walkability – The Naked City Blog

Can Charlotte become more walkable and bikeable? The conversation continues

AARP volunteers get ready to begin a walkability audit uptown with guest speaker Gil Penalosa of 8-80 Cities in October. Photo: Juan Ossa

It isn’t every day in Charlotte that within five hours you hear the World Health Organization invoked in conversation about planning and livability. But as a Charlotte discussion continues about whether the city needs to purposefully shift its primary emphasis away from motorists and toward to bicycles, pedestrians and transit, the “livability” term just keeps coming up.

Monday morning, I learned that the Town of Matthews in southern Mecklenburg County is the first, and to date only, municipality in North Carolina to sign on as an AARP Age Friendly Community.

That AARP initiative, as it turns out, is an affiliate of the WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities and Communities Program, a global effort dating to 2006 to help cities prepare for both increasing urbanization and for an aging population, as the huge Baby Boom generation hits retirement age.

Michael Olender, the Charlotte-based associate state director for AARP, says he’s in conversations with the Charlotte mayor’s office about whether Charlotte should also seek to join.

What does “age-friendly community” have to do with walkability and livability? Simply this: As planners and policymakers focus on the wishes and needs of the huge Millennial generation, Olender says, not much attention is being paid to the needs of what the older generation wants. But, he says, “What Boomers want mirrors very closely what Millennials want. They want to walk. They want good public transit.”

Fast-forward a few hours. I’m at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission’s monthly work session. Planning commissioner Deb Ryan, an associate professor of urban design at UNC Charlotte, is giving a short presentation on the role of livability and public health in city planning. She pointedly did not call it “sustainability.”

“ ‘Sustainability’ means everything and nothing,” Ryan said. Instead, she talked about becoming a “livable city.”

“While you may be opposed to sustainability, you can’t be opposed to better public health,” she said.

But what about the World Health Organization? As Ryan described how cities throughout history have acted to improve the health of their residents, she showed the WHO’s definition of health: “A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

“We’ve created a world where it’s much easier to drive than to walk,” Ryan said. “We’ve created neighborhoods where to get anywhere you have to drive. People have grown up with this. They think it’s normal.”

To show how transportation choices are a public health issue, Ryan pointed not only to the air pollution from auto exhaust, but to the role of physical exercise and to diseases today. In 1900 tuberculosis was the second leading cause of death in the U.S., with pneumonia (often related to TB) and influenza No. 1. By 1998 the leading cause of death was cardiovascular disease, with cancer a distant second. And research from the Activing Living Research project has found, for instance, that people who live in walkable communities are two times as likely to get enough physical activity as those who don’t.

The planning commission is an appointed advisory body that offers recommendations, not final decisions, on rezonings and planning policies. Nevertheless, Ryan urged her fellow commissioners to consider taking a stand in favor of stronger measures to move the city toward livability. “We have such a car-centric city now,” she said. “Are we stuck with what we have?”

And I’ll go out on a limb to note that not many people or neighborhoods in Charlotte can claim to have “complete physical, mental and social well-being.” But can we do better at the way we’re building the city? Absolutely

.

Why slow-growing light rail ridership should not surprise anyone

A bus in uptown Charlotte, where most bus routes begin and end. Photo: Claire Apaliski

Today’s Charlotte Observer brings an article from Steve Harrison noting that ridership on Charlotte’s light rail line, the LYNX Blue Line, has finally rebounded to its pre-recession levels but has not increased dramatically despite rapid growth in apartments along part of its route. See “Lynx light rail ridership back to 2008 levels.”

Some background: Charlotte’s first and only light rail line opened in late 2007, just in time for the massive 2008-09 recession that had Charlotte unemployment lingering in double-digits or near it for months. The northern couple of miles of the 9-mile route, closest to uptown, have seen massive apartment development in the past several years. The southern part of the route? Nada.

But the South End neighborhood – an area of old industrial buildings dating from the 1960s back to the late 1800s – is popping with hundreds of new apartments, and hopping with new microbreweries and trendy restaurants.

Car-free in Charlotte? It isn’t easy by Carolyn Reid, published last June at the PlanCharlotte.org website I run, helps explain why ridership may not be growing as quickly as you’d think.

Even in South End there’s little easy or walkable access to routine shopping needs like grocery and drug stores, no easily accessed, widely connected network of bike routes, nor robust bus service with headways under 10 minutes that spreads cross town. Because of lack of funding, the city’s bus service – while much improved over 1990s levels – still focuses on delivering workers to uptown rather than building a widely connected network.

South End remains a place with better transit, bike and pedestrian connections than almost any other Charlotte neighborhood. But it’s still not a place where living without a car is going to be easy. Unless you’re trying to go uptown, the light rail can’t deliver you where you want to go.

My prediction: Ridership will zoom when the Blue Line Extension opens in 2017, taking riders to the 27,000-student UNC Charlotte campus about 10 miles northeast of uptown.

Least walkable city in U.S. is – wait a minute, that’s us!

Uptown is one of Charlotte’s most walkable areas, along with First and Fourth wards. Photo: Nancy Pierce

(Friday, Nov. 15: I’ve updated this with comments from Charlotte transportation officials. To see that expanded version, visit the article in PlanCharlotte.org: “Charlotte trails nation in walkability rankings.”)

Want to guess the large U.S. city rated worst for walkability by Walk Score, the national rating system?

That would be the Queen City. Take a look at the 2014 report. New York rated No. 1, followed by San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Miami.

But what does this ranking measure? The Walk Score website says it “measures the walkability of any address using a patent-pending system. For each address, Walk Score analyzes hundreds of walking routes to nearby amenities. Points are awarded based on the distance to amenities in each category. Amenities within a 5-minute walk (.25 miles) are given maximum points. A decay function is used to give points to more distant amenities, with no points given after a 30-minute walk.
Walk Score also measures pedestrian friendliness by analyzing population density and road metrics such as block length and intersection density. Data sources include Google, Education.com, Open Street Map, the U.S. Census, Localeze, and places added by the Walk Score user community.”

If I read that correctly, Walk Score doesn’t measure the existence of sidewalks (although Charlotte wouldn’t rank very high in that regard either). So this city’s typical Sun Belt-all-spread-out, low-density development means anything you’d want to walk to is probably farther away than in a more densely developed area.

Charlotte also would ran low in block length and intersection density – which essentially measures how well networked the city is with plenty of streets and street corners.Many parts of Charlotte developed during the cul-de-sac era, when streets intentionally did not connect to anything.
Even uptown, which at least had a strong grid when it was laid out a couple of centuries ago, has seen many instances of streets being eliminated to accommodate large-footprint projects such as ballparks, stadiums, convention centers and parks.

I’m seeking comment from Charlotte Department of Transportation officials, but I doubt this ranking will surprise them.

Charlotte trails nation in walkability

Slate.com has been running a wonderfully written series about pedestrians, but in the No. 3 installment, about the WalkScore.com website, the article has a list of cities and neighborhoods deemed “most walkable” and “least walkable” according to the Walk Score formula. New York ranked most walkable. Charlotte wasn’t least walkable – that honor (?) went to Jacksonville, Fla. But the Queen City was the next-to-last.

I’ve written much about the need for more walkable neighborhoods and about more lights, crossings, sidewalks and – just as important – destinations within walking distance. And, as Tom Vanderbilt’s article makes clear, part of Walk Score’s value is that it bothers to quantify something that few other metrics do, and it coughs out an easily understood score, which makes comparisons easy. However, it is not perfect.

Because of the flaws in the way it’s done, the Walk Score also makes comparisons suspect. For instance, it deems the Cherry neighborhood the most walkable in Charlotte. Um, why?

Although I feel affection and protective toward that small, African-American neighborhood snuggled next to, but predates, Myers Park, and much as I hope its proximity to uptown does not ensure a future of high-rises, and evocative though its bungalows are and its wonderful square, surrounded with a school, a church, stores and houses – it is significantly less walkable than uptown (see photo above), or any of its neighborhoods. Yes, you can walk to Trader Joe’s, but that isn’t a full-service grocery. Is there a drug store in walkable distance? I suppose you can count the Target, but it’s across some yucky high-capacity streets. Cherry is technically walkable, but not comfortably walkable. Uptown has better amenities for pedestrians, better access to jobs and better access to transit.

One commenter on Slate had this to say:

The Charlotte data is laughable.

Cherry is a neighborhood where you are quite likely to get yourself killed if you are silly enough to walk there. Also the locations labeled B, D, and A are in Dilworth. Location H is in Myers Park, and location I is on the campus of Central Piedmont Community College. Only location G could even possibly considered as being sort of kind of on the extreme southern border of Cherry, and businesses on Kings Drive I’m sure would never think of themselves as actually being “in” that blighted neighborhood.

Charlotte has some walkable neighborhoods, especially Fourth Ward and to a somewhat lesser extent the newly-gentrified First Ward, but seeing how horribly inaccurate the cited data is makes me wonder about the other cities in this slide show.

For the record, I question the assumption that you’d get killed walking through Cherry. It’s low-income, but that does not automatically equal Murder Central. But while Cherry is obviously a better place for pedestrians to get somewhere useful than, say, Windy Ridge, Raintree or Stonehaven, I would not rate it the city’s most walkable neighborhood.

If you have nominations or thoughts, pop them into the comments section below. I moderate comments, so there could be a delay of a few minutes or longer before they appear.

The problem of pedestrian crossings

After a customer at an Elizabeth neighborhood bar was killed while crossing Seventh Street, the bar’s owner is trying to begin a campaign to add safety measures to the street. (The Observer ran a moving article today on the life of the victim, an Air Force veteran who was engaged to marry.)

A safer Seventh Street is an excellent goal, but the problem is not just for one street in one neighborhood. In another accident late Tuesday, a 14-year-old boy was killed when several cars hit him as he crossed W.T. Harris Boulevard.

The city, to its credit, has been working hard to add sidewalks and tame traffic on many neighborhood streets and thoroughfares. But those measures, by themselves, aren’t all that’s needed to make conditions comfortable and safe for people traveling on foot. Pedestrian crossings are essential. Charlotte doesn’t have enough of them.

In my possession is the 2008 draft of the City of Charlotte’s Pedestrian Plan. It remains unfinished, and thus unadopted. One of the most interesting maps in it shows the distances between signalized intersections (click here for a larger view. If the link doesn’t work, we’re working on that.). Segments greater than a half-mile (a 10-minute walk) are shown in purple, those greater than a quarter-mile (a five-minute walk) are in brown.

Except for a nugget in the center of the map (uptown) the map is a snake-pit of brown and purple squiggles. And I know, from driving around and checking the odometer, that many signalized intersections are farther apart than a half-mile.

For instance, yesterday I used the odometer to check distances between signals (where one could safely cross) on heavily traveled Eastway Drive, North Tryon Street and University City Boulevard, all of them bus routes. I frequently see pedestrians perched on tiny concrete medians as cars whiz past, or crossing in front of cars, typically to get to bus stops on the other side. My findings:

Eastway Drive: From Central Avenue to Kilborne Drive, no signal for crossing for .9 mile. I saw two pedestrians in the median.
From Kilborne to Shamrock Drive, one-third of a mile between traffic signals.
From Shamrock Drive to the signal at Sugar Creek Road, at Garinger High, .4 mile but no pedestrian crosswalk at the light.
Sugar Creek to The Plaza, .4 mile.

North Tryon Street: From Old Concord Road to Tom Hunter Road (served by two bus routes), 1 mile.
From the newly opened I-85 Connector Road to University City Boulevard, a stretch served by two bus routes but with huge gaps in the sidewalk network, .5 mile.

University City Boulevard: No sidewalks from the light at North Tryon to the light at the Target near W.T. Harris Boulevard, no way to cross for .4 mile.

On first glance you’d say a five-minute walk to go 1/4 mile to a signal isn’t so bad. But consider that you have to walk to the light, then back again if, for instance, you’re trying to get across a busy street to get to a bus stop. Humans are not prudent, and most people resist walking 20 minutes out of their way just to cross the street. If the street looks clear, they will cross where they can.

I know trade-offs exist. The more pedestrian lights you have the slower traffic will flow. In spots where motorists aren’t expecting to see a light they tend not to stop, even if the light is red. Pedestrians who believe they can safely cross might get hit. (Update 6:48 p.m. 11/4/11: One unfortunate example took place Thursday night, when a Davidson professor was badly injured when he was hit while in a pedestrian crosswalk.) (Update Nov. 13: The injured man died Nov. 11.)

I ran much of this past Malisa Mccreedy, the pedestrian program manager for the Charlotte Department of Transportation. She replied, via email: “Your effort to bring attention to pedestrian crossings is much appreciated. While the City has a history of working to address the inherited challenges of how our land use and road networks function, it is an ongoing balancing act.” CDOT will focus anew on its Pedestrian Plan starting in 2012, she said.

Guerrilla tree planters, here’s a project for you

(See note at end about where to find this blog after Friday.)

Today was a sunny morning, unseasonably cool for mid-June, and so I took my last 4-mile walk to my job at the Observer (Friday is my last day after 17 years on the editorial board). Only had one vehicle nearly hit me – a white SUV at Morehead and Kenilworth. At least I made him squeal his brakes.

I’ve chronicled some of my pedestrian adventures in my weekly op-ed columns, such as (“The foot challenge for Sun Belt cities” and “City walkability goal hits an icy patch” and “Walk this way. If you can.”

This morning, I thought – not for the first time – about the possibility of a little guerrilla, tree-planting campaign. I tend to think of this as I walk up South Tryon from Morehead Street to the Observer building at Stonewall Street. The N.C.-owned right-of-way alongside the I-277 bridge, where those odd witch-hat/Klan-hood sculptures sit, is bare grass. It’s a bleak trek across that bridge, let me tell you, and once you get past it, you sure could use some shade. What you get, though, is grass. And some “art.” (To be fair, the sculptures do offer a bit of shade at the right time of day.) But what about it? Someone want to sneak onto some of our fair city’s spots-that-need-shade-trees and just plant some trees? Come December, if you see someone out there with a shovel and some oak or maple saplings, it might just be me.

After June 17, if you want to read The Naked City blog, don’t look for this URL (marynewsom.blogspot.com) because it will be disabled when I leave the Observer. Instead, seek out nakedcityblog.blogspot.com. Right now it’s in the process of being designed (using the word “design” quite loosely). That’s where you’ll find me after my last day at The Charlotte Observer.

In Charlotte, walking has pleasures but problems, too

In my life as an associate editor at the Observer I’ve written a lengthy piece about my experiences walking 4-plus miles to work once a week in Charlotte, since March. Here’s the piece, with a photo slideshow.

But it’s too bad the slideshow with the package doesn’t show the evil “goat path” along Runnymede, where the sidewalk has not been cleared, to my observation, since at least 2001. Doreen Szymanski of the Charlotte Department of Transportation told me she believed the city had cleared it, at least once. I drive that way almost daily, however, and have never seen it cleared of muck and leaves. I’ve posted a photo below.

Some adjoining property owners – who ARE RESPONSIBLE because property owners bear the responsibility for keeping sidewalks clear of obstructions – have not-so-helpfully planted holly bushes there, the kind with prickly leaves. So if the bushes ever grow you’ll be crowded off the goat path and onto the teensy planting strip.

I’m already getting emails from readers, including one from someone who’s a quadriplegic. She writes:
“As a quadriplegic and wheelchair user, I blog about wheelchair pedestrian safety frequently. So many people fail to recognize that, as paratransit cuts continue, even more blind people and wheelchair users are taking to the streets to get around to doctor’s appointments, grocery stores, etc. as a necessity. Passable sidewalks, street signals and driver education are urgent concerns that need to be discussed in communities.”

Another reader tells of stealth pruning:
“After years of watching walkers and joggers (me included) duck — or walk in the street to avoid — low hanging branches on the sidewalk next to a large condo complex, I took my loppers in the dead of night and did some heavy pruning.Now, once a year or so, I just have to do some light maintenance. I leave the clippings — in the case of the first year, the limbs — on the grounds of the condo complex, thinking they would get the hint. Now, several years later, I STILL have to do my midnight pruning.”

Here’s the photo of the Runnymede goat path, with holly bushes:

Another road diet, this one for South Tryon

This is a street project I can love. The city wants to widen the sidewalks on South Tryon Street over I-277, plus create bike lanes. The picture above is an artist’s rendering of what it might look like, looking north toward the skyline. Note the lovely Charlotte Observer building at left, just over the bridge. Here’s what it looks like now. The idea is to make South Tryon Street between Stonewall Street (the corner where the Observer office and the Gantt Center sit) and Carson Boulevard (the street formerly known as Independence Boulevard until I-277 was born) more suitable for pedestrians and bicyclists. If you want to hear more, there’s a public meeting today at 5:30 p.m. at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, in room 280.

The city intends to start with a 90-demonstration project, starting March 15. They’ll temporarily restripe the lanes on the pavement and put up bollards. Tryon will go from four lanes to three – two northbound and one southbound – between Stonewall and Carson. “It’s going to require some signal phase tweaking” for the traffic light at Morehead and Tryon, says Jim Kimbler with the Charlotte Department of Transportation.

The goal is to turn the excessively wide four-lanes into three lanes with better sidewalks, especially over the bridge. Currently when you walk over the I-277 bridge you’re on a 5-foot back-of-curb sidewalk looking down on traffic zooming below. It is not pleasant. And because I work at that spot I can report that traffic on Tryon is usually sparse. Jay-walking is routine, and easy.

Why a demonstration project? The bridge is state-owned, as is South Tryon south of Morehead, so the N.C. DOT has veto power, and it wants to make sure that the changes won’t foul traffic or hurt the bridge. If the state agrees the “street diet” will work, then the city will move forward.

Tryon between Morehead and Carson isn’t as wide as the section over I-277. Kimbler said the sidewalks there won’t be widened right away, because the city hopes development in the near future will produce better sidewalks. Let us hope that is the case, or that the city will improve the sidewalks if no development ensues in a year or so. The photo here is what the sidewalk is like now. It is not a scene that makes your heart sing.

EPA video spotlights Charlotte, Dilworth

New video posted on the EPA’s Web site lauds the city’s Urban Street Design Guidelines and the East Boulevard Road Diet, which illustrates the city’s transportation design goals. Check it out. Mayor Anthony Foxx, ex-Mayor Pat McCrory, council member Susan Burgess, ex-council member and current city department head Patrick Mumford and others talk about how great the Urban Street Design Guidelines are.

It stems from the city’s National Award for Smart Growth Achievement, announced in December, in the “Policies and Regulations” category for the USDG.

Yet the developers’ lobby, the local Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition, as well as influential, long-time real estate magnate John Crosland Jr., are still urging the city to dial back – or un-adopt, or never actually codify into ordinances, or otherwise eviscerate – those same USDG. They don’t like the requirements for modestly shorter blocks, or the width of the planting strips (wide enough so street trees will survive) or the general policy to build more streets and sidewalks in new developments. It’ll add cost, they say. And yep, it will.

But what’s the cost of congestion? What’s the cost of not being able to ride a bicycle or walk anywhere? What’s the cost of street trees that die? What’s the cost of having to retrofit streets and build sidewalks into already built neighborhoods – at taxpayer expense. The costs exist. It’s just a question of where you inject them into the growth process: at the start, or later on and spread among a wider group of payers, i.e. us taxpayers.

Charlotte snags ‘Smart Growth’ award

Although Charlotte’s policy to design streets to better accommodate pedestrians and bicycles remains under assault by the local developers’ lobby – who claim the extra pavement required for sidewalks and more streets isn’t good for the environment – note that the Environmental Protection Agency has given the city an award for those very same Urban Street Design Guidelines.

The EPA announced today that Charlotte is one of four winners of its Smart Growth Awards.
Click on this link to the EPA web site, which should be updated after 3 p.m. Here’s what the press release says:

• Policies and Regulations: City of Charlotte for Urban Street Design Guidelines. As the central city in a rapidly growing metropolitan area, Charlotte, N.C., is under intense development pressures. Rather than continue the automobile-dominated development patterns of the last 50 years, Charlotte adopted Urban Street Design Guidelines to make walking, bicycling, and transit more appealing and to make the city more attractive and sustainable.

Other winners:

Overall Excellence: Lancaster County (Pa.) Planning Commission for Envision Lancaster County. “Lancaster County, in south-central Pennsylvania, is known for its historic towns and villages, and its fertile farmland. To maintain the county’s character, its diverse economy, and its natural resources for future generations, the Lancaster County Planning Commission established a countywide comprehensive growth management plan, which protects valuable farmland and historic landscapes by directing development to established towns and cities in the county.”

• Built Projects: Chicago Housing Authority, FitzGerald Associates Architects and Holsten Real Estate Development Corporation for Parkside of Old Town. “Parkside of Old Town sits on eight city blocks that were once home to a public housing complex notorious for criminal activity. The redevelopment has transformed the neighborhood by reconnecting it to downtown Chicago and tying together mixed-income housing, parks, and new shops and restaurants.”

• Smart Growth and Green Building: City of Tempe, Ariz. for the Tempe Transportation Center. “The Tempe Transportation Center is a model for sustainable design, a vibrant, mixed-use regional transportation hub that incorporates innovative and green building elements tailored to the Southwest desert environment. The Tempe Transportation Center is a true multi-modal facility that integrates a light rail stop, the main city bus station, and paths for bicyclists and pedestrians.”