Category: transit

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.

Do women pay a transportation ‘pink tax’?

This is a quick note, following my previous post, “Cities for woman: Transit and gendered spaces,” which raised the question of whether city planners and designers take women’s experiences and needs sufficiently into account.

A survey from New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management concluded that women in New York pay, on average $26 to $50 a month more for transportation due to concerns about harassment and safety.

According to an article in amNewYork, the survey took place during September and October and asked New Yorkers about travel habits. Read more here and here. Of the women who responded, 75 percent had experienced harassment or theft on public transportation, compared with 47 percent of male respondents.

And 29 percent of the female respondents, compared with 8 percent of men, said they avoided taking public transportation late at night because of “a perceived safety threat.” From that figure, the report authors estimated women’s higher transportation costs.

Cities for women? Transit and gendered spaces

Bus route changes that force longer walks, especially at night, can be particularly discouraging to female transit passengers. Photo: Charlotte Area Transit System bus, in 2010, by James Willamor via Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0
I recently found myself listening in on a group call with Daphne Spain, author of Gendered Spaces (1992) and How Women Saved the City (2002). Spain, a sociologist at University of Virginia, studies and writes about ways women and men historically have been treated differently in both public and private spaces. And I now have two more books on my To Read list.

Spain talked about public transit, among other topics, and at one point noted India has created women-only trains because of the extreme harassment women there can experience.

As it happened, the conversation came a few days after I saw the viral video, “A Scary Time,” by Lynzy Lab. With more than 1.3 million views as of Nov. 5, the video from Lab, a dance lecturer at Texas State University, mocks some discussion that arose after the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in Congress that men’s fear of being wrongly accused of sexual improprieties dwarfs the fears women live with over sexual assault, harassment and not being believed.

Accompanied by a ukulele, and ending with a plea to vote Nov. 6, Lab sings, in part:

“I can’t walk to my car late at night while on the phone / I can’t open up my windows when I’m home alone / I can’t go to the bar without a chaperone … / I can’t use public transportation after 7 p.m. / … And I can’t ever leave my drink unattended / But it sure is a scary time for boys … / I can’t live in an apartment if it’s on the first floor … / I can’t have another drink even if I want more … / I can’t jog around the city with headphones on my ears. … / And so on.

But back to Spain. She noted that women are more dependent on public transit than men. She also mentioned that if bus route planning took greater notice of women’s concerns that bus service would run later into the night to accommodate night-shift workers at places like hospitals. (This, obviously, applies to male night-shift workers, too. But women are
disproportionately more likely to use transit, and more likely to live in poverty, meaning they can’t afford to own a car.)
This resonated loudly. The Charlotte Area Transit System recently redesigned some of its routes, to make them speedier and more convenient to more passengers. It’s adding more cross-town routes. Without a massive infusion of funding – not possible in an era when federal transit funds are shrinking and the transit-hostile N.C. state legislature must OK any new sales taxes for places like Charlotte – this means trade-offs are required. The route changes dropped some stops on neighborhood streets and moved them to thoroughfares. That means some riders must walk farther.
A Charlotte Observer article on the pluses and minuses of the changes has this passage, with echoes of Spain’s remarks:
One rider impacted by CATS’ changes is Alberta Alexander, who works nights at a restaurant. Her bus stop on a residential street near Tuckaseegee Road has been eliminated by the changes. 

“It’s my only transportation,” she said. “If I do not drive, and they’re changing these buses and changing these routes, I have no other option.”

Now, if she gets off work late, she’ll have to walk from Tuckaseegee to her house at night, instead of getting off much closer on State or Sumter streets.

“Before the changes, I had a bus stop in a 2-1/2 block radius,” she said. “I wasn’t afraid to walk home.”
Men as well as women walking alone on a dark, deserted street are vulnerable to muggings, robberies, etc. But women, often less physically able to overpower any attacker, make easier targets. Plus they experience the additional fear of sexual assaults. Consider this, as reported in a Next City article, “Designing Designing Gender Into and Out of Public Space”: “A 2014 Hollaback!/Cornell University study found that 93.4 percent of women surveyed globally had experienced verbal or nonverbal street harassment in the last year, and more than half had been groped …”
This isn’t meant to say the CATS bus route changes were, on balance, a mistake. As CATS chief operations planning officer Larry Kopf told The Observer, while some riders might have a longer walk or lose a stop nearby, the majority will benefit from faster bus trips and more efficient routes.
But it’s important to ensure that the concerns of women – about walking to bus stops along well-lit, not deserted streets, for instance – are treated seriously when changes are proposed.
And this is not just an issue for CATS. The city of Charlotte should pay more attention to, and put more money into, making streets safer for all pedestrians, for the disabled, and for people riding bicycles (and today, scooters). Fewer than half the streets in Mecklenburg County have a sidewalk on even one side.
Charlotte has many streets without sidewalks, like this one in a neighborhood near SouthPark. That can make pedestrians, especially women,  feel unsafe, particularly in the dark. Photo: Mary Newsom
Building a well-used, safe transit system means more than better and more frequent routes. It requires more sidewalks, improved sidewalks, better street-lighting (with energy-efficient LED lights that point downward so as to avoid blinding glare), and requiring development that creates “eyes on the street,” to reduce deserted areas.
Daphne Spain, in the conversation last month, mentioned that she serves on the Albemarle County (Va.) planning commission. In her time on the commission, she noted she hasn’t worked with a single female developer. “The people building our cities,” she said, “are still men.”

MORE ABOUT CITY DESIGN AND GENDER:

The ever-present dilemma of paying for transit

The topic of transit – or the lack of it – arose during public hearings on the vast new River District development that won city approval last month. The almost 1,400-acre development will grow west of the Charlotte Douglas International Airport in what today is a rural and thinly settled area.

The development is expected to generate 120,000 vehicle trips a day. That number got the attention of Charlotte City Council members, who talked about transit but did little beyond talk before approving the developers’ rezoning request.  That’s because the city’s plans for transit to that part of town are, for now, vague and – like most of the 2030 Transit Plan beyond the Blue Line Extension – unfunded.

The city isn’t allowed to impose impact fees without state legislative approval. And don’t hold your breath for that. Further, state courts struck down some counties’ attempts at adequate public facility ordinances – where developers either had to wait until local governments could afford to offer public facilities such as classrooms and police/fire service to serve the new development, or pay a fee to help the local government provide them.

So Charlotte can’t do what Sacramento, Calif., is proposing: a transportation impact fee on most new construction to fund
more and wider streets and improve biking and pedestrian facilities. See Sacramento asks developers to open wallets to keep city streets from clogging. (The Sacramento fee would range from a few hundred dollars for some rental units to more than $2,000 per single-family home in some areas. It’s expected to generate about $3 million a year.

But N.C. local governments still have negotiating power. In Charlotte, developments expected to generate a lot more motor vehicle trips have to pay for a traffic impact study, and talks between city planners and developers often produce a “voluntary” agreement for the developer to provide a turn lane or a traffic signal or some such. That’s called an “exaction,” although developers joke it’s more of an “extraction.”

As I listened at the River District public hearing in October, I wondered whether the city could put some transit funding on that list of negotiated agreements. It’s fairly routine for the city to ask for, and get, a slightly upgraded bus stop, generally a concrete pad to bus riders don’t have to stand in the mud in wet weather. But why not expand the menu for those asks, especially for a development expected to generate 120,000 trips in a part of town not built for that much traffic?

The city has a fee-in-lieu mechanism for its tree ordinance. Could there be something similar for transit needs?

Would that solve the cavernous funding gap between our local transit plans and our local transit revenue from the countywide half-cent sales tax? No. But it would help – and it would instill into local practice the idea that transit should be among those things developers could “volunteer” to assist with. 

N.C. transportation funding: ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’

A Charlotte light rail station

If you were at the Charlotte Chamber’s 2015 Transportation Infrastructure Summit this morning, you got two pointed lectures. The first, from N.C. Rep. Bill Brawley, R-Mecklenburg, was about dealing effectively with the N.C. General Assembly.

The background: North Carolina’s transportation dollars aren’t keeping up with needs. This is true whether you’d prefer new light rail and no roads, or new roads and no light rail, or whether you’re thinking about ports, aviation and ferries. (Wonkish but important point: North Carolina doesn’t have “county roads.” Roads are either state- or city-maintained (or private).The state has a larger role in road-building and maintenance than in some other states.)

The gas tax, intended to support state transportation needs, is not keeping up, because people are driving less and driving more fuel-efficient cars, and transportation projects today are more expensive than in decades past.

For cities like Charlotte, growth and congestion mean more voters and businesses want mass transit as well as expanded roads. But the General Assembly today is dominated by Republicans who are more likely to represent rural or suburban districts. Here’s Brawley’s advice:

“Whenever you do anything to raise money for transportation … you make people mad,” he said. In that atmosphere, it’s important to try to build a statewide consensus on funding before you even approach politicians. But when Charlotte comes to Raleigh seeking money for transportation projects, he said, “Charlotte comes with Charlotte-specific projects.They don’t talk about the state as a whole. They don’t work on building support with the state as a whole.” In other words — and this is my wording here — act like you care about more than Charlotte.

His final words: “In Raleigh, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”

The second lecture was even stronger. Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (whose successor is former Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx) would have pounded the table if he’d had a table to pound. “Transportation infrastructure is at a crossroads. It’s at a standstill,” he said. “It’s at a crisis.”

“The long rich history of our country … is about being No. 1 in transportation and infrastructure,” he said. “We’re not No. 1 in infrastructure any more. We’re No. 16.”

 “America is one big pothole!” he all but shouted. “Because we haven’t invested. We haven’t fixed up our roads.”

As he’s done for months — years, really — LaHood, a Republican from Peoria, Ill., pushed the idea of raising the federal gas tax 10 cents a gallon, and indexing it to the cost of living. The tax has not been raised since 1993.

“We need to bit the bullet,” he said. “Voters are not going to vote you out of office if you fix a big problem”

Transit chief: P3s help but won’t solve transit funding woes

Sharon Road West station on Charlotte’s light rail line. Photo: Nancy Pierce

The idea of using public-private partnerships to help fund transportation systems, including mass transit, is one of today’s hottest topics in transportation policy circles. But the head of Atlanta’s MARTA cautions that P3s, as they’re known, aren’t a silver bullet for transit systems.

Keith Parker, who headed Charlotte’s transit system 2007-2009 and since 2012 has been MARTA CEO, was in town Tuesday, as a rail conference was kicking off. Parker spoke at a small event organized by the Transit Funding Working Group, a Metropolitan Transit Commission committee that’s been pondering how CATS can move forward despite huge gaps between the 2030 plan and available money to built it out.

The working group has studied P3s, and a P3 conference was held here in March. In transportation, public-private partnerships are being used for bridges, tunnels, toll roads and High-Occupancy-Toll lanes such as the new HOT lane planned for Interstate 77 north of Charlotte. A private company, Cintra, has contracted with the N.C. Department of Transportation to build the lane and use the toll revenue to operate it. In Vancouver, a P3 built one of the region’s rail lines.

P3s are touted as a way to get around a growing national problem of too many transportation needs and too little tax revenue to pay for them. With cars’ gas mileage increasing, a decrease in driving among young people, and a national gas tax that’s not been raised since 1993 and isn’t indexed for inflation, trend lines for transportation funding are heading down.

In Atlanta, Parker has won praise for helping improve MARTA’s relationships with the Georgia legislature and for bringing efficiencies to MARTA operations. And next week may see the first expansion of the system since it was launched 42 years ago in Fulton and DeKalb counties. A referendum is set for Nov. 4 in Clayton County, Ga., asking voters there whether to approve a 1-cent sales tax to expand MARTA into their county.

Parker, who described how MARTA is partnering with developers for transit-oriented developments on MARTA-owned land, cautioned the audience about the limitations of P3s, especially for transit programs. “They don’t solve your revenue issues,” he pointed out. And continuing revenues are needed, as well as capital expenses for building the transit lines and stations.

He quoted a popular misconception: “If you just go to the private sector they’ll build all your trains for you.”  That thinking? “It’s just a myth,” he said.

The Atlanta system is funded with a 1-cent sales tax in two counties. It receives no funding from the state of Georgia.  Mecklenburg County’s system is funded with a half-cent sales tax in only one county.

For more on the recent transit funding challenges facing Charlotte, see “Mayor: Transit sales tax funding may be at risk” from PlanCharlotte.org.

Proposed bill would hobble transit across North Carolina

A bill being considered in the N.C. General Assembly would bar N.C. counties from raising sales taxes to fund both education and public transportation. The taxes could fund one or the other, not both.

The bill – House Bill 1224 – acquired some surprise provisions in the last few days. One provision would kill the plan to ask Mecklenburg County voters in November to OK a quarter-cent sales tax increase to pay for teacher raises and offer a bit of help for arts organizations.

The bill would cap any county’s local sales tax at 2.5 cents, and Mecklenburg is already at the cap. See “Senate bill would scuttle November sales tax referendum.”

The effect on transit hasn’t gotten much publicity in the Charlotte region, although it can’t afford to build its long-planned transit system with only the half-cent transit sales tax it’s had for 14 years. But in the Triangle, it’s a different story. Transit advocates are worried. (Update July 25: The bill was amended to get rid of the either-or provision. It still would cap a county’s sales taxes, effectively barring Mecklenburg from its planned sales tax referendum for teacher pay and creating a dilemma for Wake County. Here’s a summary of the bill’s process. It passed the N.C. Senate on July 24, and now sits in the N.C. House Finance Committee.)
Some background, although be forewarned, it’s complicated: In N.C., no city or county can raise sales taxes unless the state legislature gives them permission. But N.C. legislators in 2007 gave all N.C. counties permission to raise sales taxes a quarter-cent, if county voters OK’d. (That’s the tax increase Mecklenburg commissioners were hoping to use.) That money could be used for any county use. In addition, in 2009 the legislature gave three Triangle-area counties permission to ask voters for a half-cent sales tax for public transit. The heavily congested Triangle has been planning a rail transit system for years, but had no way to fund it.

Voters in Durham and Orange (Chapel Hill) counties approved the transit tax. In Wake County (Raleigh), a Republican-dominated board of county commissioners has not put the issue to voters. However, Wake commissioners had been expected to decide next month whether to put a quarter-cent sales tax for education to a November referendum.
 
The Senate bill now would allow sales tax income to be spent on education, or on public transportation, but not both at the same time. Huh? Yes, it’s confusing. This article from WRAL-TV is helpful: Senate seeks to curb local tax use. So is this one, from the Raleigh News & Observer: Senate bill would ban N.C. counties from raising sales taxes for both education and transit.

The N.C. Senate was to vote on the bill today; the vote was postponed until Monday.

WRAL’s Laura Leslie quotes a Raleigh-area legislator,Sen. Josh Stein, D-Wake, who said he was puzzled by the bill:

“Why wouldn’t we allow it, if they chose to designate a quarter-cent to transportation and a quarter-cent to education? Why must it be one or the other?” Stein asked. “What if they have needs for both?”

Raleigh-area transit advocates worry the bill could devastate plans for multicounty systems. “This is a really bad bill that could kill the transit referendum for Wake County,” Karen Rindge with WakeUP Wake County wrote in a message to supporters. Another source, speaking on background, told WRAL: “It pits transit against education, and transit’s going to lose every time.”

In Charlotte, meanwhile, the 1998 half-cent transit tax doesn’t bring in enough money to build anything beyond the Blue Line light rail, now operating, and the Blue Line Extension, under construction. No nearby counties have stepped forward to help make the Charlotte Area Transit System a regional one.

Of course, tax policy experts will tell you sales taxes are harsher on the poor than property taxes, because the poor spend a larger proportion of their income on food, clothing, and other taxed purchases. So why not just raise property taxes to fund both education and public transportation?

In my experience, no matter how practical that idea may sound, the question is about as welcome as an ex-boyfriend at a bridal shower. In other words, you aren’t likely to hear any pols — local or state — asking it.

You call that an auto mall?

An auto dealership in an urban environment in Manhattan

I was in New York over the weekend for a meeting, and Saturday morning I went out for a quick walk beforehand. I was staying on West 55th Street so I decided to walk west toward the river.

By the time I got down to 11th Avenue I realized I had been walking past a large auto dealership. Sure enough, a look at signage told me this Mercedes dealership was taking up a substantial part of the block.

New York-style dealerships

Nearby was another new-looking, large building selling Audis. Across 11th Avenue was a building with the names for numerous makes of car – Ford, Volvo, Mazda, Jaguar, etc. I had stumbled on an urban auto mall! (It was the Manhattan Automobile Company.)

It seems developers – at least those who are not in Charlotte – are perfectly capable of designing auto dealerships, even facilities housing several dealerships – that sit right on a sidewalk along a city street, and do not require vast surface parking lots designed with the elegance of a Walmart superstore.

Back home in Charlotte, of course, the City Council just unanimously OK’d a rezoning to allow a vast expanse of auto mall asphalt within the quarter-mile walk zone of a to-be-built light rail station. (See “Don’t derail transit areas with an auto mall,” and “University City auto mall rezoning complete.”)

This was after the appointed planning commission recommended it, and after the city planning department recommended it. Those decisions remain a bafflement to me. None of it matches the city’s stated goals for its transit station areas. While in New York, I mentioned this transit-station-area rezoning vote to a former city planning director from another state who now teaches planning at a large state university. His jaw dropped. He was incredulous.

The said thing is, as these photos show, there are creative ways to have both auto dealerships and a pedestrian environment. I’m left to conclude that our local folks may just be too provincial to know better.

Mercedes-Benz Manhattan.

Triangle’s transit tussle – and its ‘expert’ trio

And speaking of public transit, which I often find myself doing, Rob Perks of the Natural Resources Defense Council last Friday posted a good summation of the situation in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region, where two of the three counties have voted for a sales tax to start building a system of rail and bus lines throughout the region. But Wake County continues to balk.

And read on to learn about my research into a panel of three ostensibly unbiased “experts” that may have been a stacked deck.

First, here’s a link to Perks’ blog, “The Tussle over Transit in the Triangle.” It’s a good summation of the situation. Be aware that given Perks’ job and beliefs, it’s commentary, as opposed to a news article.

The situation: Wake County commissioners, dominated by Republicans, have stalled and stalled. Then they hired a three-person panel of “experts” to look at the local data and provide advice. One of the experts is Sam R. Staley, well known in planning circles as an anti-Smart Growth voice. He’s a research fellow at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian public policy think tank. Among those on Reason’s board of directors is David Koch, the billionaire oil industry mogul and conservative activist whose money in part has helped bankroll the Tea Party, among other political endeavors. But I digress.

Another of the three experts is Steve Polzin, director of the mobility research program at the Center for Urban …
Transportation Research at the University of South Florida. A Tampa Bay Times investigation in 2009 found that the center has frequently been critical of passenger rail travel, while promoting alternatives (highways and bus rapid transit) that it has been paid millions to study.  Read it here: One of rail’s biggest critics gets millions to study and promote alternatives

The article notes the CUTR’s history of opposition to rail transit projects. Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio (who didn’t run for a third term in 2011) was critical of CUTR. She told the Times that CUTR’s objections to rail have held the area back and predicted they’d be recycled, again, to weaken public support of a light rail proposal headed for a 2010 vote. [That 2010 vote for a 1-cent sales tax for transit in Hillsborough County lost 58 percent to 42 percent.]

“I’ve been very disappointed in the role CUTR has chosen to play,” Iorio said. “I do believe academic think tanks can play a very important role in shaping public policy. But CUTR is such a waste of a resource. It’s one of the reasons why we haven’t moved forward with rail. It’s really been a shame.”

The third expert is Clarence W. “Cal” Marsella, former general manager of the Regional Transportation District and the public face of its multibillion-dollar and nationally praised FasTracks rail project.

Here’s an account of the panelists’ recommendations from the Raleigh Public Record.

Of course, transit and transportation scholars can legitimately disagree about the wisdom of one public policy course over another, and they can provide research data to support a wide spectrum of conclusions. That’s legitimate.  But for the Wake commissioners to name two prominent rail transit critics to a three-person advisory panel might be raising some eyebrows in the Triangle. 

Here are some links to Raleigh News & Observer articles on the three-member panel:

New urban workers want rail transit
Wake transit plan – which never got first look from commissioners – needs ‘second look,’ Triangle Transit chair says.

 

Old Charlotte, meet New Charlotte

Old Charlotte met new Charlotte Thursday night. And in this case, “old” doesn’t necessarily refer to people’s ages.

Thursday night, I sat in on WFAE’s latest public conversation, this one on “One Charlotte or Many? A Neighborhood Perspective.“

Among the panelists was Tim Timmerman, a south Charlotte resident and founder of a group called South Mecklenburg Alliance for Responsible Taxpayers (SMART). He’s of the opinion that south Charlotte – the wedge-shaped pie slice with the city’s least crime, highest incomes, highest property values, highest education levels, etc. – is not getting its share of city resources while its property owners pay the lion’s share in property taxes. His part of the city would end up paying for a streetcar nobody wants, he said, and he’s tired of so much city money going to center city. South Charlotte has no voice, he said.

The other panelists – Diane Langevin, president of the Winterfield Neighborhood Association in east Charlotte, Vee Veca Torrence, president of the Thomasboro Neighborhood Association in west Charlotte, and City Manager Ron Carlee, only three weeks into the job – didn’t loudly denounce Timmerman.

But the audience sure did. Several audience members drew applause when they said Timmerman was being divisive. We are one city, they said. Stop being adversarial. We need a strong downtown and strong neighborhoods. We need not only a streetcar but a “spider web” of transit connections throughout the city. Two who drew applause were long-time Charlotte residents, one in her late 60s and a Charlotte native, the other a man who said he, too, lived in “the wedge,” yet he was delighted the city had spent time and attention on uptown. He recalled uptown Charlotte in the 1970s. It was dead, he said, and so much livelier now.

Several 20- and 30-something audience members rose to describe how much they value living in or near uptown and being able to walk and bicycle around the city. They urged better bicycle amenities. One young man said he had moved from Buffalo to Pineville and that he came to Charlotte because it had a transit line (and less snow). He’s looking to move closer to uptown. They talked about living in Villa Heights, Grier Heights, Echo Hills and Shamrock Gardens. Note: Those particular speakers were white, and the first two neighborhoods have been predominantly black for decades.

They don’t want to live in suburban south Charlotte, they said. “I would consider that a step down,” said one.

To a longtime Charlotte resident, this is an amazing sea change. For years, opinions such as Timmerman’s dominated the city’s discourse. And those neighborhoods of little houses and even less  cachet were where you lived until you could afford a new subdivision in south Charlotte.

Obviously, it’s not as though south Charlotte today lacks for people who want to live there. But the enthusiasm of the crowd for living as close to uptown as they could afford was inspiring. They want to live in “the city.” They want to bicycle and walk and take transit. This is a whole new interest group being added to the city conversation, alongside voices like Timmerman’s.

This is not the Charlotte I moved to 30-some years ago. And that, I think, is a wonderful thing.