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Have you been to the cinema at Ballantyne? If so, you may have some thoughts to share on the topic that Hickory’s Avis Gachet shared. Gachet, one of the Observer’s community columnists this year and a faithful Forum writer, e-mailed me this. My response is below. And planners, it would be especially interesting to get your thoughts on this one:

Mary, Yesterday a friend and I spent the day in Charlotte. At noon we sought out the Ballantyne Theatre in Ballantyne Village. It was a nightmare to find. (Fabulous movie, however–“Away from Her.”)

I had gone to the Website for directions. Found a phone number, and, after talking to two people, obtained rather poor directions. Found Johnston road off 485–no problem.

THEN…we began to negotiate our way through the maze. I had NOT been told to look for the tower. Even so, we found ourselves turning around in parking areas and going out of our way several times before we zeroed in on it. We were ten minutes late for the movie as a result.

Is that the current planning style in Charlotte? I have to say that I would opt for a strip mall instead.

I am NOT a timid driver. I drive in Washington, D.C. and New York City. I would drive to England if someone told me I could. One of these days if there is a fire or a crisis in that area, people will be frantic trying to evacuate.

Do you approve of that sort of design? This would be a real turnoff to many older drivers.
Give me a theatre in a former big box–with a parking lot one can find easily. I guess that I am a Philistine.

But I am one person who is old enough to: 1) see various fads come and go (each having the absolute answers, of course); and 2) feel that making things fancy is not always making them better.

I would not THINK of making a casual run for something from one of those shops near the theater. It would take an Act of Congress to get me there more than a very few times a year. Generally speaking, I will go anywhere–at least once.

Here’s my response, only partly tongue-in-cheek.
Avis, I’ve been to Ballantyne Theatre and I fully understand your frustration. They need some signs that tell you where to turn! I’ve been there 2 or 3 times and usually I turn at the wrong place.

From what I see, it’s the planning style everywhere to use movie theaters in large shopping center-mixed use developments. There’s one at a Ballantyne-like shopping center in Mount Pleasant, S.C., called Towne Center-or-maybe-Centre (not that it’s in the center of town.)

But I don’t think the planners have any set “style” other than to encourage connectivity of streets, etc., etc. They tend to assume the retailers and developers will be savvy about getting people into their developments. And as we all know, sometimes they aren’t savvy at all.

And then you can’t discount the old Charlotte tradition of just figuring that people who are from around here will learn their way around and the other people, well, they’re not from around here, are they? Example: Myers Park and its Queens Roads.

This follows up on the previous posting which included one father’s musing about teens living in suburban or urban neighborhoods, and what the suburban-reared kids may be missing. A report in the U.K. speculates that the mental health of modern-day kids is at risk because they lack the freedom to explore the natural world that their grandparents had. Here’s the top of the article from the Daily Mail of London:

When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.

It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike, and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.

Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas’s eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom. He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.

Even if he wanted to play outdoors, none of his friends strays from their home or garden unsupervised.

The contrast between Edward and George’s childhoods is highlighted in a report which warns that the mental health of 21st-century children is at risk because they are missing out on the exposure to the natural world enjoyed by past generations.

Here’s a link to the full article.

As a parent, I’ve struggled — as I’m sure many of you have — with figuring out where to land on the freedom-versus-safety spectrum. At what age do you let a child walk to a neighbor’s house alone? When should you let a child go for a walk in the neighborhood for exercise? What about riding a bicycle?

I have a friend, a native Charlottean whose family got its land from King George III before the revolution. She grew up near Commonwealth and Central avenues, in the 1950s and 1960s. She remembers riding her bicycle over to the Coliseum on Independence (now Cricket Arena) to go ice skating. That was their hangout, she says. Or they would take a bus to go uptown to a movie. Would any parent today let a kid do that? If so, at what age? When our daughter was 11 or 12 I let her walk or take the Gold Rush shuttle from Discovery Place or the Main Library to The Charlotte Observer building, seven or eight blocks away.

I know other parents who’d be shocked to think of such a thing. And even others who’d let kids do that at a younger age.

It’s one of the little-mentioned differences found in cities with strong public transportation systems: Teens and preteens have more freedom to move around the city without having to depend on parents chauffeuring them.

People who live in gated communities and complain about traffic congestion remind me of people who say they hate sprawl and also hate density.

Guess what. The best remedy for traffic congestion is to have lots of streets, most of them relatively narrow and slow-speed, connecting to lots of other, similar streets. Traffic engineer and N.C. State grad Walter Kulash, in an interview with me years ago, compared an efficiently functioning street network to an electric company’s power grid: “a dense, highly connected network of low capacity.”

What prompted this reverie was the news that the city of Asheville just banned building any more gated communities. Here’s the story. The city figured out that letting some neighborhoods wall themselves off makes it even harder to build a street network of connecting streets.

Charlotte, despite its much bragged upon “connectivity” policy, not only hasn’t banned gated neighborhoods, there hasn’t even been a proposal for the City Council to vote on.

I have two theories why Charlotte isn’t talking about such a ban.

–First, developers wouldn’t like it. Gated communities are popular with some affluent buyers, who assume they’re safer. Guess it depends on which crimes you’re worried about. I might worry about disproportionately high rates of insider trading or hedge fund fraud in gated communities. (But seriously, I recall seeing a study a few years back done in Atlanta, that compared crime rates in a gated community with those in a comparable, but non-gated community. The gated community had more burglaries.)

–Second, even when planners and politicians are willing to displease developers — which believe it or not does happen upon occasion — they still operate with a mindset dating to maybe the 1960s or 1970s, in which central Charlotte truly was threatened by vast growth flowing to the suburbs. In this mindset, the city shouldn’t do anything that would discourage development here.

Even though the city is experiencing growth so rapid and extreme that infrastructure can’t keep up with it, and even though demand for close-in housing is so great that prices are being bid up to an unhealthy level and in-town houses are being scraped away so in-town mansions can be built — despite all that the planners and politicians are still afraid they might scare off growth.

Silly, isn’t it?

Those who took part in the Bike Commuting Challenge (part of Bike Charlotte!, May 4-13) saved a total of $536 in gasoline (or $2,600 in total car costs). Other fun facts below.

Thanks to John Cock (The Lawrence Group) for forwarding results of the Commuter Challenge from Bill Clark of the Bicycle Commuter Mentor Program.

Altogether, we had 77 cyclists, 26 new cyclists, 22 female cyclists, and around 250 commutes made at an average of 7.5 miles each way! For that week, some quick math shows that we:
–did not drive 3,750 miles during that week;
–saved $536 in gas between all of us (or $2,600 in total car costs);
–kept 3,500 – 4,300 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere (about the weight of a car); and maybe got a little bit of exercise!

Some highlights of this year’s results include:
–Top workplace participation for a small workplace: TKM’s Best (TKM Associates) with 100% participation!

–Top workplace participation for a large workplace: The Midnight Ramblers (The Charlotte Observer) with 2% participation. Yes, only 2% – but there are a lot of folks at these large businesses to convince to bike, and 2% is a great percentage.

—Top non-businesses group participation: The Greenway Go-Getters (The Greenway Advisory Council) with 100% participation and The Bicycle Advisory Council with 87% participation!

–Most riders in a small workplace: Charlotte Department of Transportation with 6 riders!

–Most riders in a large workplace: Bank of America’s Gateway Village Team with 11 bikers!

—Most riders in a non-workplace: Wesley Heights Neighborhood with 4 riders!

—Most number of new riders in a small workplace: Full Blast Face Meltery (REI Pineville) with 3 new cyclists!

—Most number of new riders in a large workplace: Charlotte Observer with 4 and Duke Energy with 3 new riders!

—Most number of new riders in a non-workplace: The Portaro Family with 2 new riders!

—Most number of female cyclists in a small workplace: The Park and Wreckers (Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Planning Department) with 2 female cyclists, one being seven months pregnant and biking every day! (Way to go, honey!)

—REI also had 2 female riders!
— Most number of female cyclists in a large workplace: Piedmont Natural Gas and Gateway Village with 3 female riders!
—Most number of female cyclists in a non-workplace: Team Diva of the Dirt Divas Mountain Bike Club with 3 female cyclists and Wesley Heights Neighborhood with 3 female cyclists as well!

The teams which are the envy of all bicycle commuters and whose members live the closest to work include LG Love (The Lawrence Group – 1.5 mile average distance), REI (2 mile average distance), and The Drafters (The Housing Studio with and average driving distance of 3 miles).

The team that is way more dedicated than the average human being is the Charlotte Bicycle Advisory Council with an average commuting distance one-way of 19 miles!

A special recognition to the US Bankruptcy Court for getting the judge on a bike?!

Final recognition to a Bank of America team called Pigs CAN Fly for having the best team name, to the Heartwood Tree Service guys for always being there and showing a great performance, to Duke Generators and The Portaro Family for showing the media how it’s done, to Smokin’ in Spandex for their enthusiasm and to the captains of BikURS, eC Riders and Crown Club Cruisers for dealing with the most number of excuses!

If you’re a cyclist and wondering about how to bicycle in Charlotte, visit the Charlotte Department of Transportation’s Bicycle Program web site. Or try B.I.K.E.S., a local bicycling advocacy group.

Several people recently have posted comments akin to this one (look deep into the lengthy comments thread):

Yes Mary…please get with Ms. Burgess immediately and ask about the $50 MM that city council funded to LTR [light rail transit] to the detriment of public safety (ie: police officers).Oh, and ask about that bald face lie they told to the general public that the 2006 increase was necessary to FUND additional police officers. They would have plenty if not for the $50 MM funded to LTR, so really it was an LTR tax.

I asked Susan Burgess. I asked Deputy City Manager Curt Walton. I asked Budget Director Ruffin Hall. They all said the same. The city budget doesn’t allocate any money to the transit system — not for operations, not for building the rails or stations. It never has. All the LRT money comes completely from within CATS’ separate budget. (See technical note below.)

Best we can figure — I mean Hall, Burgess, Walton and I — people who are talking about the $50 million are referring to a $50 million street and sidewalk infrastructure package known at City Hall as SCIP, the South Corridor Infrastructure Program. That project is building much- needed sidewalks and improving intersections, as well as solving decades-old drainage and sewage problems, along South Boulevard near the light rail line.

The city decided to speed up some of that work so that people would have sidewalks on which to walk to transit stops and so streets and intersections on the South Boulevard corridor would function more smoothly once the light rail operations start. Those needs have lingered for years, decades even and many of them predate any notion of light rail. The city decided it would be more efficient and effective to do the work all at once, rather than tear up the street for an intersection improvement, then tear it up a few years later for storm drainage, and then later still to add sidewalks and bike trails.

SCIP is being paid for through bond issues that voters passed — let me repeat that, VOTERS PASSED — in 2002 and 2004. The City Council’s decision to raise property taxes came in 2006. In other words, those decisions were not linked, and the voters approved the SCIP projects. Whatever Susan Burgess may have said on the radio (she told me she couldn’t remember saying anything like that) she was either misunderstood or bumbled what she was trying to say.

People who are spreading this alleged fact are either:
A. Confused and/or misinformed.
B. Getting their “facts” from news sources that are confused, misinformed or don’t understand the city budget.
C. Deliberately spreading misinformation.

I’m going to assume most people are A. City finances are tricky and boring to understand. Most people whose jobs don’t require them to attend City Council meetings or interview city officials don’t have the time or interest to fathom things such as the difference between capital budgets and operating budgets.

But here’s a quick lesson. The $50 million capital improvement project SCIP comes from the capital budget — i.e. one-time expenditures, such as when you get a new roof for your house. Debt service on city bonds also comes from the capital budget.

Police officers’ pay comes from the operating budget — i.e. continuing expenses, such as paying the light bills. In other words, you can’t just take money allocated to repay bonds and convert it easily into police officer positions. (See the other technical note below.)

(Technical note: For bond-issuing reasons, the CATS budget is housed within the
city’s budget, because there’s no official government entity that runs CATS, as there would be if the Metropolitan Transit Commission were an authority. But the CATS budget and the city’s budget remain separate.)

(Other technical note: Yes, city officials have to balance how much revenue to put into their capital budget and how much into their operating budget. So yes, there is a relationship between those budgets. But the city has been issuing street and sidewalk improvement bonds for years and years, long predating CATS and the light rail plans. Most council members see those improvement projects as basic, continuing city services.)

Asheville tries to hire an architect who’ll do a green roof for its new civic center; can’t find a taker. Any green-roof experts willing to contact Asheville? Here’s the Citizen-Times’ version.

The idea, of course, is that a roof with stuff growing on it is better insulated and helps save energy costs for the building in the long run, as well as absorbing stormwater (i.e. fewer taxpayer dollars going to storm drain projects) and keeping down the urban heat island effect. Which means lower A/C needs for everyone.

Some of my architect sources tell me green roofs still have some kinks to be worked out. Like trying to keep birds’ nests from being sucked into air ducts. Or, finding plants that will grow in the hot (HOT!) and occasionally very dry environment. A planted roof I visited in Providence, R.I. — you know, New England where it isn’t all that hot — was planted in desert cacti and other dry-heat loving plants. My suggestion? Bermuda grass or crabgrass. Or both. Heat and drought just encourage them.

Read to the end of this, as I’ve tucked in a news item.

Is it true only 2 percent of the public in Charlotte rides public transportation?

You’ll hear that stat a lot. It counts everyone driving through the region on I-85 or I-77, commercial delivery trucks, tractor-trailers, etc. — trips transit would never compete for. Nearly 10 percent of the workforce in uptown Charlotte takes public transportation every weekday.

Light rail will never reduce congestion.

In a growing metro region, building mass transit doesn’t result in fewer cars on the road than before. However, mass transit will keep congestion from being as bad as it would be without mass transit.

In large and very large urban areas with rail, traffic congestion grows at a 42 percent lower rate than in similarly sized urban areas without rail. That’s from a study in 2000 by Mobility Planning Associates of Austin, Texas.

The well-respected Texas Transportation Institute, in its 2005 Urban Mobility Report and Texas Transportation Index, found that in the Charlotte region, people who ride public transportation versus driving alone reduce congestion delays by 6 percent to 12 percent, or more than 2 million hours of congestion delay per year.

Public transportation provides 3.25 times more congestion relief than operations treatments such as signalization, intersection improvements, incident management, etc., according to the TTI study.

In coming months you’ll hear a lot of people offering up statistics purported to show that light rail transit is a bad, bad, evil and/or spendthrift idea. Plenty of anti-tax folks just don’t like more taxes. Other, libertarian types don’t like public governments spending money on big public works projects. Others just like to make political hay.

Be smart. Statistics are like cakes. How they turn out depends on what ingredients you start with. For just about every stat purporting to show CATS is wasting money and poorly run and light rail is “failing” all over the country, you can find other stats — many of them from groups such as TTI that are neither transit bashers nor transit zealots — that will show the opposite, or will show a more complex, nuanced reality.

Now news, of a sort:
Transit and city officials are looking at whether part of the South Corridor light rail line — which they call the Lynx Blue Line — could open earlier than planned. Target date, CATS chief Ron Tober told me, is Oct. 27. The section that would open, he said, would be from uptown to as far south as they determined they could do it safely.

City Manager Pam Syfert says the City Council will be asked to look at the pros and cons of an early opening.

Betcha they’re looking at that Nov. 6 election, when the kill-the-transit-tax measure is likely to be on the ballot. Generating a lot of positive community enthusiasm right before the election surely couldn’t hurt. But any glitches, and they’re toast.

I’ve been in Charlotte long enough to know that you should never, ever count Crosland out of any city deal until the final buzzer. For decades developer John Crosland Jr. was the city’s preeminent master of getting what he wanted out of elected officials. He’s retired now, and others run the company he and his father, John Sr., built. The company is still doing suburban subdivisions but has done more urban-oriented and mixed-use projects (Birkdale Village, Alpha Mills renovation). Now it’s going for transit-oriented development.

Fast-forward to Monday’s City Council committee meeting, where the Economic Development and Planning Committee (hereafter ED&P) was briefed on the three development teams seeking to build a transit-oriented development (hereafter called T.O.D.) at the Scaleybark station. (Note to you who don’t read all the fine print inside the Observer: Yes, all three original development proposals withered. But all three development teams submitted new proposals.)

David Furman of Boulevard Centro retooled what was formerly known as the Bank of America proposal.

Crosland, which had dropped its St. Louis-based affiliate McCormack Baron & Salazar, offered a retooled proposal.

So did Scaleybark Partners, a coalition that includes Pappas Properties (Phillips Place, the Midtown development, etc.), GreenHawk Partners of Raleigh, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership, Shook Kelley design and something called Citiventure Associates of Denver, which is run by Marilee Utter who’s been to Charlotte several times to give talks on transit-oriented development.

The committee unanimously recommended —- Scaleybark Partners.

The staff had recommended against Boulevard Centro — the only team to guarantee a parking deck — because it sought a loan from the city. There’s no money now for a loan, said Tom Flynn of the city’s Economic Development office.

Both the Crosland and Scaleybark Partners proposals include affordable housing — 90 units from Crosland (with a commitment to start 30-50 of them in 2008 regardless of whether they have in hand some tax credits to build them) and 80 units for Scaleybark Partners.

Both guarantee parking for the light rail station. Neither guarantees a parking deck (preferable for T.O.D. but more expensive). Both said they’ll build one if market conditions are right, i.e. if they can get enough money from developing land that would otherwise be under a surface parking lot to make it worth the extra expense.

Neither offered a site design. Scaleybark said it would build open space — i.e. a park — before this November and do some landscaping and streetscape improvements by the end of 2008.

Neither offers a guarantee for a new library, though both say they’d like to try to build one.

The city would net a few hundred thousand dollars more from the Crosland proposal. But the council members on ED&P (John Lassiter, Nancy Carter, Andy Dulin, Don Lochman and James Mitchell) seemed to prefer several things about Scaleybark Partners:

–The development team has remained the same.

–Citiventure has T.O.D. experience. (Crosland said its planners would also have experience, but its development team isn’t fully formed yet.)

–They liked Scaleybark’s willingness to build the open space first, so the station area looks more inviting.

–They’re familiar with the Housing Partnership, a local nonprofit with a strong record of building affordable housing.

–And a key point, mentioned by Carter: Crosland owns a big chunk of land across South Boulevard and intends to redevelop it. There’s value in having different developers doing projects near each other, so you don’t have a big chunk of your city looking exactly alike. She’s right, though it’s a point of design likely to be lost on a lot of people.

Here’s a link to a Powerpoint presentation made to council on May 14 that has some of the key information. Here’s a link to Monday’s presentation. (Be forewarned that our online guru notes many of you may not have a viewer that can see it.)

The full council still has to make its recommendation, probably May 29. The memorandum of understanding would go to council July 11, and a development agreement would come in July or August.

I’ve been in Charlotte long enough to know that you should never, ever count Crosland out of any city deal until the final buzzer. For decades developer John Crosland Jr. was the city’s preeminent master of getting what he wanted out of elected officials. He’s retired now, and others run the company he and his father, John Sr., built. The company is still doing suburban subdivisions but has done more urban-oriented and mixed-use projects (Birkdale Village, Alpha Mills renovation). Now it’s going for transit-oriented development.

Fast-forward to Monday’s City Council committee meeting, where the Economic Development and Planning Committee (hereafter ED&P) was briefed on the three development teams seeking to build a transit-oriented development (hereafter called T.O.D.) at the Scaleybark station. (Note to you who don’t read all the fine print inside the Observer: Yes, all three original development proposals withered. But all three development teams submitted new proposals.)

David Furman of Boulevard Centro retooled what was formerly known as the Bank of America proposal.

Crosland, which had dropped its St. Louis-based affiliate McCormack Baron & Salazar, offered a retooled proposal.

So did Scaleybark Partners, a coalition that includes Pappas Properties (Phillips Place, the Midtown development, etc.), GreenHawk Partners of Raleigh, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership, Shook Kelley design and something called Citiventure Associates of Denver, which is run by Marilee Utter who’s been to Charlotte several times to give talks on transit-oriented development.

The committee unanimously recommended —- Scaleybark Partners.

The staff had recommended against Boulevard Centro — the only team to guarantee a parking deck — because it sought a loan from the city. There’s no money now for a loan, said Tom Flynn of the city’s Economic Development office.

Both the Crosland and Scaleybark Partners proposals include affordable housing — 90 units from Crosland (with a commitment to start 30-50 of them in 2008 regardless of whether they have in hand some tax credits to build them) and 80 units for Scaleybark Partners.

Both guarantee parking for the light rail station. Neither guarantees a parking deck (preferable for T.O.D. but more expensive). Both said they’ll build one if market conditions are right, i.e. if they can get enough money from developing land that would otherwise be under a surface parking lot to make it worth the extra expense.

Neither offered a site design. Scaleybark said it would build open space — i.e. a park — before this November and do some landscaping and streetscape improvements by the end of 2008.

Neither offers a guarantee for a new library, though both say they’d like to try to build one.

The city would net a few hundred thousand dollars more from the Crosland proposal. But the council members on ED&P (John Lassiter, Nancy Carter, Andy Dulin, Don Lochman and James Mitchell) seemed to prefer several things about Scaleybark Partners:

–The development team has remained the same.

–Citiventure has T.O.D. experience. (Crosland said its planners would also have experience, but its development team isn’t fully formed yet.)

–They liked Scaleybark’s willingness to build the open space first, so the station area looks more inviting.

–They’re familiar with the Housing Partnership, a local nonprofit with a strong record of building affordable housing.

–And a key point, mentioned by Carter: Crosland owns a big chunk of land across South Boulevard and intends to redevelop it. There’s value in having different developers doing projects near each other, so you don’t have a big chunk of your city looking exactly alike. She’s right, though it’s a point of design likely to be lost on a lot of people.

Here’s a link to a Powerpoint presentation made to council on May 14 that has some of the key information. Here’s a link to Monday’s presentation. (Be forewarned that our online guru notes many of you may not have a viewer that can see it.)

The full council still has to make its recommendation, probably May 29. The memorandum of understanding would go to council July 11, and a development agreement would come in July or August.

How’s business?

The Charlotte Regional Partnership and UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute, trying to answer that question, have devised the Charlotte Regional Business Barometer.

It’s a regional snapshot, combining data from the region’s North and South Carolina counties. Some notable “down” arrows: unemployment and business investment.

The partnership’s CEO, Ronnie Bryant, says in an e-mail newsletter:

“Our activity over this economic period has remained strong, although we can see some leading indicators that suggest some of the economic sectors and particularly U.S.-based small businesses are proceeding very cautiously with their capital spending programs.”