Category: Harry West

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

  

No, DON’T make 485 top priority

I’m going out on an opinion limb here, but I’ve been trying to figure out why just about every elected official around here seems to take it on faith that finishing that final leg of the outerbelt should be at the top of all local transportation spending lists. It shouldn’t. There are better and more useful ways to spend that estimated $220 million.

Putting a lot more of it into Charlotte’s transit system and better — faster and more frequent — rail service between North Carolinas cities would be a good place to start. Yes, it’s expensive. But it would solve a lot more congestion than any urban loop road ever would. Yes, the money’s in different legal “buckets.” So change the law, already.

Meanwhile, we should get smarter in using state and federal transportation money restricted for streets and roads. There are plenty of legitimate projects in Mecklenburg County that are sorely needed, as development has overtaken old farm-to-market roads. But instead of building the typical NCDOT-style four-lane country highways, build four-lane boulevards. This is, after all, a city.

And this is the most important part of this piece: Build plenty of streets that connect. The more connections, the less the load on any one road. And can we stop calling them “roads”? They’re streets. Streets are what you have in cities. Roads are what you have in the country.
Did I mention that this is, after all, a city?

On those interconnected streets, build (or require others to build) sidewalks and bike lanes. If key thoroughfares need connecting, buy the houses that stand in the way, and connect where needed.

Note what the state of Virginia has done. The state recently decided it will no longer maintain (or even plow) state-owned streets in new subdivisions that don’t meet state requirements for connectivity and sidewalks. Here’s a link to a WashPost story. The reasoning is sound: State taxpayers are funding road widenings that wouldn’t be necessary if subdivisions and other developments were required to connect with each other. And disconnected neighborhoods pose a serious problem for emergency services.

That’s true in North Carolina as well. Your tax dollars will pay for a Shelby bypass to bypass the current Shelby bypass, because Shelby and Cleveland County welcomed all that sprawling development along the U.S. 74 Bypass (while sort of pretending it also was supporting its downtown. Come on.)

Ditto Monroe, although are planned to help pay some of the planned Monroe bypass. Supposedly. (And anyway, it’s looking as if the “Finish The Outerbelt” forces will use up that Monroe bypass money for a few years.) Ditto widening Providence Road, a state highway needlessly carrying thousands more vehicles than it would if developers had been required to connect their developments with a street network. But the developers didn’t want to do that, because customers like to live on cul-de-sacs, so local rule-makers didn’t make them.

Sure, that little gap atop 485 looks weird. But in terms of solving traffic congestion, it’s a nonstarter. Loop roads have no history of solving congestion in any city. They generally clog shortly after they open, because local elected officials happily OK just about any development proposed anywhere along the route — thus packing the outerbelt with what is, essentially, local traffic. That’s one important reason I-485’s southern leg is so congested. Mecklenburg County commissioners, plus municipal officials in Charlotte, Pineville and Matthews, pretty much let any developer who wanted to build anything do so.

What we need, instead of widening 485, is about 10 more connector streets besides 485, N.C. 51 and the handful of others.

Indeed, old-timers remember when the outerbelt was first proposed back in the 1960s, its rationale was more openly stated in those innocent times. It was “to open land for development.” Transportation rationalizations came much later, after developers had already snapped up the land along the route.

Hardly any local transportation professionals believed the outerbelt was necessary, longtime local transportation planner Bill Coxe told me more than a decade ago. But knowing the powers pushing it, they didn’t openly oppose it. “That bulldozer was way too big for anybody to get down in front of,” Coxe told me.

I remember in 1998, hearing Harry West, the longtime director of the Atlanta Regional Commission, who had seen how Atlanta’s Perimeter Highway pushed that city’s sprawl. Speaking about I-485, he told a Charlotte conference sponsored by, among other groups, the Charlotte Chamber: “If I thought you would listen to me, I’d tell you not to build it.”

Obviously, we didn’t listen to him. And we still aren’t.