Category: walkability

Why it’s not easy to walk to school

“Why was it necessary to create a job in the health dept. to encourage kids to walk to schools? Isn’t that something a principal/teachers/student nurse could communicate to the parents?”

Good question, from a comment on the previous posting. The situation is complicated. A few administrators at schools here (and other cities as well) don’t want kids walking to school. They think it’s unsafe. They think kids already have bus rides so why would they want to walk? In addition, many principals spend their time trying to make sure kids are learning and teachers are teaching. How students arrive at school — as long as it’s not causing immediate problems — is way, way down the list. I wish the case were otherwise, but it’s not realistic to think that will change.

And school nurses? Most school nurses are assigned to multiple schools and barely have time to turn around, must less launch campaigns to encourage walking.

But there are other problems, too, that even the principals who DO want kids to walk or bike can’t surmount: Lack of sidewalks. Lack of crosswalks. Lack of midblock stoplights on long, long blocks. Lack of bike lanes. Lack of crossing guards. Those policies and decisions are not within a principal’s authority, but reside with the City of Charlotte.

And it’s even more complicated. Plenty of schools were built and designed for car- and-bus-only transportation. They’re not in pedestrian-friendly settings. Here’s a good example: Unless things have changed in the last couple of years, Greenway Park Elementary sits right next to the McAlpine Greenway, yet there’s no pedestrian connection to the greenway. The school, like many, sits so far back from the road and its sidewalk that the whole setting conveys a subliminal message of “Don’t walk here.” Technically, of course, you can walk to that school. But it wouldn’t be very efficient or pleasant.

Older schools — Eastover, Myers Park Traditional, Davidson Middle, Midwood School, the old Wilmore School (now used for offices) — were built when it was expected that kids would walk to school. That fell out of favor, all over the country.

School designs for the past 40 years had almost nothing to do with whether the assignment zones were neighborhood-school or crosstown busing. You see the same styles all over the country, not just in Charlotte. They have to do with state school design guidelines (influenced by national standards), traffic engineering and the architectural mode and practices of the day when they were built.

Reversing all the policies that combine to create an anti-walking environment is a huge task. I don’t wany my school principals having to tackle it. They have another mission.

CDOT: “Don’t Walk Here” Wall Doomed


Here’s the word from Danny Pleasant, interim director of the Charlotte Department of Transportation, responding to my post earlier today about this pedestrian obstruction on Brevard Street as you head from Fourth toward Third Street:

Good news, Mary. We have a project to convert Brevard Street between Trade Street and Stonewall Street into a more pedestrian oriented, two-way, two-lane street. It will follow the current work of converting Caldwell Street to two-way operation. We are in the process of selecting a design firm. The process should finish up in October. The project will include sidewalks on both sides of Brevard the length of the project. It will take a couple of years to build. But when it’s done, the brick wall will be gone.

Here’s what I had written earlier:

Don’t you love this? Walkable Charlotte, eh?

This particular barrier to pedestrians is on Brevard Street, between Fourth and Third streets, a half a block from the Transportation Center — a spot to which thousands of people walk daily.

Last time I asked about it, several years ago, someone at either CDOT or the city planning office told me they were waiting for that property to develop and when it did, they’d make sure the sidewalk got built. That’s been several years. Guess they’re still waiting. I’ll see what interim CDOT chief Danny Pleasant has to say.

And to be fair, I’ll say that CDOT has improved dramatically in its attention to pedestrian comforts, and that uptown Charlotte is, square foot for square foot, the largest pedestrian friendly site in the city. Does anyone know of any others that would compete for that distinction?

Walkable rating – We’re not last!

Walkscore.com, a cool site I plugged a year ago, looked at 2,508 neighborhoods in 40 cities. Charlotte didn’t do too well. That’s a euphemism. Charlotte was in the basement: No. 38 out of 40. (Cherry, Fourth Ward and Downtown Charlotte were rated our most walkable neighborhoods.)

The site measures walkability with a walkability checklist which assesses stuff such as whether a neighborhood has a discernible center, mixed-use development, sidewalks, traffic that doesn’t go too fast, narrow streets (calmer traffic), parks and public spaces, etc. The software used for measuring is based on Google maps, U.S. Census data, Zillow neighborhood boundaries and Yellow Page information, and it assigns values to locations such as schools, workplaces, supermarkets, parks and public spaces based on how near they are to an address. (Based on some comments I saw elsewhere, the software has some glitches.)

USA Today had a piece on the list, noting the bottom three: Charlotte, Nashville and Jacksonville, and the Huffington Post had a short blurb on the Bottom 10 as well.

Why is Charlotte so un-walkable? It’s hard to find just one villain; there are several. The part of the city built before World War II (as in Cherry, Fourth Ward, and downtown) is much more pedestrian-friendly. After WWII, traffic engineers and planners embraced some theories, based on the ideals of Modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, that have proven to be ill-suited for urban life. The federal government was in thrall to the automakers and began subsidizing auto travel with vast new highways while shrinking subsidies and passing laws that hurt rail transportation.

Single-use zoning was considered modern and progressive — yet another reason not to let yourself be blinded by an idea just because it’s labeled “progressive.” The traffic engineering profession promoted neighborhood layouts that didn’t have connecting streets.

In addition, elected leaders in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County rarely did anything that developers didn’t like, such as require sidewalks to be built or require subdivisions with lots of connecting streets, or require subdivisions to connect to the subdivision next door. Neighborhood activists fought street connections — witness the silly closure of East Kingston in Dilworth. After all, if you live on a street that doesn’t connect you understandably prefer the lack of traffic to what you’d have with through streets. Private comfort for a few trumped street networks that would have benefited the greater community.

The city’s transportation department in recent years has pushed admirably for more pedestrian amenities, and it’s making progress, although the rate is slow. Retrofitting the mistakes of 50 years will take money and time — lots of it.