Category: parking

Time to have that uncomfortable talk. I mean about parking.

A Walmart in east Charlotte offers a gracious plenty of parking. Photo: Google Maps satellite view

It’s a question without easy answers. But that just makes it even more important to confront, and find a guiding strategy. It’s time for Charlotte to talk about parking.

Parking is both blessing and curse for any city built – as Charlotte mostly was – around private automobile use.

There’s a lot to curse. An admittedly incomplete list of problems parking lots cause would include the way they devour valuable land space that could hold housing, stores, workplaces, parks, community gardens, tree canopy, pretty much any use valued by city residents. (See below for a short list of what could go into one parking space.) They send storm water runoff cascading into local surface waters (i.e. creeks), polluting them and causing more frequent flooding onto the floodplains where foolish development was allowed. Remember Hurricane Florence in September? Get used to it, as climate change brings more heavy rainstorms. They add to the urban heat island effect, pushing the rising summer temperatures even higher. And the need to provide parking creates significant headaches for small businesses.

And finally this: With so much parking both “free” and available, we almost always hop into the car instead of asking, could we walk? Bicycle? Take a bus or light rail?

But parking lots can also be a blessing in a city built to make driving the automatic choice for almost all of us. For most residents here, any alternatives to private automobile travel – walking, bicycling, scootering, transit or ride-shares – aren’t available or competitive in terms of time, hassle and cost. And when we drive, we need temporary lodging for our vehicles.

I was reminded of this late last month. Rain was pelting the asphalt as I wheeled into what looked like the last available parking spot at Cotswold shopping center, then sloshed across the asphalt for last-minute Christmas shopping. I was glad to find even that terrible parking place.

But should two weeks in December really determine the size of parking lots year-round? It’s January now, and across
most of Charlotte those huge lots at our shopping centers revert to their 50-other-weeks-a year condition: plenty of open, “free” spaces.

It’s time for Charlotte policy-makers to figure out how to get a handle on parking. How can we encourage smarter use of our land while admitting cars will be with us, even if, we hope, in smaller numbers? Can we acknowledge the social inequities embedded in our autopilot acquiescence to providing all the parking anyone needs for the Saturday before Christmas? Can we ask:

• How much parking should be required? How much should be allowed?

• Why isn’t more parking shared between day- and night-time uses, and how can the city encourage more sharing?

• Why should churches, schools and other institutions get a free pass to expand surface parking lots into nearby neighborhoods almost without limit?

• How in terms of parking regulations, do we treat places differently, since places in the city are different? Ballantyne is not NoDa, and University City is not Myers Park.

• Can the city lead on this issue? Could it assist with financing private, shared parking decks, more space-efficient and environmentally prudent but more expensive to build?

• Couldn’t some parking lot and meter revenue help fund something helpful?

City planners are rewriting ordinances governing development in light rail station areas, called Transit Oriented Development (TOD) zoning. They propose eliminating any required minimum number of parking spots except for restaurants within 200 feet of single-family homes. They believe (with reason) that providing easy, “free” parking close to light rail stops encourages people to drive when they could walk, cycle or take transit.

The problem, of course, is that not offering easy parking doesn’t stop people from driving in from areas where transit isn’t readily available and walking isn’t safe or efficient. Yes, I personally will sometimes drive 15 minutes to get to a light rail station where I can “park for free”* and then ride to South End or NoDa, but I am not a typical Charlottean. Example: For me to leave home and arrive at the Evening Muse in NoDa for an 8 p.m. event would be a one-hour transit trip, and that’s with a bus stop a quick, 5-minute walk from our house. Driving is 15-20 minutes.

Further, developers will tell you that lenders require a certain amount of parking, even if the city doesn’t. Yes, easing the TOD parking requirement may well be a smart thing, but it’s no silver bullet that kills the parking monster.

Just imagine what could go in one 220-square-foot parking space: room for 10 bicycles, space for lunch with 15 friends, 3 office work spaces, or one small studio in Paris. That fun factoid comes courtesy of author Taras Grescoe (@Grescoe on Twitter) and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York (@ITDP_HQ on Twitter).

So as Charlotte dives into a new comprehensive plan, Charlotte Future 2040, can we please take a harder look at parking? We’re going to need some of that space for other things.

————

* Why is “free” in quote marks? Because parking is never really free. The cost is embedded in rents you pay, the cost of goods you buy from merchants who must build those parking lots or pay the cost in their leases.

Planner and author Daniel Shoup studies parking and believes it’s been subsidized in a way that’s inequitable. “Wherever you go – a grocery store, say – a little bit of the money you pay for products is siphoned away to pay for parking,” Shoup says (as quoted in this 2014 article in Vox). “My idea is simple: if somebody doesn’t have a car, they shouldn’t have to pay for parking.”

Shoup estimates the national tally for public subsidies for parking at $127 billion.

Apparently Google’s Satellite View camera did not take the photo of this south Charlotte church lot on a Sunday morning.

More parking? Less parking? The debate continues.

Tobe Holmes of University City Partners describes changes coming to the UNC Charlotte part of the city when a light rail extension opens early in 2018. In the background is a new parking deck with retail on the ground floor, built by the Charlotte Area Transit System. Photo: Mary Newsom 

In the playbook for transit-oriented development, as a city adds more transit service it needs less parking. Here’s the reasoning: Building too much parking is an incentive to people to keep driving. Parking lots and decks create large, unfunded environmental and health costs, including but not limited to the heat island effect, water pollution from gallons of storm water runoff and the American obesity epidemic from too much driving.

As Charlotte’s Blue Line Extension light rail project nears completion (March 2018 is the projected opening), parking decks are rising along the line, including two huge decks near the UNC Charlotte campus where the line will end.  People who pay attention to such things ask whether we’re overbuilding parking. One recent example is this opinion piece from Charlotte Five – “It’s insane to keep building huge parking decks along the light rail line.”

The piece responded to a previous article – “It would be insane for Charlotte to stop building parking for apartments — right now.”

Three thoughts about all that:

1. I think both arguments are right. We need less parking in the long run, but for now we continue to need parking. (There is a whole other topic to be addressed, not here and not today, on how to shrink the number of surface parking lots being built.)

2. In this case it’s not planners who should feel the most heat but lenders – who may not even know
where Charlotte is and who won’t finance a project if the parking spots don’t fit their math formula. From what I see and hear most lenders don’t give a rip about good urbanism, diversity of uses, protecting surface waters, reducing obesity or any of that. They have their formula.

3. This is an opportunity for creative, innovative building design – a flexible parking desk structure that could adapt, as the city becomes easier to navigate without a car, into something else.

Here’s why we can’t instantly get rid of parking, happy though I would be to be arguing the other side of this. Most of the acreage in Charlotte, like most Sun Belt cities, was built to make driving easy, not walking or biking or transit. In huge parts of the city only the brave, the masochistic or the desperate choose to walk or bike to destinations. Yes, a few older neighborhoods break that pattern – Dilworth, Plaza Midwood, NoDa, etc.  Most Charlotteans don’t live there.

Consider: UNC Charlotte is nearing 30,000 students, plus 4,000-some faculty and staff.  We can all agree that encouraging more of them to use transit is ideal. With more people taking transit the campus can build fewer large expensive parking decks. But people live all over the city. Using transit to get to the campus is huge time investment requiring walking long distances to a bus, which may run only every 30 to 45 minutes, then riding to campus or to a light rail station. Only two bus routes serve the campus; one originates uptown, the other at SouthPark mall (that route will probably change as part of other transit changes to campus). Most people will not choose to invest 90 minutes or more for a trip they can drive in 20 to 30.

The city’s bus service is better than in 1998, but nowhere near what it needs to be. The Charlotte Area Transit System is studying its bus routes, but is not well-funded enough to simultaneously build light rail and dramatically improve bus service.

Consider people living near the light rail. Some did opt to live there so they can take the rail to work. But people change jobs and the new one may not on an easy transit route. Jobs are spread all over the city, with only a sliver of them easily reachable by the lone light rail line. And people acquire roommates, partners and spouses whose jobs may not be transit-friendly. (See this 2014 piece, Car-free in Charlotte? It isn’t easy, by a writer who gave up on South End as too hard to manage without a car.)

So for the foreseeable future, driving is necessary even for those of us who wish we could drive less. That means parking is necessary. For now. No, we don’t need as many spaces as lenders require to be built. We should figure out how to incentivize shared parking, and work to minimize surface lots. But still.

Yet couldn’t some of those ugly decks be repurposed in time? I’m not an engineer so maybe this is nuts, but I have to think that with innovative design and engineering, a parking deck could be designed to transition at a later time into residences or retail, with a much smaller share of parking.

As the city densifies and transit grows more robust – we can always hope! – we can get by with less parking. And those ugly decks could sprout other, more congenial uses.

By Jove, I think they’ve got it!

There, that wasn’t so hard to figure out, was it?

Back in the winter, when the reverse-angle parking was installed in the Plaza-Central business district, which requires you to back in, and people weren’t doing it right, I wondered if they’d ever figure it out. Here’s a link to a WCNC-TV piece on motorists’ inability to grasp the concept.

As this hilarious article from Charlotte magazine recounts, so many people were just not getting it that the city held a press conference and hired a guy to do a rap song, to demonstrate:

“This was a news conference, an honest-to-God news conference, in which Charlotte city officials demonstrated how to back into a parking spot. And they brought a rapper.”

Last Saturday, my spouse and I decided we should visit the amazing new Harris Teeter grocery store at Central and The Plaza (It’s two stories, y’all!) because we do lead rather boring lives. After we conquered the problem of how to find the second floor, and ascended and realized there’s nothing there but tables where you can eat your Teeter Deli purchases, we bought a few necessaries and left.

On the way home, we drove past the formerly infamous reverse-angle parking. If Saturday is anything typical, I’m here to report that by cracky, people have figured it out.  Not a single car was parked front-end-in.

Way to go, PM-ers.   

Who owns the street outside your house, and who gets to park there?

Parking. It’s a dilemma for cities, towns and even hamlets. The more you make accommodations for drivers (that is, most adults) who need to park vehicles, the uglier and less functional you are likely to make your city.

Yes, you can find exceptions: Parking decks lined on all sides with stores or condos or offices. (Want examples? Visit the Gateway area of uptown along West Trade Street across from Johnson & Wales University.) But those projects are notably more expensive than your basic surface lot that slicks a coat of asphalt over the dirt. That’s one reason a large chunk of uptown Charlotte, beyond the main corridors, is a dead-zone of surface parking lots. Fully one fifth of First Ward is covered with surface parking lots. In a city with some 75,000 uptown workers and limited transit service, people are going to drive. Just saying, “Don’t drive,” is not a helpful option.

On-street parking in College Downs will be restricted. Photo: Corbin Peters

As many have noted – with UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup maybe the most prominent among them – free parking isn’t. Wal-Mart may be surrounded by acres of “free” asphalt for you and your Camry, but Wal-Mart has to pay for that land and for the paving and repaving. The parking cost is built in to the price of what you buy there. Even if you don’t shop at Wal-Mart, you pay for their lot, because as a taxpayers you foot the bill for storm drainage systems and anti-pollution measures to accommodate the torrents of rainwater that run off, most of it carrying pollutants.
So on-street parking emerges as one of the most cost-effective and sensible ways to provide parking. The streets are already built and paved, and publicly owned by all of us, and publicly available to all of us. But …

Ever had some dingbat park at the end of your driveway so you can’t back out? Ever had to weave through landscapers’ trucks and massive SUVs parked on both sides of a narrow neighborhood street? On-street parking isn’t always comfortable for everyone.

Now, imagine you live in an established neighborhood right across a busy street from a 26,000-student state university, which charges its students and employees for parking – as it should because, after all, it costs N.C. taxpayers to build those lots and decks. The non-student residents in the College Downs neighborhood, understandably, got fed up with students and others parking all up and down their streets. They asked the city to ban on-street parking. So the city did.

The problem of managing parking raises plenty of questions, and not just near UNC Charlotte. Few of the answers are easy. PlanCharlotte.org writer Corbin Peters examined the College Downs situation in “As the city urbanizes, who gets to use the streets?“

Now imagine, for a minute, what would happen in Manhattan if a group of residents asked the city to ban on-street parking on a street because they didn’t like it. They’d be laughed off the island. But even in other large, parking-stressed cities, odd notions of ownership will arise around streets and parking places. In Boston, some people who have to park on the street will shovel out their cars in winter, and before they drive away, “reserve” their spot with a chair or other place-holder until they return. After all, shoveling out is hard work and why should somebody else benefit from your work?
 But Charlotte is not Manhattan, or Boston. Here, we mostly assume we’ll be able to park easily and for “free.” At least, for now we do. In 20 years, I predict, those assumptions will have changed.

* And if you haven’t yet, please take the PlanCharlotte/UNC Charlotte Urban Institute survey, so we can learn more about our readers and help improve our online publications.

Feed the meter with a cell phone app

Short of quarters? Next week Charlotte launches a  program to let you use your cell phone to pay for on-street parking.

According to a city memo sent Friday to Charlotte City Council members, the program will have a “soft launch” Thursday and a “hard launch” in April. According to the memo:

The cell-phone-payment system will be available at both parking meters and the pay stations located on some uptown streets.

To use it, you have to register with the Pay by Cell service provider, at www.parkmobile.com. Registration is free, although each pay-by-cell transaction costs a 35-cent fee to Parkmobile USA.

To pay, you would:

Find a parking spot. Then either launch a mobile app, access the Internet or call toll-free, 1-877-727-5301. You enter the parking zone number on the meter or nearby sign or the pay-station stall number. Choose the parking time desired.
You could extend the time you choose, via another transaction, but not beyond the two-hour limit.
 

The city memo cautions that parking meters won’t display the payment and time remaining, although the city’s handheld ticketing equipment will let ticket agents know the customer’s payment.

Will the 35-cent fee deter people? Hard to say: I’m a penny-pincher and I try to keep my ashtray stashed with quarters. But if you’re facing a choice of on-street-with-fee or expensive parking deck, 35 cents may be an easy hurdle to take.

An aside: I first saw the pay-by-cell-phone parking fees in Sofia, Bulgaria, and wondered how long before Charlotte began using it. And I have seen pay-by-cell-phone signs posted in some of the privately owned surface lots uptown, so it’s clear the technology is finally arriving here.

We love parks, but do we love parking more?

2005 aerial photo in west Charlotte (Photo: Nancy Pierce)

Two lengthy and thought-provoking articles about parking are making the rounds this month, sparking what I hope will be a lot more thinking about, and innovative approaches toward, that mundane but ugly creature, the parking lot.

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, in “Paved But Still Alive: It’s Time To Take Parking Lots Seriously, As Public Spaces,” lists some astounding numbers: Estimates of the number of U.S. parking spaces range from 105 million to 2 billion, a third of them in parking lots. Eight parking places for every car in this country. Houston has 30 parking places per resident. If you estimate the country has 500 million parking spaces (as author Eran Ben-Joseph of MIT does), they cover a combined 3,590 square miles, an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together.

Kimmelman writes about the so-called Pensacola Parking Syndrome (a term possibly coined by architect Andres Duany in Suburban Nation), in which a city tears down its old buildings to create parking spaces to entice more people downtown, until people no longer want to go there because it has become an empty lot. He suggests that more cities should set limits on the number of parking spaces and urges New York to abandon what he calls “outmoded zoning codes from the auto-boom days requiring specific ratios of parking spaces per housing unit, or per square foot of retail space.” And he tells the interesting tale of the parking lot of the Dutchess County Mall in  Fishkill, N.Y., and the planning firm Interboro. Well, you can read that yourself.

Longer, quirkier and even more interesting, is Dave Gardetta’s “Between the Lines,” in Los Angeles magazine. He has his own set of amazing stats, such as this:

In Los Angeles, at least, building a spot in an above-ground deck costs developers as much as $40,000 per parking spot. With an underground deck, it’s more like $140,000 per space. And he makes the point, or at least, he lets UCLA planning professor and parking expert Donald Shoup make the point, that building so much parking for Disney Hall – space for 2,188 cars below ground, costing $110 million, paid with county bonds – was remarkably poor planning. “Like any parking lot entrance,” Gardetta writes, “the one on Bunker Hill sucked air from street life. ‘L.A.,’ says Shoup, ‘required 50 times more parking under Disney Hall than San Francisco would allow at their own hall.’ “

It’s a conundrum faced all over the country, and one Charlotte’s planners wrestle with continually. When institutions such as churches, hospitals and schools locate in neighborhoods and especially when they grow, they build large surface parking lots and start gobbling the neighborhood. Squabbles over lots and decks (but mostly lots) have erupted for years in Myers Park, Dilworth and, more recently, in Wilmore, where Greater Galilee Baptist Church wanted to expand and build a bigger parking lot.
Cities, including Charlotte, need to be leaders on this issue. That’s tough, especially politically. People may say they love parks, but what really has the tightest grip on their hearts appears to be parking. Every one of us who drives seems to have an instinct to find The Best Parking Space, an impulse so powerful I think it must be hardwired into our brains, the search for the direct route and prime spot. I think it’s related to the hardwiring that propels us to jaywalk instead of go to the corner to cross and to create goat-paths across the grass instead of taking a less convenient paved walk. Whatever it is, letting city neighborhoods be consumed by parking lots is terribly unwise.
But unlike New York or Los Angeles, which have extensive public transit systems, a Sun Belt city like Charlotte can’t just assume that if parking becomes too inconvenient people will take the bus or the subway. Here, lousy parking can kill a business. Yet, as Kimmelman points out, many parking lots are built that then aren’t full. Garages near the new Yankee Stadium, built over objections of Bronx neighbors, are never more than 60 percent full, even on game days, he reports.
I’ve long wondered if the city of Charlotte couldn’t somehow create a parking deck revolving fund, to build decks (lined with businesses or apartments so they’re not ugly; excellent examples to be found in Gateway Village on West Trade Street) that churches and offices and smaller businesses could share, as a way to cut down on surface parking lots. The city has helped large developments with parking decks, but that requires a big development; most of the city’s development is much smaller-scale.
Decks are expensive. Surface lots aren’t, except for buying the land to put them on. That’s why the city needs to take the lead on building decks and using revenues to pay down construction costs, or maybe pay to improve transit. (“Free” parking isn’t really free anyway, so why not make its cost more visible to users?) I’m not a banker or a developer so the aforementioned scheme probably has lots of holes in it. But smart, creative people could figure out a scheme that would work – IF we had city leaders willing to be out front  on the issue.
I checked with Planning Director Debra Campbell to make sure the city hadn’t already done some studies of the overall parking dilemma that I had missed. It hasn’t. “We have revised some standards for certain areas and for certain districts,” she answered, via e-mail. Surface lots are no longer allowed as a primary use in areas zoned UMUD (the uptown mixed-use district), for instance. Transit areas have lower parking requirements.  
And, she said, “We may look at this issue [parking] pending the results of a project we are calling the Zoning Ordinance Assessment that will be launched this summer.”

Parking lots as polluters

We know driving creates pollution: ozone, other toxic tailpipe emissions such as particulates, contaminated water that runs off streets, the heat island effect of the asphalted street and highway network, etc. etc. But until now, few people had studied the polluting effect of parking lots.

But Eric Jaffe, in The Infrastructurist, writes about new work from researchers at University of California at Berkeley that looks at energy and emissions related to America’s vast parking infrastructure. The researchers write,

“The environmental effects of parking are not just from encouraging the use of the automobile over public transit or walking and biking (thus favoring the often more energy-intensive and polluting mode), but also from the material and process requirements in direct, indirect, and supply chain activities related to building and maintaining the infrastructure.”

There’s no national inventory of how many parking spaces, lots, decks are out there – one academic who’s studied parking compares it to the “dark matter” in the universe – but the researchers point to such things as the heat island effect, where pavement raises summer temperatures which requires more energy for air-conditioning, etc. They calculated that when parking spots are taken into account, an average car’s per-mile carbon emissions go up as much as 10 percent.

And as long as we’re trashing parking places (which even die-hard environmentalists probably wish they could find as they circle, circle, circle the lot on the Saturday before Christmas) check out “Six Reasons Free Parking Is the Dumbest Thing You Didn’t Know You Were Subsidizing,” by Christopher Mims in grist.org. The point is not that we shouldn’t have parking, but that we should all be a lot more aware of the costs of building and providing it. Maybe we’d be more conservative in how we spend that money – if we realized we were spending it.

And for a parking-related footnote, here’s a way Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools might bring in a bit more revenue so CMS won’t have to cut a whopping $100 million from the budget and lay off 1,500 people including hundreds of teachers:

Charge high school students more money to park their cars. If CMS provides buses to the schools (which it does, except to magnet high schools) then families that opt to let kids drive can pay for the privilege. Wake County Schools charge $170 and they’re raising the fee. CMS charges $25. Ahem.

Each parking space adds $2,500 to the cost of a high school, a CMS architect told me a few years ago. Yes, staffers need parking spaces, and some students probably do, too. But a lot of that money could be better spent.

Parking lots as polluters

We know driving creates pollution: ozone, other toxic tailpipe emissions such as particulates, contaminated water that runs off streets, the heat island effect of the asphalted street and highway network, etc. etc. But until now, few people had studied the polluting effect of parking lots.

But Eric Jaffe, in The Infrastructurist, writes about new work from researchers at University of California at Berkeley that looks at energy and emissions related to America’s vast parking infrastructure. The researchers write,

“The environmental effects of parking are not just from encouraging the use of the automobile over public transit or walking and biking (thus favoring the often more energy-intensive and polluting mode), but also from the material and process requirements in direct, indirect, and supply chain activities related to building and maintaining the infrastructure.”

There’s no national inventory of how many parking spaces, lots, decks are out there – one academic who’s studied parking compares it to the “dark matter” in the universe – but the researchers point to such things as the heat island effect, where pavement raises summer temperatures which requires more energy for air-conditioning, etc. They calculated that when parking spots are taken into account, an average car’s per-mile carbon emissions go up as much as 10 percent.

And as long as we’re trashing parking places (which even die-hard environmentalists probably wish they could find as they circle, circle, circle the lot on the Saturday before Christmas) check out “Six Reasons Free Parking Is the Dumbest Thing You Didn’t Know You Were Subsidizing,” by Christopher Mims in grist.org. The point is not that we shouldn’t have parking, but that we should all be a lot more aware of the costs of building and providing it. Maybe we’d be more conservative in how we spend that money – if we realized we were spending it.

And for a parking-related footnote, here’s a way Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools might bring in a bit more revenue so CMS won’t have to cut a whopping $100 million from the budget and lay off 1,500 people including hundreds of teachers:

Charge high school students more money to park their cars. If CMS provides buses to the schools (which it does, except to magnet high schools) then families that opt to let kids drive can pay for the privilege. Wake County Schools charge $170 and they’re raising the fee. CMS charges $25. Ahem.

Each parking space adds $2,500 to the cost of a high school, a CMS architect told me a few years ago. Yes, staffers need parking spaces, and some students probably do, too. But a lot of that money could be better spent.

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?