanchett

The statue, designed by Wendy M. Ross of Bethesda, Md., depicts a woman with a slight smile (and not brandishing a pistol). It’s the smile of someone who is possibly about to ask you to support a project for which she is raising funds, and whose smile is also a bit stern, as if to show that even if you do not give her any money, she will not rest until you – and others – make her project a success.

While it’s excellent that our monuments are honoring one woman among the seven people planned to have statues (see the list here), it’s a bit odd that this statue is hiding behind a very long brick wall along Morehead Street, where it crosses Little Sugar Creek. Why have a wall between the sidewalk and a public park area? That seems to me inappropriately suburbanistic for this part of the city.  Plus, it obscures the existence of the statue and the nice flowers planted around it. When you are walking on the Little Sugar Creek Greenway on the other side of the creek, you have no idea the monument to Jane Wilkes is even there.

I asked Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Department greenway planner Gwen Cook for details on the design of the garden. She relates, via email: “At Robert Haywood Morrison Gardens [the formal name for the small garden in which the statue resides], the wall is an essential element of the garden. The noise from Morehead Street is terrible. You couldn’t hear yourself think, and if we hadn’t got that right, we’d have no garden. We had to add the wall to manage the ambience of the garden.” She said the garden, but not the statue, are on maps along the greenway.

The only way I knew the statue was there was having read about it in the Charlotte Observer. As her great-great granddaughter, Margo Fonda of Charlotte, told the Observer, “Jane Wilkes was from a time when women didn’t vote, didn’t hold jobs and stayed in the background, but she did incredible things. And she was really humble about it, not even acknowledging it in her autobiography. The idea of a statue to her is really cool.”

*Once you get behind the brick wall, you discover Jane Wilkes’ statue. Photo: Mary Newsom

Watch Charlotte grow … foot and bicycle traffic

Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park is one of Chicago’s treasured public spaces. Photo: Mary Newsom

CHICAGO – Can Charlotte ever become an authentically walkable and bikable city?

I’ve just spent three days at a conference encouraging cities to overcome obstacles that keep them from achieving that goal.
The conference was sponsored by a group called 8-80 Cities. The idea behind that name is that cities should be designed for kids of 8 as well as adults of 80. The first group can’t drive and must walk or bicycle; the 80-year-olds may have already lost or be about to lose the ability to drive from hearing, vision, mental acuity or other age-related factors.
As 8-80 Cities executive director Gil Penalosa put it, “We have to stop building cities as if everyone is 30 years old and athletic.”
The 8-80 Cities Forum conference was named “The doable city” to encourage participants to consider the art of the possible in their cities. Co-sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, most participants were from some of the 26 cities where Knight has a special relationship, among them Charlotte; Akron, Ohio; Detroit; Macon, Ga. ; Miami; Philadelphia; Saint Paul, Minn.; and San Jose, Calif. (Disclosure: The Knight Foundation paid my travel expenses.)

Millennium Park’s “Cloud Gate” offers dry space during a rain.
We were shown numerous examples of efforts in cities from as far away as Melbourne, Australia, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Bogota, Colombia, to as close as Raleigh – events and campaigns and years-long projects to bring more public spaces (read parks and greenways) to cities and to find ways to encourage residents to view their city streets as public spaces, too – which of course they are.
Here’s an apt metaphor: impatiens or orchids? The idea was to encourage activists and public officials at the conference not to try to cultivate orchids, exotic, beautiful and needing expert
care, but to aim for the equivalent of impatiens, a colorful – and much easier – flower to grow.
For Charlotte, even a “grow impatiens” approach might be akin to, say, trying to cultivate roses in thick clay. After all, a recent study of large metro areas, Dangerous By Design, ranked Charlotte the tenth most dangerous metro for pedestrians. A new ranking from the Trust For Public Land ranked Charlotte No. 57 of 60 cities for “ParkScore.”

Red and white impatiens, with caladiums

But Charlotte has changed some important city policies, and its residents are changing, also. The city has adopted a set of street-design standards to require sidewalks and encourage bike lanes and that will, over time, add significantly to bicycle- and pedestrian-friendliness. Not that I will live long enough to see all of them, but still…

And more and more cyclists have been spotted on city streets and commuting to jobs. Here’s a recent set of articles from PlanCharlotte about folks who’ve chosen not to drive. “Car free in Charlotte? It isn’t easy” and “They’d rather not drive, thank you.”

In Chicago, speaker after speaker encouraged the conference attendees to work toward making their cities and towns more attractive to people, well, from age 8 to 80. As Dan Burden of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute put it, we all need to stop worrying so much about whether people dislike residential density: “What they don’t want to do,” he said, “is live in ugly places.”

The 606 rail-trail under construction. Photo: Mary Newsom

Stefanie Seskin of the National Complete Streets Coalition (whose report ranked Charlotte as 10th most dangerous), noted that speed is a factor in 1 in 3 traffic fatalities. Additionally, from 2003 to through 2012, more than 47,000 people died while walking on U.S. streets – 16 times the number who died in natural disasters during in the same period.

“We have a moral imperative to do better,” said Seskin.
The Charlotte contingent included several city officials, including Mike Davis and Liz Babson of Charlotte Department of Transportation and Deputy City Engineer Tim Richards, as well as Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Director Jim Garges.
We toured the Chicago’s stunning Millennium Park – built atop parking garages and a set of railway lines – as well as the under-construction 606 Project, a linear park on an unused, elevated freight line through neighborhoods west of downtown Chicago. (Both, I note, were made possible in part due to the city already owning the land.)
Millennium Park benefited from a number of extremely generous philanthropic donors; 115 donors gave at least $1 million. In other words, private donors in Chicago made their support for parks very public.

We who were on the Charlotte team are putting our heads together to see what events or improvements might happen relatively quickly here. We know local governments won’t be doling out Chicago-sized dollars, nor do we expect more than 100 local donors to pony up $1 million each.

But I think the soil here is more fertile than some folks might recognize. And although I’m someone who has owned an orchid that hasn’t bloomed in five years, even I can grow impatiens. I think Charlotte can, too.

Conducting a visual “audit” of sidewalks, we noted how planting squares offer informal seating. Photo: Mary Newsom

Charlotte’s lost old buildings may be costlier than we thought

Where a historic-district house once stood, in Dilworth

It’s sadly coincidental that this week, I went out to snap a photo of the lot where a vintage 1920s house in Dilworth has been demolished, just a few days after I read this article in the New York Times. The Times piece, “Urban Renewal, No Bulldozer: San Francisco repurposes old for the future,” describes how it’s San Francisco’s older buildings downtown that are luring the tech firms that so many cities – including Charlotte – hope to attract.

Charlotte’s Dilworth neighborhood is a turn-of-the-last-century streetcar suburb built a mile from the city’s uptown in an era when that was the edge of town. The section where the house was demolished is a local historic district. (This PlanCharlotte article describes growing discontent among some Dilworthians with the way that district has been managed over the past decade.)

In North Carolina, buildings in local historic districts can be demolished, as can local historic landmarks. The law says that if a city or county has a local historic district or landmarks ordinance, an appointed commission can delay
demolition by up to a year. That’s what the Historic District Commission did for the Dilworth house. But it’s a hot neighborhood, with numerous tear-downs of older, smaller homes being replaced by much larger, grander homes.

An aside: Don’t complain that the neighbors who don’t like the demolitions are just density-fighting NIMBYs. No increased density is being created here, just more impervious surface.

The sad irony is that because Charlotte’s civic personality has never valued older buildings, the city’s uptown has hardly any of those old buildings that in San Francisco are being upfitted. They’ve all been demolished because local development policies,shaped in large part by builders of tall office towers, never pushed for policies that would have better protected some of the older, smaller buildings: height limits, for instance, in parts of uptown, and restrictions on surface parking lots.

If you want to look for tech firms and start-ups that like the funky older buildings, you can visit uptown’s Packard Place, but in general you’ll have to widen your search far beyond uptown. Look to the old, industrial fringes of South End. Look along North Tryon Street and into Optimist Park, Belmont and Villa Heights, just north of the I-277 freeway loop, as well as up North Davidson Street. Look at the Plaza-Central business district, and beyond. Cast an eye on the city’s smaller, overlooked spots. That’s where those valued old building remain.

But with so little protection from city policy, will those spots remain? And it’s sadly ironic that Dilworth – the first of the city’s once-fading close-in neighborhoods to rebuild itself with 1970s urban pioneers – is now being devoured with demolitions.

What’s been keeping me busy? Trash

Plastic debris fouls a bridge over the Catawba River. Photo: Nancy Pierce

What’s been keeping me from blogging regularly these days? Trash.

To be more specific, I’ve become involved in a three-year project, through the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and the UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, to highlight environmental issues in and around Charlotte. We call it KEEPING WATCH.

Year One, which we are in the middle of, is KEEPING WATCH on PLASTICS and focuses on plastics and recycling. We’re working with a whole flock of community partners — you can read the long and growing list at keepingwatch.org.

If you missed it Sunday, here’s a lengthy article in The Charlotte Observer that goes into much detail. “Debris to beauty: Keeping WATCH exhibitions reveal the beauty in discarded plastics” describes many of the arts-related events taking place this spring. Disclosure: The “Aurora Robson: Stayin Alive” exhibit at McColl Center for Visual Art was planned separately but the concept dovetails well with the overall theme. Robson’s work will be on display through July 26.

We’ll host a “Clean Martini night” June 13 at UNC Charlotte Center City, 6-9 p.m., with locally sourced drinks sponsored by Slow Food Charlotte, locally sourced nibbles, and a screening of the film “Growing Cities.” It’s free and open to the public.

Other pieces of the project have included articles at PlanCharlotte.org from local writer Mae Israel:

Finally, the Sustain Me Baby exhibit at the UNC Charlotte Center City gallery highlights recyclable plastics and the problem of plastics in the oceans. And Is This Yours takes art out of the gallery, with totems made of bales of recycled plastic, by Kurt Warnke, displayed in uptown Charlotte as well as placing recyclable vinyl stickers with photos by Nancy Pierce. all over town. 
Next year’s KEEPING WATCH will be bigger and better. We’ll focus on Charlotte’s creeks, those maligned and mistreated urban streams that are finally being taken seriously as amenities. Well, some of them are… 

Can traffic deaths go the way of smallpox?

In the United States we have become desensitized to traffic deaths. That doesn’t mean we don’t mourn, of course, but it means we seem to have accepted them as just a normal part of living – much the way people used to accept death from smallpox or cholera. I’ve never understood why the continual stream of students killed driving to and from school is not cause for the sort of national campaigns that attended, for instance, the now-debunked idea that inoculations cause autism.

Isn’t there a different way to view traffic safety? There is. A New York Times article this week described how Sweden is pushing to reduce the country’s traffic deaths to as close to zero as they can get.

In “De Blasio Looks Toward Sweden for Road Safety,” reporter Matt Flegenheimer describes how the Swedish Parliament adopted Vision Zero in 1997 as the national foundation for all its road safety operations. Since then the number of traffic fatalities in Sweden has been cut in half. The fatality rate in Stockholm, 1.1 deaths per 100,000, is less than one-third of New York City’s rate. The national rate in Sweden, 2.7 deaths per 100,000, is the world’s lowest.

The article notes that in American states with Vision Zero policies, including Minnesota and Utah, fatality rates fell more than 25 percent more quickly than the national rate.

And, it says, Swedish authorities weren’t keen on the value of education or enforcement on pedestrian safety. (In 2012, after two men were hit in two days at Stonewall and College streets in uptown Charlotte, and one died, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police began a brief campaign of ticketing jaywalkers, although the two men who were hit were crossing the street in crosswalks.)


Tree ordinance proposal raises alarms around N.C.

Photo: Nancy Pierce

Charlotte likes to boast of its tree canopy, so a proposal at the state level to gut N.C. cities’ tree ordinances has gotten Charlotte City Council’s attention. At the council’ Environment Committee meeting on Wednesday, after a briefing about the measure, the committee referred the issue to another committee to devise a lobbying strategy with N.C. legislators. Here’s the PlanCharlotte.org article I wrote yesterday after the meeting.

But if you’d like to burrow a bit deeper into the issue, here are links to news coverage from around the state:

 It’s not entirely clear how the proposal emerged late in April from a state study panel, the Agriculture and Forestry Services Study Commission, its members appointed by the legislature and the governor.

But at one March meeting, the commission heard from an Iredell County nurseryman upset over municipal regulations in some cities over who pays for trees that get planted and aren’t acceptable to local government officials. And some state legislators, as well as developer lobbying groups, have said for years that some cities over-reach in their ordinances affecting private property.

Here’s a link to the agenda materials for the study commission’s March 28 meeting, with a copy of a
presentation from John Allen of Shiloh Nursery in Iredell County. Allen’s presentation shows a variety of news clips about an incident in 2011 in which the city of Charlotte fined Albemarle Road Presbyterian Church after a church member severely pruned crape myrtle trees (horticulturists call this kind of pruning “crape murder”) on church property but which apparently had been planted because of a requirement in the city’s ordinances. After a national outcry city officials dropped the fine, and said they were working with the church to educate members about pruning techniques that would not harm the trees.

Meanwhile, in Greensboro, civic discontent continues over what many believe to be extreme tree-trimming practices by Duke Energy. Last week a confrontation between a local couple and tree-trimmers led to police and an assistant city manager being called to the scene, and Mayor Nancy Vaughan getting involved. Here’s the report in Triad City Beat. Residents there have been so angry for so many years that last year the Greensboro City Council created a new tree ordinance aimed at preventing some of the more severe tree trimming.

Over the years utility tree-trimming has also infuriated residents in Charlotte neighborhoods. Some years back, when I was at the Charlotte Observer, I got a surprise phone call from then-Planning Director Martin Cramton, as angry as I had ever heard him, complaining of a contractor for Duke Energy who showed up in his back yard intending to, from what Cramton described, essentially clear-cut a part of the yard. Cramton, phoned by his wife, had rushed home and got the tree-cutting delayed for a time. But — maybe because Duke is headquartered in Charlotte, and then-Mayor Pat McCrory was an employee, or maybe because of how often fallen limbs disrupt power here — the Charlotte City Council never seriously discussed an anti-tree-trimming ordinance. The Planning Commission discussed possible ways to get more power lines buried. Those talks went nowhere, either.

What does Anthony Foxx have to say about transportation funding?

Former Charlotte Mayor and current Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx gave an interview to Yonah Freemark of the website The Transport Politic. As Freemark points out, despite Foxx saying things many transportation and transit fans agree with, the secretary didn’t make any commitments to changing the way U.S. transportation is funded. As Freemark says: “At the heart of the problem, as we all know, is that the transportatoin user fee model (premised on fuel tax revenues) has collapsed and no one is willing to do much of anything about it.”

Read the interview here:
“An interview with Secretary Foxx”

Congestion worsening, so buy more asphalt?

A new report from a Washington think tank and transportation research group says 44 percent of Charlotte’s major roads are in poor or mediocre condition, and increasing congestion is costing local drivers a work-week’s worth of delay. Read more at Eric Frazier’s article here. And here’s a link to the press release about the report.

The group is TRIP. But before you read it, check who’s on the board of directors: construction companies, asphalt and cement executives, road builder associations, etc. Its website says the group “is sponsored by insurance companies, equipment manufacturers, distributors and suppliers, businesses involved in highway and transit engineering and construction, labor unions, and organizations concerned with an efficient and safe surface transportation network that promotes economic development and quality of life.”

There is no denying that in many areas, especially high-growth suburban spots, traffic congestion is worsening. And no question that many roads and bridges need repairs, as do many city streets. This winter’s cold-warm-cold spells has certainly not helped.

But to assess congestion and to think road-building is the only solution is simplistic, even for places that – unlike
Charlotte – don’t have public transit systems and aren’t planing to. Other important tools are:

  • Connectivity. Policies that require plenty of interconnecting streets, even in the far fringes of a suburbanizing area.
  • Proximity. Land use policies that allow, or even require, more things to be closer to each other, not just so people can walk places easily, but so they don’t always have to drive 5 miles on a thoroughfare to get there.
  • Controlling where commercial goes. Land use policies that don’t allow highway-oriented  businesses to clog roads that have already been built. Examples: Independence Boulevard in Charlotte, North Tryon Street in Charlotte’s University City, the Monroe Bypass, Wilkinson/Franklin boulevard through Belmont and Gastonia, U.S. 24-27 in Albemarle. The list could go on.
  • Bike-ped projects. Making walking and bicycling easier using sidewalks, crossing lights and crosswalks, safe bicycle lanes (especially off-road) greenways, etc.
  • Downtowns. Making centrally located neighborhoods – in other words, downtowns – attractive places for people to live, work and shop means those residents are not out driving on overburdened roads nearly as often. 

When those conditions exist, along with good public transportation, sometimes people with choices will, in fact, choose not to drive. Read about four Charlotteans who have made that choice: “They’d rather not drive, thank you.”