Category: MPOs

Which mayors weighed in on airport issue?

More regional voices are diving into the issue of who should control the Charlotte/Douglas International Airport.  This morning’s Charlotte Observer has an article from Jim Morrill, “Mayors urge delay on airport bill.” 

The article quotes Miles Atkins of Mooresville saying a dozen mayors at a regular meeting last week of a group called the Regional Conference of Mayors Central Carolinas Advisory Board

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/04/25/4003485/mayors-urge-delay-on-airport-bill.html#storylink=cpy

discussed the issue with Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx.

It also quotes Matthews Mayor Jim Taylor as concerned that the airport bill is another example “of those in Raleigh trying to whittle away at local control.

“We’re just asking them … to hold off making a decision so there is additional time to investigate all the ramifications with all parties at the table,” Taylor said. “We keep hearing they (Charlotte) have done something wrong, but we don’t know any details.

“We want to know specifically what is driving the need for this legislation. We haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer.”

The sponsors of the bill, N.C. Sen. Bob Rucho and N.C. Rep. Bill Brawley, are also from Matthews.

According to Morrill, the mayors who signed a letter to N.C. House Speaker Thom Tillis, R-Mecklenburg, urging delay on the bill were: Atkins of Mooresville, Taylor of Matthews, plus:

  • Belmont Mayor Richard Boyce
  • Spencer Mayor Jody Everhart
  • Waxhaw Mayor Daune Gardner
  • Statesville Mayor Costi Kutteh 

The issue has created discussion throughout the Charlotte region about regional cooperation. To read more:
Regional cooperation at risk? 
Threatened revote on bypass didn’t happen
 and, from the Observer: 
Emotions high over airport authority push

MUMPO no more

While reporting further on the Charlotte City Council vote Monday to seek a re-vote on a resolution supporting the Monroe Bypass I learned of a name change.

But first, it’s important to note the vote to be possibly revisited was on a resolution, not a measure directly affecting the project’s funding; I’ve updated the original blog, “Charlotte council, smarting over airport resolutions, threatens Monroe Bypass,” to clarify that.)

The Mecklenburg Union Metropolitan Planning Organization, known for years as MUMPO, has renamed itself the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization (CRTPO), says MUMPO (or CRTPO?) Secretary Robert Cook.

As I’ve opined in the past, since the 2010 census brought portions of Iredell and Lincoln counties into the jurisdiction of the MPO, I was hoping for MILUMPO. I have an odd fascination with the bizarre names of the regional transportation groups surrounding Charlotte, not to mention a continuing frustration that transportation planning in this huge metro region is fractured among so many groups: GUAMPO, CRMPO, GHMPO, RRRPO (the pirate?) and RFATS. What do those excellent acronyms stand for? Read it here: “No more MUMPO. Get ready for … MILUMPO?“

Region’s planning footprint set to expand

How sane is transportation planning in the Charlotte region? Depends, I guess, on how you define sane. Plenty of sane people take part in the planning, of course.

But the organizing device, the Metropolitan Planning Organization (a.k.a. MPO,) is not configured in any sane way. For instance, the MPO for Charlotte – you know, the city of 750,000 or so in the middle of the huge metro region – does not include Cabarrus, Gaston, Iredell, Lincoln or York counties. It now includes only a portion of Union County and a teeny sliver of Iredell. This Charlotte-area MPO is known as MUMPO – the Mecklenburg-Union Metropolitan Planning Organization.

That’s about to change, bringing a modest improvement. Based on the 2000 Census, the federal rules that define what can/should be in an MPO mean the Charlotte-area MPO must expand. It’s all based on what’s called an “urbanized area,” which is a “metro region” which is not the same as the many, many other “metro regions” you may have heard of, such as the Centralina Council of Governments‘ region, the Charlotte Regional Partnership‘s region, the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s region, etc.  (Want to see a mash-up map of all those regions laid atop each other? Try this link.) Note of clarification here, added at 2:44 p.m.: Unlike many metro regions, MUMPO plans ONLY transportation projects. It’s a separate organization from the Council of Governments, which is ostensibly a regional planning group. Sort of. And of course, one of the first things you learn in Planning 101 is that land use planning and transportation planning are, or should be, joined at the hip. Whatever.

So I’m sitting at the policy-wonkish session of the Charlotte City Council’s Transportation and Planning Committee, hearing a report on MPO expansion. Here’s a link to download the proposed new map. Pictured above is a small version of the map.

The good news: Expanding the MPO is much smarter than not doing so. It’s not expanded out to what it should be (for Pete’s sake, why not include Cabarrus and Gaston?) but it’s clearly better. After all, as MPO secretary Robert Cook just told the panel, Marshville is now considered part of the “urbanized area.”  As is all of southern Iredell County, north to north of Interstate 40.

But will the name change?
I’ve proposed MILUMPO although, I admit it, it was sort of tongue-in-cheek. I’ve had fun in the past with the names of all the regional MPOs and RPOs. (Yes, there are rural planning organizations, too.) GUAMPO, RFATS, RRRPO, etc. are just too funny to pass up.

But Robert Cook just said the MUMPO members think they’d rather keep the acronym and come up with new words to match the letters. “Metrolina Unified something or other …” was one name mentioned here.  Council member Patsy Kinsey piped up with, “I hate the word Metrolina.” She is not alone.

There’s a lot of minutiae being discussed, though the details in this sort of thing matter. Do towns under 5,000 population get a vote? Previously they did not. Should the MPO members pay a piece of the local matching money required to get federal funds to help run the MPO? Currently Charlotte pays the whole local match, about $400,000. (Note, as City Council member David Howard has reminded the group several times, the local “match” is not the same as membership fees. Those are paid on a sliding scale based on population.)

And this is a biggie: Should the group continue with its system of weighted voting? Currently there are 38 total votes, with 16 allotted to Charlotte. Other members have one or two votes each. Under the new setup, Charlotte will have 53 percent of the population. Should it get 53 percent of the vote? As is, when the Charlotte representative does not show up the group pretty much lacks a quorum. Currently, the voting is structured so that Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, by themselves, could not carry the day; they need at least one other member for anything to pass.

So one idea is to have two types of votes, one not weighted, for things that are minor and not procedural, and the other for important matters that need weighted votes.  The City Council committee by a show of hands was strongly in favor of weighted voting, all the time.

Update (5:37 p.m.): What happens next? The memorandum of understanding among the various MUMPO members, setting out the number of members, who gets a vote, whether and how votes will be weighted, etc., must be negotiated and approved by MUMPO members. So today’s input from the City Council was not an official vote on anything. Final action on the memorandum of understanding is scheduled for March.

No more MUMPO. Get ready for … MILUMPO?

The Charlotte-region transportation planning agency known as MUMPO (Mecklenburg-Union Metropolitan Planning Organization) is almost certainly in for a name change.

That’s because a large piece of Iredell County, including Statesville and Mooresville, plus a decent-sized chunk of Lincoln County are now part of what’s known as Charlotte’s “urbanized area.”

I, personally, am hoping it will call itself MILUMPO. (Mecklenburg-Iredell-Lincoln-Union Metropolitan Planning Organization). Other waggish types, using the Catawba River basin as a unifying slogan, are musing about CRAMPO (as in, Catawba Regional Area MPO) or SCUMPO (Southern Catawba-Union MPO).

What is an MPO and why does it matter? See below. You may also wonder what is this “urbanized area” and why does it matter? The short answer is, “It’s complicated.”

The U.S. Census Bureau decides what an “urbanized area” is, via a complex formula that takes into account historical population centers. For the detailed answer click here. Do not expect common sense to play a large role. For instance, Gastonia, Rock Hill and Concord are not part of the “urbanized area,” but Statesville now is. Got that?

This piece by my UNC Charlotte colleague John Chesser and me last month, “A region by many other names,” goes into some of the absurdities under which the greater Charlotte metro region is divvied into this or that “region.”

Metropolitan planning areas, a.k.a. MPOs, set priorities for divvying up state and federal transportation money. They are required to take in the “urbanized area,” unless for some reason they decide to try to find another MPO who’ll agree to take it over. According to Bill Coxe, Huntersville’s transportation planner and chair of MUMPO’s technical coordinating committee, it’s possible some of the smaller non-Mecklenburg territories that are, as of this year, part of Charlotte’s “urbanized area” (examples: a very small part of western Gaston County and eastern Catawba County, and parts of northern Lancaster and York counties, S.C.) may end up becoming part of other MPOs, such as RFATS (Rock Hill-Fort Mill Area Transportation Study), or GUAMPO (Gaston Urban Area MPO). For that to happen, MUMPO must seek out and arrange with another MPO to take over the territory.  If MUMPO wants to keep that territory, it does. If no MPO exists to take it over, as is the case in Lincoln and Iredell counties, MUMPO keeps it. If another MPO does not want the added territory, MUMPO keeps it.

Why does any of this MPO stuff matter? Here’s why. Transportation planning, to be done well, should be undertaken at a fully regional level, with decisions made that balance needs in one area against needs in another. That is not what happens in the Charlotte region.

Depending on how you count, the region is split among as many as five MPOs, plus two Rural Planning Organizations. Those five are MUMPO, GUAMPO, RFATS plus Cabarrus-Rowan MPO (CRMPO), and, if you consider the Hickory area part of the greater Charlotte metro area, the Greater Hickory MPO (GHMPO). (An aside: in the Hickory area, the MPO is lodged in the regional land use planning agency, the Western Piedmont Council of Governments, a sensible arrangement yet to be adopted elsewhere in the Charlotte region.)

Bob Cook, MUMPO secretary, made a presentation on much of this to the Charlotte City Council’s Transportation and Planning Committee on Monday. Wednesday he’ll give a similar presentation at the MUMPO meeting, which starts at 7 p.m. in room CH-14 of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center.

Want to know more? Links:
MUMPO’s map of the new urbanized area.
Close-up of the Gaston County portion of the urbanized area
Close-up of the Lincoln and Catawba County parts of the Charlotte urbanized area
A summary of what new territory is in Charlotte’s urbanized area, and likely MPO scenarios

A chaotic map hints at many meanings of ‘urban region’

The recent news that the Charlotte “urbanized area” was No. 1 in rate of population growth 2000-2010 among U.S. urbanized areas of 1 million or more brought some local chest-thumping and in some quarters a bit of head-scratching. After all, last year, the Census Bureau told us the Charlotte metropolitan area was No. 4 in rate of growth over the same period. What gives?

The answer is that it all depends on how you define the urban region.  The Census Bureau’s six-county Metropolitan Statistical Area is a whole other territory from the “urbanized area.” Neither is what many would consider the greater Charlotte metro region. The Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord MSA, for example, includes Anson County but not Lincoln, Iredell, Rowan or Stanly counties. The Census Bureau’s “Charlotte N.C.-S.C. urbanized area,” by contrast, doesn’t even include Gastonia and Concord.

My colleagues at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute include some geographers and map lovers (a.k.a. map geeks) and we decided to take a look at all the different areas that are considered the “Charlotte region.”  Here’s a link to that article. It includes a large, easier-to-read map of multiple “regions,” including the MSA, the urbanized area, the MPOs, and more. The word that comes to mind is “chaos.”

Transportation planning in particular, is a crazy quilt of metropolitan regions, known as Metropolitan Planning Organizations. I’ve written before about that particular nuttiness.

Over at newgeography.com, Wendell Cox calculated the density (population per square mile) of those Census Bureau “urbanized areas.”  It turns out Charlotte’s had the lowest density of all 41 major urban areas.  Next-least dense was – wait for it – Charlotte’s fellow sprawling Sun Belt metro, Atlanta.

So if you figure that urban density is is one way to characterize an area as “urban,” then maybe Charlotte’s “urbanized area” is the fastest-growing but least “urban.”

Tell them where you really go

Where do you really travel, and how do you get there, and how long does it take? The collection of transportation planning groups in the Charlotte metro area (a group I like to call the Seven Dwarfs), is undertaking a survey to learn more.

I learned this tidbit in reading the Oct. 28 memo to Charlotte City Council from City Manager Curt Walton. (This is why the world needs journalists; someone has to read these things and sort the chaff from the wheat. Whether this survey is chaff or wheat remains to be discovered.)

The memo reports:

Over the next few months, a sample of residents of Mecklenburg, Gaston, Union, Cabarrus, Iredell, Rowan, Cleveland, Lincoln, and Stanly counties in North Carolina and residents of York and Lancaster counties in South Carolina will be contacted by phone to participate in the regional household travel survey.  ETC Institute, the firm conducting the random survey on behalf of the planning agencies, will be recruiting 4,000 households to participate based on geographic location, household income, and household size. 

Households participating in the survey will have each household member keep a travel diary for one day.  They will be asked to record the destination address, travel time, travel mode, and vehicle occupancy for their trips throughout the day.  The travel diary results will be used to understand travel patterns, and specifically, how, when, and where people travel.  All information collected is confidential and individual responses will not be released.

Wondering about the reference to Seven Dwarfs?

The memo goes on to list the multiple transportation planning agencies in the Charlotte region, saying, “This study was programmed by Mecklenburg-Union MPO (MUMPO), Cabarrus-Rowan MPO (CRMPO), Gaston Urban Area MPO (GUAMPO), Rock Hill-Fort Mill Transportation Study (RFATS), NCDOT, SCDOT, Rocky River RPO (RRRPO), and Lake Norman RPO (LNRPO).”  Where’s the seventh dwarf? That would be the Hickory-area MPO, also known as GHMPO.

Getting better information about how and where people travel is sound planning. If you worry that it’s sort of Big Brotherish you don’t have to take part in the survey. Plus, your cellphone is keeping a record of everywhere you go, anyway, courtesy of AT&T or Verizon or whoever.

But the larger point about transportation planning is this: How in the world can the Charlotte region think it is doing anything that is even in the same hemisphere as “sane transportation planning” while it is split among seven different planning groups, each jealously guarding its own projects and only one of them (MUMPO) shouldering the very real need for regional mass transit?  Merge them all. Even consider – gasp! – merging  transportation planning and the Charlotte regional land-planning agency, the Centralina Council of Governments. Many, many large and successful metro areas did that years ago. It’s not a cure-all. But it’s a smart start. 

The fantasy land of transportation planning

The N.C. Department of Transportation is seeking people’s opinions to help guide them in putting together a 2040 plan. They’ve launched an online survey, which you can weigh in on at this link.

I encourage you to take the survey, but if you do, you’ll notice most of the questions require only one answer where several answers are needed. Example: For the question: “Which of the following is the most important to address the transportation needs of our changing population?” your choices are:
  •    Invest additional resources in public transportation (rail and buses).
  •    Expand roadways in North Carolina’s major cities.
  •    Encourage development with higher numbers of people per acre.
  •    Better coordinate transportation and land development.
  •    Other (please specify)
 You can choose only one. Which seems, to me, a bogus choice. Transportation and land use have to be coordinated or they are all but worthless. Additional resources must be invested in public transportation. And we all need to encourage development where more people live closer together – the only way to make public transportation work. No one of those is more important than another.

Land use planning and transportation planning are as linked as conjoined twins. The state likes to say it doesn’t do land use planning but that’s a fig leaf of an excuse that doesn’t hide the truth: Every time NCDOT makes a transportation decision, that decision affects land uses.

Accept that reality. Then accept the related reality that planning and transportation, to have validity, should be undertaken at a metro region level. Merge all the state-sanctioned transportation planning agencies in each of North Carolina’s metro regions. Charlotte has four to seven, depending on what you count. (You gotta love their names, too: The MPOs are MUMPO, GUAMPO, CRMPO, GHMPO and RFATS. Lest you think that’s not surreal enough, we also have two rural planning organizations, named LNRPO and the snarly sounding RRRPO.) We need just one, region-wide MPO.

If you’re looking for true sanity, then (as I have often written before) merge all those metropolitan planning organizations (a.k.a. MPOs, which despite the name do only transportation planning) with the regional Councils of Government, which attempt a regional approach to land use planning – although of course they aren’t allowed to adopt zoning ordinances and thus have little clout. Has all this made Salvador Dali seem reasoned and predictable by comparison?

So have your say on the NCDOT survey.  But recognize that efforts at serious urban region planning are fantasy, until the state adopts a more realistic approach linking land use and transportation.

Highway tales from the crypt

It was like a quick, surprise trip to the mindset of the 1980s. Or maybe like one of those horror movies when something you thought was dead turns out to be twitching in the grave, still alive.

I dropped in on a group of regional elected officials and other civic-leader types who’d gathered Monday afternoon to talk about “next steps” for the worthy-but-unsexy goal of regional transportation planning, with the Centralina Council of Governments moderating a series of conversations by a study group.

It’s one of those under-the-radar issues, boring but important if you think a metro region should act like, well, a metro region and not a bunch of unrelated local governments, especially when it’s dealing with something as important – and as costly to the taxpayers – as transportation. As I’ve mentioned previously (some might even say ad nauseam), the Charlotte metro region has possibly the most fragmented transportation planning of any metro area in the country. Gaston County isn’t in the same transportation planning group as Charlotte. Cabarrus County isn’t either. Ditto York County, S.C., and ditto the whole Lake Norman area.

It was as the group was talking about the need to articulate a vision for the whole region, that the zombie idea arose from the crypt. Gaston County commissioner Joe Carpenter started talking about how it felt like, as Yogi Berra used to say, “deja vu all over again.” He recalled the era from 1988 to 1992, when a regional coalition, the Carolinas Transportation Compact, pushed for – if you said mass transit, or farmland preservation you lose – for an outer-outerbelt highway around Charlotte.

Carpenter then unfurled a large map of the route of this mythical highway, long lusted after by suburban land developers.

Because why have only one outerbelt if you can have two? Haven’t we all seen how well Charlotte’s first outerbelt has relieved congestion, led to smoothly flowing traffic, trimmed the region’s carbon footprint, helped create walkable neighborhoods and made transit easier to implement? Imagine the wonders if we could spread our Pineville- and Ballantyne-style development all over the region’s farmland?

Then-state Sen. Jerry Blackmon had conceived of the idea of a 13-county outer-outerbelt, 30 to 50 miles from Charlotte, in the mid-1980s. Planning continued throughout the 1980s, out of the public eye although land speculators such as Robert Pittenger, later a state senator, bought land along its route. In 1993 its cost was estimated at $2 billion.

Although the Carolinas Transportation Compact backed it, there was a Carolinas Urban Coalition of nearby cities which opposed it, foreseeing that the sprawl it would engender would empty their struggling downtowns. “I find the idea inconceivable,” said then-Charlotte City Council member Lynn Wheeler. “You could take gasoline and pour it on the city of Charlotte and the other cities and light a match. It would have the same effect.”

The newly elected Gov. Jim Hunt was not a fan. “The outer-outerloop strikes me as just being a little farfetched,” he said in early 1993. “I’d be very concerned about spending money on that.” And after that, Observer articles on the outer-outerbelt dwindled. And in the intervening two decades thinking about urban transportation has changed dramatically. Highways have been shown not to relieve congestion, as hoped, but to create it. Willy-nilly suburban growth has been shown to be, in many cases, a net loss for local government revenues rather than the hoped-for boost.

As Carpenter (who’s also a big backer of the dubious Garden Parkway through rural southern Gaston County) spoke, I noticed that the meeting’s chair, Dennis Rash – a former N.C. transportation board member and a one-time key lieutenant to ex-Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl Jr. – wasn’t saying much. I asked him later about the outer-outerbelt idea. Is that what we are to see from a group looking for regional transportation planning? He noted, drily, that the old outer-outerbelt idea had been conceived during a time when the federal government was paying for 90 percent of the cost of highway projects. Those days are gone, probably for good.

And that should be the fate, as well, of yet another outerbelt highway through the Piedmont around Charlotte. Please, no more rising from the crypt for this one.

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.

Revamp of transportation planning? (Or, toss the dwarfs?)

TRYON, N.C. – During council discussion about transportation, Mayor Anthony Foxx mentioned a key issue: Among the many challenges to finding federal funding for Charlotte-area transportation projects – streets, roads and mass transit alike – is that the feds are looking closely at how well a region is supporting regional transportation planning.

And the Charlotte region plans its transportation regionally about as well as I can dunk a basketball. Is there any other large metro region with more different “metropolitan planning organizations” – aka, the state-established way to plan transportation? Charlotte region transportation is split among 4 or 5 MPOs and two Rural Planning Organizations. Just one small example of the ridiculousity: The Lake Norman area is considered a Rural Planning Organization and not part of the Charlotte metro transportaton planning.

I’ve ranted about this previously. Small hope in the offing? At least the mayor and other transportation officials are talking about it. And MPOs must be reconstituted after every census. And NCDOT chief Gene Conti is actually paying attention to Charlotte. NCDOT now has a staffer with an office on the 8th floor of the Char-Meck Govt Center.

If you’d like to know a bit more about the unbelievable insanity of transportation planning in the greater Charlotte region, read this piece from early January – you have to go to the very end to read about what “sounds like a bizarre camaraderie of dwarfs: MUMPO, GUAMPO, CRMPO, GHMPO and RFATS (in the Disney version he’d be the chubby, clumsy one). Let us not forget LNRPO and RRRPO (the small but snarling pirate dwarf?).”