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The new development, its builders will say, will look like an English countryside village. It will be called Mayfair – a countryside village bearing the name of very pricey but decidedly urban London neighborhood.

Except, it’s nowhere near the countryside. It will be on Rea Road, deep in the heart of south Charlotte’s suburbia.

In England, of course, country villages are in the countryside – and the countryside is protected from development by powerful planning laws that set growth boundaries around each village. Unlike North Carolina, in England developers can’t fling subdivisions into the countryside. That’s why Americans think the English countryside is so beautiful they’re willing to buy into ersatz England in south Charlotte. They just don’t want to let our government try anything to protect our countryside. We want picturesque England without any of the hard political work required to create and maintain it.

And it’s not a village. It’s a cluster of 59 townhomes on 11 acres. It’s about a mile down Rea Road from a shopping center, which is decidedly not the same thing as the traditional English cluster of small shops. An English village has houses, stores, churches, pubs, schools – all within a close walk of one another. An English village is not a clump of townhouses, no matter how cutely designed with faux half-timbering, marketed to the relatively narrow slice of society, who can afford $300,000 to $500,000 dwellings.

Oh, and just in case you wanted that neighborly feel – you know, the kind of warm welcome you usually find if you visit an English village pub or tea shop, a sense of being invited to be part of their community, if only for a few hours? The “English countryside village” will be gated. You are not welcome there. Prince Charles and Camilla are not welcome there.

In England, a countryside village does not have a locked gate around it.

The motto of the state of North Carolina is Esse quam videre – to be rather than to seem. And in Charlotte, people wonder why the rest of the state thinks Charlotte isn’t really part of North Carolina.

The east and west sides of Charlotte have been afraid that the transit system the city is building will end up with classy light rail or commuter rail for all the other corridors but yucky buses for the East and West.

I’m just back from a two-day conference in Boston (Cambridge, to be precise) and one afternoon we ended up riding around the greater Boston area on the T – meaning using the heavy rail (that is, subway) system primarily but also taking a short hop on the new Silver Line. Bus. Bus Rapid Transit. In the argot of Transportation Jargon, it’s BRT.

If you travel much in Boston you probably already know the Red line goes to Harvard Square in Cambridge. The Green line goes to Fenway Park and to whatever they call Boston Garden these days. The Blue line goes to the aquarium and goes sort of near Logan Airport. Now, the new Silver Line goes to the airport, too, and depending on where you’re going it’s got a good chance of being a better choice, meaning fewer transfers, than Blue.

The Silver Line is – how to put this and still sound like a journalist? – gorgeous. The station is new and clean, which isn’t how you’d describe many of Boston’s aging subway stations.

These buses aren’t like the ones that ply the streets of Boston, Charlotte, or just about any other city of any size. They’re new, but just as important, they’re powered by overhead electrical lines, which makes them clean and quiet. They can also switch to diesel fuel. They’re designed so people hauling luggage don’t have to lift the suitcases to get from platform to bus. In the section of the Silver Line we went on, the bus had its own dedicated path, just like the subway does. In fact, part of the newly opened Silver Line runs through a tunnel that had to be carved underneath downtown Boston. Swedish boring equipment, I was told.

Some parts of the Silver Line that have to go into Boston traffic aren’t as rapid. And the Silver Line, at this point, is in two sections with no connection – a connection that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make.

One attraction of bus rapid transit is that it’s cheaper than laying rails. Seems to me, though, when you tunnel under a city and install electrical wires you’re making BRT kinda pricey. Even so, it was cheaper than just adding another subway link. And in 20 years or so – once the Big Dig is paid for, presumably – the Silver Line can be converted to rail if that seems important and there’s money available.

Of course, part of the reason to build the transit system in Charlotte is to attract growth to the transit corridors. Whether bus rapid transit will lure growth as well as rail is an open question and not one that should be dismissed. Plenty of other factors count, too, such as the affordability calculation, which takes into account based projected ridership and projected construction and operating costs. With fewer riders, you need less-expensive construction costs or you don’t get those all important federal dollars. The transit decision-makers can’t ignore those formulas.

But the headline is this: The bus transit wasn’t smelly or loud, like surface buses. Because it had its own path it was rapid. The transfer from rail to bus was seamless – just like switching to another subway line. If anything, the ride on the new bus transit was more attractive than the older rail.

Would it fly in Charlotte? I’m guessing it would.

The east and west sides of Charlotte have been afraid that the transit system the city is building will end up with classy light rail or commuter rail for all the other corridors but yucky buses for the East and West.

I’m just back from a two-day conference in Boston (Cambridge, to be precise) and one afternoon we ended up riding around the greater Boston area on the T – meaning using the heavy rail (that is, subway) system primarily but also taking a short hop on the new Silver Line. Bus. Bus Rapid Transit. In the argot of Transportation Jargon, it’s BRT.

If you travel much in Boston you probably already know the Red line goes to Harvard Square in Cambridge. The Green line goes to Fenway Park and to whatever they call Boston Garden these days. The Blue line goes to the aquarium and goes sort of near Logan Airport. Now, the new Silver Line goes to the airport, too, and depending on where you’re going it’s got a good chance of being a better choice, meaning fewer transfers, than Blue.

The Silver Line is – how to put this and still sound like a journalist? – gorgeous. The station is new and clean, which isn’t how you’d describe many of Boston’s aging subway stations.

These buses aren’t like the ones that ply the streets of Boston, Charlotte, or just about any other city of any size. They’re new, but just as important, they’re powered by overhead electrical lines, which makes them clean and quiet. They can also switch to diesel fuel. They’re designed so people hauling luggage don’t have to lift the suitcases to get from platform to bus. In the section of the Silver Line we went on, the bus had its own dedicated path, just like the subway does. In fact, part of the newly opened Silver Line runs through a tunnel that had to be carved underneath downtown Boston. Swedish boring equipment, I was told.

Some parts of the Silver Line that have to go into Boston traffic aren’t as rapid. And the Silver Line, at this point, is in two sections with no connection – a connection that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make.

One attraction of bus rapid transit is that it’s cheaper than laying rails. Seems to me, though, when you tunnel under a city and install electrical wires you’re making BRT kinda pricey. Even so, it was cheaper than just adding another subway link. And in 20 years or so – once the Big Dig is paid for, presumably – the Silver Line can be converted to rail if that seems important and there’s money available.

Of course, part of the reason to build the transit system in Charlotte is to attract growth to the transit corridors. Whether bus rapid transit will lure growth as well as rail is an open question and not one that should be dismissed. Plenty of other factors count, too, such as the affordability calculation, which takes into account based projected ridership and projected construction and operating costs. With fewer riders, you need less-expensive construction costs or you don’t get those all important federal dollars. The transit decision-makers can’t ignore those formulas.

But the headline is this: The bus transit wasn’t smelly or loud, like surface buses. Because it had its own path it was rapid. The transfer from rail to bus was seamless – just like switching to another subway line. If anything, the ride on the new bus transit was more attractive than the older rail.

Would it fly in Charlotte? I’m guessing it would.

If you get a chance to read my Urban Outlook column in Saturday’s Observer (it’s in the Opinion section of charlotte.com, starting Saturday) you’ll see – no surprise – I’m a huge fan of Jane Jacobs’ writing.

At a dinner Wednesday I sat next to a smart, accomplished local architect who was quibbling about Jacobs a bit, saying she didn’t have what he called real world experience, hadn’t ever designed any buildings and even at one point said her writing was essentially “fiction.”

I didn’t stab him with my salad fork, but I was tempted.

Obviously, anyone in any line of work learns from doing, whether it’s designing buildings for clients, drawing up city plans, writing editorials or building stone walls. Reality – whether in the form of structural engineering, planning department budget shortfalls, or looming deadlines – makes almost anything that any of us produce less than perfect. It’s true, Jane Jacobs never drew up city plans or designed buildings. And it’s true the Greenwich Village neighborhood that she observed most intently for “Death and Life of Great American Cities” wasn’t – still isn’t – a typical New York City neighborhood. But that doesn’t make her work fiction any more than it makes Lewis Mumford’s work fiction.

Jacobs wanted us to trust our eyes and our ears. She scorned, for example, urban planners’ veneration of “open space” as an abstract good, regardless of whether the “open space” ever got used by real people for anything other than muggings.

She saved some of her choicest invective for traffic engineers. In her 2004 book, “Dark Age Ahead,” she wrote that traffic engineers “have abandoned and betrayed science as it is understood. … It is popularly assumed that when universities give science degrees in traffic engineering, as they do, they are recognizing aboveboard expert knowledge. But they aren’t. They are perpetrating a fraud upon students and upon the public when they award credentials in this supposed expertise.”

She called it an “incurious profession” that “pulls its conclusions about the meaning of evidence out of thin air – sheer guesswork – even when it does deign to notice evidence.”

One example she gave: She didn’t drive and had to take taxis, which charge according to time and distance. To get to destinations in downtown Toronto using the elevated, limited access freeway invariably cost more than to get to destinations downtown avoiding the freeway. Her conclusion: Traffic engineers had planned roads without realizing that drivers have micro-destinations, not just the macro-destination of “downtown.” You could get to the outskirts of downtown quickly on the freeway, but you were slowed as soon as you hit the exit ramps and all the one-way streets, no-left-turns and other engineer tricks that were supposed to ensure a “speedy trip.” Instead, they’re impediments to getting where you want to go, she wrote, because someone apparently told traffic engineers the journey (speedy travel) matters more than the destination (getting somewhere efficiently).

She wrote: “In the background of this paradigm I see little boys with toy cars happily murmuring, ‘Zoom, Zooom, Zooooom!’ ”

Jacobs wanted people to see the world as it is, not just as they were taught in class. It’s a useful lesson.

I made a short comment in my previous post about the design of the ImaginOn building, asking what people thought. (Architects, here’s your chance.) One reply, from “Rebecca”:

“IMAGINON is GHASTLY. The ugliest building I have ever seen. it makes me ashamed every time I pass it. It looks like something my kids built in the woods out of scraps of castoff crap they found laying around. ICKY.”

Several comments complained about what they thought was ineffective use of tax money on the buildings. Others defended the building’s use – as a children’s library and the new home of the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte.

Here’s my take: I love libraries. And the Children’s Theatre is a gem of a resource for the city. We’re lucky to have it, lucky enough theater folks are willing to work there for what I’m pretty sure aren’t great salaries. Our daughter has taken classes at the CT and loved it, so I’m happy that worthy organization has much better, larger and better-equipped space.

I mourn the loss of the old building on Morehead because its walls oozed memories and history. The stairwell wall from the dressing rooms up to the stage was layer upon layer of signatures of Children’s Theatre participants from over the decades. The history had seeped into the bones of the building and was palpable for even the youngest users, and I’m sad that all those memories were just turned into rubble in one day.

BUT – you knew a “but” was coming, right? – it’s dumb to segregate “children’s books” from the main library in a whole other building. That just further isolates young people from larger society. Kids need more places where they’re integrated with, and interacting with, people of all ages from the elderly on down.

In addition, it’s user-unfriendly for two rather large groups: 1. Adults who want to browse and check out books WHILE they take children to the library. Why make them trudge between two buildings several blocks apart? 2. Kids aged about 8-15 who are good readers and move back and forth between “children’s books” and “young adult books” and “adult books.” We should all be encouraging more kids to read more advanced literature if they’re interested, not putting obstacles in their way.

And I confess, I think the building is junky looking. I’m afraid that in 10 years it will look dated, and in 25 years will even be shabby. Our 14-year-old loves it, however. So who’s right? Let the debate begin.

Attention, uptown folks: What WAS that? Or downtown folks. Doesn’t matter what you call the place. What WAS that thing I saw on Sixth Street last Thursday?

It was the carcass of what can best be described as a critter.

It lay on the south side of East Sixth, in the block east of College Street, sort of across the street from Brixx. It was brown and furry, with a rodent-ish face, and a furry tail. It was the size of a beaver.

The size and the fuzzy tail ruled out rat, possum or beaver and, based on a quick Google search, muskrat. It wasn’t a rabbit or hare; its ears were small and round.

Is it possible we have groundhogs – a.k.a. woodchucks, as in “How much would would a woodchuck chuck,” etc. – in uptown Charlotte?

“Fried, roasted or stewed woodchuck can be tasty,” a Canadian Web site, Hinterland Who’s Who, tells me. No mention of woodchucks having become urbanized like raccoons and possums. Even so, it looked more like a groundhog than anything else, though I’ve only seen them dead on the highway, or standing sentry beside mountain roads or being fêted at the Nature Museum on Groundhog Day.

Any theories, anyone?

Speaking of sights
And speaking of uptown sights, can there possibly be a less distinguished-looking county courthouse than the new Mecklenburg County Courthouse at Fourth and McDowell streets?

One last thought
One last uptown thought: ImaginOn? Love the building or hate it?
My quick take – it’s seriously suburban, with its odd scraps of useless lawn out front. And that grassy berm out back looks as if it was modeled on some suburban buffer in Weddington. It has no place in an urban setting.

Maybe someone with a competitive streak figured if Dallas has a grassy knoll, then Charlotte needs one, too.

Attention, uptown folks: What WAS that? Or downtown folks. Doesn’t matter what you call the place. What WAS that thing I saw on Sixth Street last Thursday?

It was the carcass of what can best be described as a critter.

It lay on the south side of East Sixth, in the block east of College Street, sort of across the street from Brixx. It was brown and furry, with a rodent-ish face, and a furry tail. It was the size of a beaver.

The size and the fuzzy tail ruled out rat, possum or beaver and, based on a quick Google search, muskrat. It wasn’t a rabbit or hare; its ears were small and round.

Is it possible we have groundhogs – a.k.a. woodchucks, as in “How much would would a woodchuck chuck,” etc. – in uptown Charlotte?

“Fried, roasted or stewed woodchuck can be tasty,” a Canadian Web site, Hinterland Who’s Who, tells me. No mention of woodchucks having become urbanized like raccoons and possums. Even so, it looked more like a groundhog than anything else, though I’ve only seen them dead on the highway, or standing sentry beside mountain roads or being fêted at the Nature Museum on Groundhog Day.

Any theories, anyone?

Speaking of sights
And speaking of uptown sights, can there possibly be a less distinguished-looking county courthouse than the new Mecklenburg County Courthouse at Fourth and McDowell streets?

One last thought
One last uptown thought: ImaginOn? Love the building or hate it?
My quick take – it’s seriously suburban, with its odd scraps of useless lawn out front. And that grassy berm out back looks as if it was modeled on some suburban buffer in Weddington. It has no place in an urban setting.

Maybe someone with a competitive streak figured if Dallas has a grassy knoll, then Charlotte needs one, too.

A reader shares this link to another article about the Big House phenomenon, and the backlash against it. Her comment, “pretty much same story/justification – if they can afford it and they run you off from your home/ruin your neighborhood then too bad for you. They are rich and you are not so get lost…” Here’s the link: http://realestate.msn.com/buying/Articlenewhome.aspx?cp-documentid=418653&GT1=8012

And if you’re interested in something a bit less public-policy-wonkish, try this site from Charlotte’s avant-gardista, Little Shiva: http://www.makecharlotteweird.com/home.html

Reader N.T. poses an interesting question:

I enjoy reading your blogs. Here’s a good topic. What will it take to make Charlotte a “World Class City”? Charlotte is a great city with potential to become world class. City Leaders need a broader vision. They also need to prepare the city for the next 30 years, not five. Here are a few of my suggestions.

An education system that provides quality education for all students, in a comfortable environment, and with educators who are professional and qualified to teach all students. An education system that focuses more preparing students for a career and life, not just passing EOG tests.

Better roads and parking; a law and/or medical School; become a 24-hour city; a diverse leadership team; international facilities (schools, parks, banks, businesses) in prime areas such as uptown and South Park. World Class Cities embrace the world.

Once some pieces are in place the city will attract more businesses and cultural attractions.

What’s your answer? Here’s mine:

Charlotte should stop trying to be a “world-class city” and just try to be a great place to live.
A world-class city has layers of history that reveal themselves to visitors and residents. Charlotte isn’t old enough yet, and too much of what could have become its first layers of history has been torn down. That’s got to change.

A world-class city has enough people concentrated in the center to create not only the sense of excitement that good cities offer, but to create a market for stores, museums, businesses and all the other things that over time help create those layers of history.

In time, 50 or 100 years maybe, Charlotte might become a world-class city – if its leaders think long-term as well as short-term, if more of its residents support the arts (name a world-class city that doesn’t have great art) and will invest public money in great parks and museums (name a world class city that doesn’t have them), if its schools stay strong (because bad schools mean a dying center city), if its luck hold up, if the creek don’t rise …

Right now Charlotte’s civic persona is so desperate to be “world-class” that it comes off like a teenaged boy who want so desperately to be popular that he runs for class president every year and tries out for all the teams. To want something that nakedly just works against attaining it.

So I think Charlotte should worry less about “world-class” and relax more.

Figured I’d weigh in with some facts, to respond to recent comments, mostly about impact fees.

First, while I think impact fees are worth considering, I haven’t said they’re the greatest idea since sliced bread. There are other, probably better ways to find money to build schools and repair streets and fund parks and deal with growth’s costs to local government. Problem is, so far our elected officials aren’t looking at those other ways, either, or using tools they already have (primarily property tax increases) or reallocating existing money.

Second, yes, impact fees would require lengthy political effort. That’s one reason they may not be worth fighting for. Another option is some places are using is to adopt adequate public facility ordinances, which need no blessing from Raleigh. Under an APFO, developers can develop in areas where infrastructure’s adequate, or wait to develop until infrastructure catches up, or pay a fee toward creating the infrastructure.

Third, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools are not “in the toilet.” Test scores are rising, not sinking, for black, white and Hispanic students. Is that the only way to measure a good education? Of course not. But it’s the only way we have. CMS has some excellent schools, with excellent and hard-working teachers, delivering excellent educations. I’m tired of people acting as if those places don’t exist.

Fourth, there are no proposals before county commissioners or City Council to adopt impact fees. There’s a lot of talk about looking at new revenue options because of a belief that the property tax shouldn’t be the only mechanism with which to raise money. But so far there’s only vague talk.

Fifth, “almost all the new development uptown is because of tax policy and government subsidy.” Say what? Most development uptown is residential and gets no incentives. All over the U.S., urban living became “cool” again in the 1990s and a market arose that didn’t exist 25 years ago, or more likely, a market that existed all along was rediscovered, and with red-lining outlawed it was allowed to flower again.

Yes, the arena and the stadium got healthy boosts from public money. So did the Coliseum on Tyvola Road, by the way. So did the old Coliseum (now Cricket Arena) on Indy Boulevard back in the late 1950s. If you’re tracking subsidies, don’t overlook the outerbelt and its numerous, clogged-with-development interchanges – way more than are needed for transportation purposes. We all paid to build those interchanges, in order to enrich developers and landowners. Remember, too, that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities plans to put sewer service in every square inch of the county, paid for by all off us who pay water-sewer fees. Talk about incentives to develop! Without sewer and water, no development. You may not like government spending that lures development, but it’s been going on for years, all over the place.

Last, “It’s well documented that new urbanism gets legs not because people want to live in urban areas (in fact this year’s realtor survey and recent census survey say the exact opposite) but because of financial and tax policy incentives.” Any of you new urbanist developers out there want to set the record straight?