Category: outerbelt

Charlotte in the ’80s


I love how old maps show what the mapmakers valued. 
I recently came across this map of Charlotte circa 1986. (You’ll want to click it to zoom in.) It was among the things Owen Furuseth found as he cleaned out his office after almost 40 years at UNC Charlotte. Furuseth left June 30 as associate provost of Metropolitan Studies, the wing of UNCC academia under which nestles the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work.  Because Owen is a geographer and planner, he was keeping the map but he let me borrow it to copy the image.
The map’s credit line says “Charlotte Mecklenburg Planning Commission 1986.” That probably helps explain why the route for the then-unbuilt I-485 is shown, although construction on the highway didn’t start until 1988, and the full outerbelt was not completed until 2015. Notice, also, how the I-485 route shown on the map is pretty much where it eventually was built. One small exception: The northern section is south of Eastfield Road, which is farther south than shown on the 1986 map.
Those of you who’ve been in Charlotte only a decade or so might get a chuckle out of seeing the “New Coliseum” west of I-77 off Tyvola Road. The “New Coliseum,” was just under construction in 1986, the year this map was made. After it was replaced in 2005 by the Time Warner Cable Arena uptown, the Tyvola coliseum was demolished in 2007 (see its implosion here).*
Note the prominence of Eastland. That was Eastland Mall.  It’s now a vacant city-owned plot of land, after the mall failed about a decade ago. 
Note city limits of Charlotte. “Rea Road Extension” south of N.C. 51, the huge chunk of south Charlotte south of N.C. 51, and UNCC and University Place were not inside the city in 1986. 
Finally, note the relative lack of prominence of “UNCC” compared to University Place, a shopping center and suburban-form mixed-use development north of the university. I wonder what that reveals about the university’s prominence in the minds of the city-county planners. I’ll leave that to your imagination. Today the university is almost 28,000 students, a campus surrounded by some of the most gawd-awful strip-shopping-center and big-box unwalkable and unbikeable suburbia that you can envision. 
* About that Coliseum implosion video.  I had never watched that until I dug up the link today. It made me cry.  At that just-opened venue in November 1988, I and 23,000 other people watched the old Charlotte Hornets – including Dell Curry, father of today’s more famous Curry – debut to a tuxedo-and-formal-gown wearing crowd, lose by 40 points. They got a standing ovation.  Less than 2 months later, on Dec. 23, Kurt Rambis’ last-second shot defeated Michael Jordon’s Chicago Bulls. (Read the Chicago Tribune story here.) The old Coliseum hosted 364 consecutive NBA-game sellouts. We loved the Hornets in those days. Loved Dell and Muggsy and for a time even loved George Shinn, though that came to a bad end. Our then toddler daughter loved Scott Burrell.  Look him up. He was a bouncy jumper.
The coliseum also hosted Frank Sinatra, Springsteen and Mother Teresa among other icons, and the 1994 Final Four, complete with then-President Bill Clinton, various and sundry FOBs (Friends of Bill), and an Arkansas victory.
The Coliseum was built in the wrong place and was poorly designed for what NBA arenas came to need just 10 years later. But it was fun while it lasted.

Highways – loosening our collective belts

The first vehicles drive down the final leg of I-485, June 5. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Even as the national discussion turns toward whether we are overbuilding highways, based on inflated state traffic numbers, in North Carolina those questions are rarely heard. Last month the state’s largest city, Charlotte, population 800,000, where I live and work, saw the June 5 opening of the final leg of its loop highway.  It’s called Interstate 485 but it doesn’t touch another state, or even another county.

When the road was first discussed in the 1960s, the idea was to open more land for development, because in these parts, the growth-is-good mindset has not had much nuance to it. While the local news media saw headlines such as Last I-485 segment will be boon to locals, we at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work and direct the PlanCharlotte.org website, decided to look deeper.

We’ve published some interactive maps that show just how much of the county’s development has been shaped by the outerbelt highway here. A couple of images are reproduced below but find the interactive and zoomable versions at this link.

 In coming weeks we’ll map population growth and traffic counts at the interchanges.

Obviously this is a fast-growing metro area, and growth was going to arrive regardless of where we put our freeways. The questions were: Where was the growth going to go? Can the highway capacity keep up with the demand created by the new development?

 The answer to the first question is now obvious. The growth flooded to the highway, leapfrogging closer in areas that even today lack for investment.  Would even more growth have leapfrogged into adjacent counties without I-485, or would the lack of the highway access have kept the development closer to the core? Who could tell?

The answer to the latter question remains unclear, although I certainly have my doubts. Even before the final link of the loop opened June 5, last December the first leg of the highway, which opened in the 1990s, was expanded from two to three lanes each direction, at a cost of $83 million.

It’s still clogged.

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

  

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.

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.