CDOT – The Naked City Blog

What in the world is wrong with North College Street?

Street view, from Google Maps, of North College at Eighth Street, which tops the city’s high-accident list

This year’s list of high-accident intersections in Charlotte is up, and guess what. Once again one-way streets uptown are atop the list. Here’s the Charlotte Observer’s article. Notice, in the photo, the pedestrian ambiance (or lack thereof) along North College Street at Eighth Street, the No. 1 high-accident intersection.

See complete 2015 list as well as previous years. Note: it’s computer-generated and factors in the amount of traffic as well as the number and severity of accidents.

My observation this year is the same as two years ago, when I wrote about this report: One-way streets in and near uptown dominate the list. Is that a reason to switch more to two-way streets?

But Charlotte Department of Transportation officials disagreed with my thinking. Engineer Debbie Self, in charge of CDOT’s traffic and pedestrian safety programs, pointed out in 2013 that of the 150 intersections in uptown Charlotte, the majority involve at least one one-way street and most are not on the high-accident list. About North College Street in particular, in 2013, Self wrote:

“College Street in the areas of 7th, 8th & 9th Streets has been on the HAL [high accident list] for many years. It’s been hard to pin point a single underlying cause. Angle crashes account for about half of the crashes at College and 7th, 8th and 9th. CDOT will likely consider reflective back plates at the signals as a mitigation given our successful reduction in crashes at 5th/Caldwell.” [CDOT had attributed the 2013 decline in accidents at Fifth and Caldwell to the installation of the back plates.]

A peek at recent years’ high accident lists prompts these questions: Why keep this as a high-speed one-way street through the heart of your downtown? And since its high-accident intersections have comparatively light traffic, what is going on?

Some observations:

I walk along North College a lot, going to and from the UNC Charlotte Center City Building, and the rest of uptown. (At least, I did. Ninth and Eighth streets have been blocked for almost a year from construction of the light rail tracks.) So where are the cars involved in 2014 accidents coming from, especially at Eighth Street? My guess is they’re going to and from surface parking lots near the rail line, which have not closed. If you’re pulling in or out of a parking lot, you are not driving quickly. So it’s likely some accidents are caused by speeding drivers on North College Street mixing with motorists turning into lots or onto Eighth Street.

North College is a major, one-way artery through uptown just one block from, and parallel to, the main uptown street, Tryon Street, where flocks of pedestrians, bus and delivery trucks as well as some timed-to-slow-you traffic lights combine to make speed impossible. But North College comes to us from the street-as-highway school of traffic design. Head north (the only direction you can) from the light at Seventh and you go down a slight hill, encouraging you to speed up. There is no light at Eighth Street, because it is a tiny little street — actually I love its narrowness, which adds a sense of historical quaintness — with little traffic. In a car one might just blow past it altogether. I imagine a lot of motorists do just that.

If you’re on Ninth Street, it’s hard to see what’s coming on College. If you’re tempted to turn right on red, ignoring the sign banning it, you might well get slammed into by a car zipping up College Street.

The No.3 high accident intersection is one block north, North College at Ninth Street. (Google Maps)

Meanwhile, with the opening of the UNC Charlotte building and growing numbers of uptown residents, plus more bars and nightlife, more people are walking even on this rather unpleasant street — a street decidedly not designed for pedestrians.

Further, this area is only a block from two light rail stops (Seventh Street and the to-open-in-2017 Ninth Street). The area should be notably more pedestrian friendly. But with back-of-curb sidewalks, a lack of street trees for several blocks and surface parking lots way too prevalent, it isn’t.

Solution? CDOT can’t alter property lines or force land owners to stop tearing down older buildings and replacing them with surface parking lots or force them to develop the property if they don’t want to. So CDOT is left with the standard toolkit for traffic-calming: traffic humps (not bumps, but humps you can glide over at 20 mph but not at 40), stop signs (ugh), traffic circles, more on-street parking. What about a bike lane? No, the cars will not be able to travel as fast. But this is one block off main street in a city of 800,000. Slower is OK.

Or, might I suggest, turning it back into a two-way street?

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.

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 10^th 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

Least walkable city in U.S. is – wait a minute, that’s us!

Uptown is one of Charlotte’s most walkable areas, along with First and Fourth wards. Photo: Nancy Pierce

(Friday, Nov. 15: I’ve updated this with comments from Charlotte transportation officials. To see that expanded version, visit the article in PlanCharlotte.org: “Charlotte trails nation in walkability rankings.”)

Want to guess the large U.S. city rated worst for walkability by Walk Score, the national rating system?

That would be the Queen City. Take a look at the 2014 report. New York rated No. 1, followed by San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Miami.

But what does this ranking measure? The Walk Score website says it “measures the walkability of any address using a patent-pending system. For each address, Walk Score analyzes hundreds of walking routes to nearby amenities. Points are awarded based on the distance to amenities in each category. Amenities within a 5-minute walk (.25 miles) are given maximum points. A decay function is used to give points to more distant amenities, with no points given after a 30-minute walk.
Walk Score also measures pedestrian friendliness by analyzing population density and road metrics such as block length and intersection density. Data sources include Google, Education.com, Open Street Map, the U.S. Census, Localeze, and places added by the Walk Score user community.”

If I read that correctly, Walk Score doesn’t measure the existence of sidewalks (although Charlotte wouldn’t rank very high in that regard either). So this city’s typical Sun Belt-all-spread-out, low-density development means anything you’d want to walk to is probably farther away than in a more densely developed area.

Charlotte also would ran low in block length and intersection density – which essentially measures how well networked the city is with plenty of streets and street corners.Many parts of Charlotte developed during the cul-de-sac era, when streets intentionally did not connect to anything.
Even uptown, which at least had a strong grid when it was laid out a couple of centuries ago, has seen many instances of streets being eliminated to accommodate large-footprint projects such as ballparks, stadiums, convention centers and parks.

I’m seeking comment from Charlotte Department of Transportation officials, but I doubt this ranking will surprise them.

Transportation officials dispute my one-way theory

When I wrote last month about the surprising (to me) prominence of one-way streets uptown on the city’s High Accident List, aka HAL (“One-way to higher traffic accidents?“) , I said I had asked for a response to my observation from Transportation Director Danny Pleasant. He responded today. Here’s what he said:

Mary – Sorry it took a while to respond. I was in one of your favorite cities, Boston, earlier this week. It could not have been more beautiful. I explored the city on foot along two incredibly vibrant one-way streets: Boylston and Newberry. I’m not sure it would be possible to create more robustness, regardless of whether the streets were one-way or two.

Here is information regarding Charlotte’s one-way streets, prepared by Debbie Self, a talented engineer in charge of CDOT’s traffic and pedestrian safety programs:

“It’s fair to say there is not a significant safety concern with one-way streets. In uptown, there are roughly 150 intersections (100 are signalized and 50 are unsignalized). Of that total, the majority of intersections involve at least 1 one-way street. So one could say most of the intersections in uptown that have one-way streets are not on the HAL. There are 15 uptown locations (defined as inside the I-277 loop) on the 2013 HAL.

Other noteworthy comments:

Uptown collisions tend to involve fewer injuries because the travel speeds are much lower. Injury rates are not reflected in the HAL.

A few of the Uptown locations rose to the top 10 based on more accurate traffic volume counts. The updated traffic counts were lower which resulted in a higher ranking on the HAL (the crashes by year remained about the same). Some of last year’s top 10 locations moved down because of higher volumes or a safety enhancement was completed.

5th/Caldwell had fewer crashes in 2012 because CDOT installed reflective back plates on the traffic signals to address angle crashes.

College Street in the areas of 7th, 8th & 9th Streets has been on the HAL for many years. It’s been hard to pin point a single underlying cause. Angle crashes account for about half of the crashes at College and 7th, 8th and 9th. CDOT will likely consider reflective back plates at the signals as a mitigation given our successful reduction in crashes at 5th/Caldwell.

The HAL is published annually to raise awareness of intersections with an elevated crash rate. It is a tool to identify location that have potential opportunity for mitigation of crashes and/or reduction in the severity of crashes.

Distractions/not paying attention continue to be the highest contributing circumstance for all crashes. That’s true for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. We want to emphasize keeping your mind on the task at hand – walking, driving, or biking.”

One-way to higher traffic accidents?

I don’t want this bit of city-traffic-related news to get lost in the recent deluge of news about Charlotte’s airport. The numbers raise a question, in my mind at least, about the safety of one-way streets uptown.

Earlier this month Charlotte’s Department of Transportation released its annual list of High Accident Locations. To see it, download it here. (Be sure to notice what it does and doesn’t measure; for instance it doesn’t measure traffic accidents on interstate highways.) The report drew a news article in The Charlotte Observer, “Report: Charlotte traffic collisions down; fatalities up.”

Here’s what I noticed: Among the Top 10 high accident locations, seven were either uptown or nearby. Of those seven, all but one involved one-way streets. The only one of those seven that did not was East Seventh Street and Hawthorne Lane, in the Elizabeth neighborhood.

The city’s top high accident location was Cambridge Commons Drive and Harrisburg Road (average daily traffic of 15,000), in east Charlotte near I-485, with a three-year total of 49 accidents and a crash rate (a formula taking into account the traffic volume – to know more download the report) of 2.98.

Other in-town streets:
2. North College Street and East Eighth Street.
3. North College Street and East Ninth Street.
5. Third-fourth Connector Street and East Fourth Street at Kings Drive.
7. East Seventh Street and Hawthorne Lane.
8. South Church Street and West Hill Street and the ramp to West Belk Freeway.
9. East Seventh and North College Street.

If you’re thinking that correlation (one-way streets and high number of accidents) does not equal causation, of course you are right. The streets were converted to one-way years ago by traffic engineers who wanted to get vehicles into and out of uptown as efficiently as possible. That was the thinking several decades ago. So busy streets are going to have more accidents.

But the crash rate takes the street’s business into account. What else might account for the striking number of uptown one-way streets that are atop the high accident list? Could it be speed? Could it be people driving home from work and just not taking as much care? (The report also shows that mid- to late afternoon rush hour is the time of day with more accidents.)

But notice something interesting: The No. 11 High Accident Location was East Fifth Street and North Caldwell Street. Notice the accident numbers over three years: 10 in 2010, 11 in 2011 but dropping to 6 in 2012. That intersection used to be where two one-way streets crossed. But from Fifth Street south, Caldwell has been converted to two-way. Did that cause the lower number of accidents in 2012?

I’ve emailed CDOT Director Danny Pleasant, to see if he had comments. I’ll add them if he responds.

By Jove, I think they’ve got it!

There, that wasn’t so hard to figure out, was it?

Back in the winter, when the reverse-angle parking was installed in the Plaza-Central business district, which requires you to back in, and people weren’t doing it right, I wondered if they’d ever figure it out. Here’s a link to a WCNC-TV piece on motorists’ inability to grasp the concept.

As this hilarious article from Charlotte magazine recounts, so many people were just not getting it that the city held a press conference and hired a guy to do a rap song, to demonstrate:

“This was a news conference, an honest-to-God news conference, in which Charlotte city officials demonstrated how to back into a parking spot. And they brought a rapper.”

Last Saturday, my spouse and I decided we should visit the amazing new Harris Teeter grocery store at Central and The Plaza (It’s two stories, y’all!) because we do lead rather boring lives. After we conquered the problem of how to find the second floor, and ascended and realized there’s nothing there but tables where you can eat your Teeter Deli purchases, we bought a few necessaries and left.

On the way home, we drove past the formerly infamous reverse-angle parking. If Saturday is anything typical, I’m here to report that by cracky, people have figured it out. Not a single car was parked front-end-in.

Way to go, PM-ers.

Safer sidewalks ahead

Starting next week, the City of Charlotte launches a publicity campaign to get residents to keep sidewalks clear. They’ll start with a campaign about garbage and recycling carts, yard waste and other bulky items.

This is much-needed, and some might say long overdue. A tragic accident last May killed a Myers Park High School student riding a bikee to school along a Sharon Lane sidewalk which was next to the curb. He encountered a rollout garbage bin blocking the sidewalk, and in trying to avoid it clipped the bin and fell into the street. He was hit by a car and killed.

In my walks around the city I note this is a problem in many places. The city built many back-of-curb sidewalks well into the 1990s, to save money. Where to put the rollout garbage and recycling bins? If you put them in your driveway you can’t get out of your own driveway. Sometimes there’s room to put them in the yard next to the sidewalk. Sometimes there isn’t, especially if the lot slopes steeply up or down.

Yard waste is another problem: One Sunday morning not too long ago I was walking down Wendover Road and
someone had pile massive amounts of tree branches along the whole property frontage, completely blocking the sidewalk next to a steep slope. Nowhere to walk but in the street. I was trying (helpfully, I thought) to move some of the brush up onto the slope and the resident in the home came out and yelled at me. I confess, I yelled back, something about what “right-of-way” means and that the sidewalk was one, and that I had the “right” to go that way. She just yelled back and I gave up and walked in the busy, 4-lane street. Good thing that I was not in a wheelchair trying to get to a bus stop and that it was not rush hour.

Below is from the weekly memo to the Charlotte City Council, from the city manager. I’m glad to see they’ll tackle the problem of overgrown shrubbery later. I’ve considered going out armed with hedge clippers, to hack my way through some places. The memo:

“Solid Waste Services, in collaboration with Corporate Communications & Marketing, CDOT [Charlotte Department of Transportation] and Neighborhood & Business Services, will launch the first phase of a public campaign to increase community awareness of the need to keep sidewalks clear of obstructions.

“The first phase of the campaign, which begins on January 28, will focus on sidewalk obstructions associated with solid waste collections – garbage/recycling carts, yard waste and bulky items – as well as other items such as parked vehicles that impede sidewalk traffic. Educational efforts will aim to increase public awareness of the proper placement of collection items and offer alternatives for residents with limited options. Code Enforcement officers will be monitoring problem areas and will be providing educational assistance via door hangers.

“Campaign components will include radio ads (WLKO, WNKS, WLNK, WPEG, WOSF, WOLS and WKQC), online ads (Yahoo), Solid Waste Services truck decals, a utility bill insert in March, social media, Gov Channel billboards, segments in City Source, community meetings, door hangers and community newsletters. A website, sidewalksafety.charlottenc.gov will launch on January 28 as a resource for additional information on keeping sidewalks clear.

“The second phase of the campaign, which addresses additional obstructions such as overgrown shrubs, is set to launch this summer. Staff will update Council when this phase of the campaign begins.”

Who owns the street outside your house, and who gets to park there?

Parking. It’s a dilemma for cities, towns and even hamlets. The more you make accommodations for drivers (that is, most adults) who need to park vehicles, the uglier and less functional you are likely to make your city.

Yes, you can find exceptions: Parking decks lined on all sides with stores or condos or offices. (Want examples? Visit the Gateway area of uptown along West Trade Street across from Johnson & Wales University.) But those projects are notably more expensive than your basic surface lot that slicks a coat of asphalt over the dirt. That’s one reason a large chunk of uptown Charlotte, beyond the main corridors, is a dead-zone of surface parking lots. Fully one fifth of First Ward is covered with surface parking lots. In a city with some 75,000 uptown workers and limited transit service, people are going to drive. Just saying, “Don’t drive,” is not a helpful option.

On-street parking in College Downs will be restricted. Photo: Corbin Peters

As many have noted – with UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup maybe the most prominent among them – free parking isn’t. Wal-Mart may be surrounded by acres of “free” asphalt for you and your Camry, but Wal-Mart has to pay for that land and for the paving and repaving. The parking cost is built in to the price of what you buy there. Even if you don’t shop at Wal-Mart, you pay for their lot, because as a taxpayers you foot the bill for storm drainage systems and anti-pollution measures to accommodate the torrents of rainwater that run off, most of it carrying pollutants.
So on-street parking emerges as one of the most cost-effective and sensible ways to provide parking. The streets are already built and paved, and publicly owned by all of us, and publicly available to all of us. But …

Ever had some dingbat park at the end of your driveway so you can’t back out? Ever had to weave through landscapers’ trucks and massive SUVs parked on both sides of a narrow neighborhood street? On-street parking isn’t always comfortable for everyone.

Now, imagine you live in an established neighborhood right across a busy street from a 26,000-student state university, which charges its students and employees for parking – as it should because, after all, it costs N.C. taxpayers to build those lots and decks. The non-student residents in the College Downs neighborhood, understandably, got fed up with students and others parking all up and down their streets. They asked the city to ban on-street parking. So the city did.

The problem of managing parking raises plenty of questions, and not just near UNC Charlotte. Few of the answers are easy. PlanCharlotte.org writer Corbin Peters examined the College Downs situation in “As the city urbanizes, who gets to use the streets?“

Now imagine, for a minute, what would happen in Manhattan if a group of residents asked the city to ban on-street parking on a street because they didn’t like it. They’d be laughed off the island. But even in other large, parking-stressed cities, odd notions of ownership will arise around streets and parking places. In Boston, some people who have to park on the street will shovel out their cars in winter, and before they drive away, “reserve” their spot with a chair or other place-holder until they return. After all, shoveling out is hard work and why should somebody else benefit from your work?
But Charlotte is not Manhattan, or Boston. Here, we mostly assume we’ll be able to park easily and for “free.” At least, for now we do. In 20 years, I predict, those assumptions will have changed.

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