Category: Fort Worth

Holiday reading, til Dec. 27

I’ll be on vacation until Monday Dec. 27, so you’ll have to make do. To keep you busy ’til then, here are a few links to interesting stories:

• Greensboro’s Kristen Jeffers writes in Grist.org about the distressing lack of black, female “urbanists.” “When I look around,” she writes, “I mostly see only one type of person associated with the urbanist label: young, white, and male. … The word ‘urban,’ when it’s associated with African-Americans, is often synonymous with housing projects, poverty, and the poisoned legacy of urban renewal. ” She’s an MPA student at UNC Greensboro concentrating in community and economic development. (Here’s her blog, The Black Urbanist.)

• The state of Oregon is considering a measure to ban single-use plastic checkout bags.

• Fort Worth’s City Council has pulled the plug on further study of a downtown streetcar. This appears to mean the city won’t accept a $25 million federal grant. (Hey, wonder if any of that now-available streetcar money might float Charlotte’s way?)

• A study at University of California-Berkeley finds that at any given moment there are at least 500 million EMPTY parking spaces in the U.S. Says Donald Shoup, a UCLA urban planning professor and author of the book “The High Cost of Free Parking.” “[Parking] is the single biggest land use in any city. It’s kind of like dark matter in the universe, we know it’s there, but we don’t have any idea how much there is.”

• CNN puts Charlotte on the map. Literally. In a piece, “Can streetcars save America’s cities?

• Utah mom cited for neglect for letting her kid walk to school by himself. Note: The school system, in budget cuts, took away his school bus. Coming soon to a CMS school near you?

Holiday reading, til Dec. 27

I’ll be on vacation until Monday Dec. 27, so you’ll have to make do. To keep you busy ’til then, here are a few links to interesting stories:

• Greensboro’s Kristen Jeffers writes in Grist.org about the distressing lack of black, female “urbanists.” “When I look around,” she writes, “I mostly see only one type of person associated with the urbanist label: young, white, and male. … The word ‘urban,’ when it’s associated with African-Americans, is often synonymous with housing projects, poverty, and the poisoned legacy of urban renewal. ” She’s an MPA student at UNC Greensboro concentrating in community and economic development. (Here’s her blog, The Black Urbanist.)

• The state of Oregon is considering a measure to ban single-use plastic checkout bags.

• Fort Worth’s City Council has pulled the plug on further study of a downtown streetcar. This appears to mean the city won’t accept a $25 million federal grant. (Hey, wonder if any of that now-available streetcar money might float Charlotte’s way?)

• A study at University of California-Berkeley finds that at any given moment there are at least 500 million EMPTY parking spaces in the U.S. Says Donald Shoup, a UCLA urban planning professor and author of the book “The High Cost of Free Parking.” “[Parking] is the single biggest land use in any city. It’s kind of like dark matter in the universe, we know it’s there, but we don’t have any idea how much there is.”

• CNN puts Charlotte on the map. Literally. In a piece, “Can streetcars save America’s cities?

• Utah mom cited for neglect for letting her kid walk to school by himself. Note: The school system, in budget cuts, took away his school bus. Coming soon to a CMS school near you?

Streetcar planning (or not), the Texas way

Charlotte as a model of planning? When it comes to its new federal streetcar grant, if you compare the Queen City to Fort Worth, Texas, the QC looks positively Swiss in its efficiency.

Fort Worth was another of the cities to win a $25 million federal grant for a streetcar project, reports Yonah Freemark in his piece in The Transport Politic, “Fort Worth Wins Grant for Streetcar, But Whether It’s Ready Is Another Question.” But Fort Worth doesn’t even have a route chosen for its streetcar from among six it’s studying. The city hasn’t yet decided on how its share would be funded. And without a route chosen, the exact costs are difficult to project.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram (disclosure, a fellow McClatchy Co. newspaper) editorialized that the city should leave the grant on the table. A local pro-transit blogger, Forthworthology, takes the editorial board to task for what it says are inaccuracies, such as saying the city’s cost would be $26.8 million, when no reliable cost estimate can be made until a route is chosen.

In the Transport Politic piece Freemark writes, “Unlike the streetcar lines proposed for Charlotte and Cincinnati, which are basically ready for construction, Fort Worth’s line is under-planned. The fact that the city has yet to settle on a final alignment is problematic since it means that Washington is agreeing to finance a project that has yet to be fully defined. Is that sound policy?”

It’s a good question. Many U.S. cities (including Winston-Salem and Columbia) are looking at launching streetcar projects. But until the Obama administration, streetcar projects were all but frozen out of any federal funding. That’s one reason the Federal Transit Administration took unspent transit money and created the pool of streetcar. With so many cities that could use the money, why give a grant to one that doesn’t seem ready?

An aside – I noticed reading the Star-Telegram editorial that the “Regional Transportation Council” has given money to the streetcar effort. Yet another metro region with a sane planning structure: The regional council of governments (known as a COG to planning technies), which does regionwide planning, is the same organization as the metropolitan planning organization (MPO), which does regional transportation planning. Well, duh.

Of course, in Charlotte we have four to six MPOs in our metro region, and they’re all separate from the COGs. So our transportation planning is both fractured and disconnected from land use planning.

Insanity. It’s one thing that helped give us a state-designed outerbelt in southern Mecklenburg designed with the state-held delusion that nearby land would remain rural.