Category: Gaston County

Five key takeaways from Charlotte’s newest transit plan

The chosen Silver Line route is shown in green, at right, along 11th Street. The blue line shows where the Trade Street tunnel would have run. Other options not chosen are a surface route along Trade Street (purple) and a route along the existing Blue Line.

No tunnel uptown. A light rail line crossing the Catawba River into Belmont. Finally light rail to Pineville?

When the Charlotte Area Transit System’s policy body on Wednesday unanimously adopted an update to its 2030 Transit System Plan, those optimistic visions became part of the official CATS planning process.

Note to readers: CATS doesn’t currently have money to build any of those things, estimated to cost $6 billion or more. Just so you know.

But here are some key takeaways from what the Metropolitan Transit Commission adopted.
1. No tunnel uptown. CATS hired consultants WSP (the former Parsons Brinckerhoff) to study a tricky issue – how would the proposed Silver Line (formerly known as the Southeast Corridor), get across all the freeways encircling uptown, then through uptown and head west on its route to Charlotte Douglas International Airport and over the Catawba River?

CATS’ existing light rail line, the Blue Line and Blue Line Extension, travel through uptown on a pre-existing rail corridor. The proposed Silver Line would not. It’s planned to run alongside Independence Boulevard and then head west, thereby adding the former West Corridor to the Silver Line. Any way you look at it, getting that sucker through uptown will mean complicated engineering and high costs.

One option WSP proposed was to tunnel under Trade Street to the existing Charlotte Transportation Center, a hub for most bus routes as well as a Blue Line light rail stop, and up West Trade Street to the not-yet-built Gateway Station, which would also hold a new Amtrak station. Gateway Station is also envisioned as the terminus for the long-proposed-but-still-distant Red Line commuter rail to north Mecklenburg. More about that later.

The MTC opted not for the tunnel but for a route running the Silver Line above ground, beside 11th Street, then alongside the existing Amtrak route beside Elmwood Cemetery, over to Gateway Station and then heading west to the airport. It’s less expensive to build, although the tunnel route would have cost less to operate, over time, the consultants said, and would have shortened Silver Line travel time considerably. (Update as of March 8: Brock LaForty, the Carolinas area manager for WSP, says the consultants’ analysis found the tunnel route would save two minutes per trip, a difference
LaForty called marginal, and said WSP had not analyzed whether the tunnel would cost less to operate over time. The statements about travel time and lower operating costs were the personal opinions of Ron Tober, a former CATS CEO who was working for WSP as a consultant on the project until this month.)

2. At long last, Pineville welcomes light rail. Ever wondered why the Lynx Blue Line ends where it does, just outside the south Mecklenburg municipality of Pineville? The stated reason from Pineville officials when the Blue Line was planned almost two decades ago was that the town didn’t want the high-density, transit-oriented development that would, rail boosters proclaimed, spring up all along the line. So the Blue Line ends at I-485, just outside Pineville. 

“Saved us $30 million,” recalled Ron Tober, who was CATS CEO at the time and who happened to be sitting next to me Wednesday night.

For the record, to date no high-density, transit-oriented development has yet come anywhere near Pineville.

And on Oct. 9 of last year, the Town of Pineville adopted a resolution to support the prospect of CATS someday extending its light rail line to Pineville’s Carolina Place Mall and then to Ballantyne in far south Charlotte. “Pineville stakeholders now recognizes (sic) the need to extend the line into Pineville, the Ballantyne area and beyond to … improve the accessibility of rapid transit and provide a faster link to and from other parts of the Greater Charlotte area …” the resolution states.

3. Finally, light rail to the airport, and into Gaston County. Someday. The proposed transit corridor formerly known as the West Corridor, and (sort of) planned to be a streetcar is now officially part of the proposed Silver Line. It would be light rail along Wilkinson Boulevard past the airport, across the Catawba River and end in the Gaston County town of Belmont. This would be CATS’ first light rail venture across county lines. Further, an ongoing Regional Transit Study would evaluate light rail to downtown Gastonia.

Gastonia Mayor Walker Reid III on Wednesday presented a city proclamation supporting the idea of light rail to Gastonia. Politically, Gaston County has been deep red, with Republican county commissioners less than a decade ago complaining that greenways were, in essence, creeping socialism. So this is progress of a sort.

The West Corridor, now renamed part of the Silver Line, would run along Wilkinson Boulevard (the route shown in purple) and cross the Catawba River into Belmont in Gaston County.

4. Still no commuter rail to north Mecklenburg, for now.  The updated plan calls for short-, medium- and long-term options heading north. Short-term would be enhanced express-lane bus service along I-77 to and from the north Mecklenburg towns, using the soon-to-open I-77 toll lanes. Medium term would be bus rapid transit from Gateway Station to Mooresville in southern Iredell County. This service would be all-day, including nights and weekends. Bus rapid transit (a.k.a. BRT) uses dedicated lanes so it’s faster than regular bus service.

Long-term, the plan would be to keep talking with Norfolk Southern about using its rarely used rail right-of-way from uptown Charlotte to Mooresville for rail transit – maybe commuter rail as was originally proposed.

5. Even some Union County enthusiasm. If Gaston County is red, then Union County is, if such a thing is possible, even deeper red. Nevertheless, the town of Stallings passed a resolution asking CATS to at least study the possibility of extending the Silver Line from Matthews into Union County and to a potential terminus in Stallings. So CATS will study that.

Remember, though, there’s no money for CATS to build any new light rail. And to date not one of the surrounding counties has proposed taxing its own residents, as Mecklenburg does with its half-cent sales tax for transit, to help build out the transit system.

Read more details here: “Charlotte unveils new transit options.”

A myriad of municipalities – the Gaston v. Union bakeoff

For years, as a public policy geek and former state editor, I’ve believed Union County, just southeast of Charlotte, has more municipalities than any other county in North Carolina. A frenzy of incorporations in the 1990s and early 2000s pushed Union ahead of Gaston County, which had held the record — at least as far as we knew.

But after doing a bit of research (for something else) I have learned that we in the N.C. Piedmont cannot hold a candle to the coastal county of Brunswick. At least, not if the N.C. League of Municipalities website can be trusted.

Check this out:
http://www.nclm.org/resource-center/municipalities/Pages/By%20County.aspx

Brunswick County has 19 incorporated municipalities, outstripping Union’s paltry 15.

And Union has 15 only if you count Mint Hill, almost all of which is in Mecklenburg County. Robeson County has 15 municipalities, and though two (Maxton, Red Springs) are split across two counties, they are predominantly in Robeson.

Gaston has only 14, and that includes two municipalities straddling the county line: Kings Mountain believes itself to be
part of Cleveland County. High Shoals is in Gaston and Lincoln counties.

Wake County also has 15 municipalities, according to the league’s list. But that list counts Durham (Durham County), Clayton (Johnston County) and Angier (Harnett County), and it splits Zebulon between Wake and Johnston counties and Wake Forest between Wake and Franklin counties. Both of those towns think of themselves as Wake County places. Subtract Durham, Clayton and Angier and Wake has 12 municipalities.

Bottom line: Brunswick County wins the most municipalities title. Its smallest is Bolivia, population 146, and Bald Head Island, 160. 

Images of near-dead suburbia

Some of you may be shocked to learn this, but the Naked City Blog is only a small part of my job. I’m the director of the new PlanCharlotte.org website, part of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. The site’s goal, since its launch a few months back, is to cover, in a journalistic way, events and trends in growth, planning, environmental and urban issues from the greater Charlotte region.

Castlebrooke in Kannapolis, about 20 miles northeast of Charlotte

Yesterday PlanCharlotte and the UNCC Urban Institute posted a series of what I think are stunning images by local photographer Nancy Pierce, of a sampling of abandoned subdivisions in the region. They are haunting, depicting nature reclaiming street drains, kudzu climbing over roll-over curbs, a swimming pool in the middle of a scraped-earth lot, subdivision entry gates looking like ancient medieval ruins.

Some of the developments remain stalled, or maybe dead. The top photo is from Apple Creek in Gastonia and Gaston County, about 20 miles west of Charlotte. The one at the end of this is from the site of the former Charlotte Coliseum, where City Park was to have been a large mixed-use development of homes, offices, stores and a hotel. (A proposal to build apartments there is now in the works, the article says.)

Others, too, such as Castlebrooke (shown directly above), may be stirring to life again. As planner Kris Krider of Kannapolis tells PlanCharlotte writer Josh McCann, in retrospect, it might not have been wise for Kannapolis to annex land so far from its core, because that can strain the city’s police force and require new fire stations and water and sewer infrastructure. But the city has already made those investments, and so it needs houses to materialize, to generate revenue to cover costs.

But the photo series and the article, together, should serve as a caution to government leaders as well as private businesses. Is all growth “good” regardless or where or what it is? Can we ever knit these developments into a town or a city, or will they remain isolated pods in remote areas? Or will the kudzu overtake them in the end?

Where Charlotteans once went to see Charlotte Hornets Dell Curry and Muggsy Bogues in action

 
Click here for article.
Click here for photo gallery. 

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.