Category: Cary NC

Lost in Cary, an American suburb

I was amused recently by an article about the state’s über-suburb, Cary – “Lost in Cary? Officials hope to show the way.”  It seems people get lost there – a lot.
If you’re not familiar with Cary, it’s a municipality just west of Raleigh. With 135,000 people, it’s now the state’s seventh largest municipality, bigger than the historic port city of Wilmington and furniture-famous High Point. But because Cary has grown so dramatically during the past few decades – America’s age of suburban-style growth – it doesn’t really have what most of us would think of as a downtown.
Bing Maps view of Cary Town Hall in “downtown” Cary
 “We used to hear a lot of people say that they didn’t know Cary had a downtown, they didn’t know where it was, particularly from people who said they didn’t live in Cary,” the News & Observer article quotes Cary  Planning Manager Philip Smith as saying.

The article also says the town has set aside tens of millions of dollars to make its downtown a destination again, not just to west Cary but to the entire region. “The plan is to seed the old town heart with arts and cultural venues, a new reason to make a half-hour trip across Cary,” the article says.

It’s a dilemma for more places than just Cary. Cornelius and Huntersville, two robust Charlotte suburbs in northern Mecklenburg County that began their lives as hamlets along a railroad line and sprouted vast subdivisions and strip shopping centers, have each been trying to build something like a downtown for a couple of decades now.  The Charlotte suburb of Harrisburg, perched just over the Cabarrus County line from UNC Charlotte, took a stab at building a downtown-type center, too. Here’s what the website I run, PlanCharlotte.org, reported earlier this year about Harrisburg’s town center: “Harrisburg N.C.: In search of a town center.”

Can Cary figure out how to make different parts of the town look different enough so that people don’t get lost? Should it? I have my own ideas (you’ll not be surprised to learn!) but I wonder what others think. I should also note here that Cary has had a reputation among many of North Carolina’s planners as a well-planned municipality.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/11/26/2508857/lost-in-cary.html#storylink=cpy

What’s fastest-growing U.S. city? Hint: Southern, suburban

Bloomberg Businessweek crunched the numbers. It found a town that grew 838 percent between 1990 and 2010, going from 3,567 to 33,484 people. Since 2000 it grew 63.47 percent. 

If that sounds like Huntersville, or maybe Indian Trail, well it isn’t. It’s Olive Branch, Miss., about 20 miles south of Memphis. Here’s the Memphis Commercial Appeal article. And here’s the Businessweek article.

The analysis looked at year-over-year growth in households, 2000-10, and other factors, such as the 2010 average length of residence and the change in average household income from 2000 to 2010. But household growth was the dominant factor. The Businessweek article notes that it didn’t go strictly by city or municipal boundary lines. By its measures, the fastest-growing city in North Carolina was Cary. The site notes that the Raleigh-Cary metro area was the fourth-fastest growing in the U.S. from 2000 to 2010.

And the fastest-growing city in South Carolina is Charlotte’s just-over-the-line neighbor, Fort Mill.  

Parking, planning and bypasses

Today’s post is a grab bag of interesting items for your perusal.

1. Envisioning development, and making planning more accessible to citizens. The Town of Cary has created a Virtual Interactive Planner. Here’s what Dan Matthys, communications and information planner with the town, had to say about why they did it:
Our development process is actually pretty complex, and it involves processes that have a lot of “it depends” and “maybes,” and it wasn’t clear to our citizens when they had a chance to speak and when they didn’t have a chance, how long the process was or what the different steps are to that process. So the mayor asked us to develop something that would be more intuitive, and we decided we needed something fancier than some sort of PowerPoint decision-making tool.
Read more about it, on this planetizen.com story, “Making Planning More Accessible.”
(Hat tip to Planetizen.com for that one.)

2. Parking space census. The City of San Francisco is probably the first in the country to have actually counted ALL its parking spaces. Here’s a Streetsblog.org piece on the effort. The magic number, it appears, is 442,541 spaces, 280,000 of which are on-street spaces. Its part of a federally funded parking management experiment (“SF’s parking experiment to test Shoup’s traffic theories”) in which the city will experiment with dynamic parking demand management, intended to tell people where the parking spaces are at any given moment so they don’t circle and circle, searching. The experiment is funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant.
Parking is a conundrum for most cities. “How we love/hate our parking lots” was my recent op-ed on the topic.

3. USA Today tells us “More cities ban digital billboards.” Among U.S. cities that have banned the billboards: Durham; Knoxville, Tenn.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Dallas and Fort Worth and Houston, all in Texas.

And Charlotte? It had the chance to ban them several years ago and after a lengthy stakeholder process (see my stakeholder thoughts “Pulling back the stakeholder curtain” here) opted to allow them.

4. The South Tryon Street road diet experiment has begun (“Another road diet, this one for South Tryon”). I know this because it is right in front of The Observer building, and because I have walked to work twice since blogging about it and I can verify that the bollards are up, AND that Hill Street between South Tryon and Church Street is now two-way.

5. Your highway dollars at work. Ground was broken today on the Sanford bypass. Here’s a photo of pols with gold shovels. Sanford is a town of about 27,000 people. The fact that our tax dollars are building it a bypass should raise many, many questions in your mind. The Good Roads State has become the State of Pointless Bypasses.

My theory: No city gets more than one bypass. (Monroe, Shelby et al have failed to control their land use development and have both clogged their bypasses – both of them U.S. 74, as it happens – and in so doing managed to all but gut their downtowns. They aren’t the only towns that have done this, they’re just two I’m familiar with. And both want new, bypass-bypasses.)