Category: WalkRaleigh

How to get Americans walking again

Uptown Charlotte, one of the city’s few walkable areas

Yes, we in Charlotte are geeky enough that it’s exciting when the mighty BBC takes note of North Carolina. And the WalkRaleigh campaign that I wrote about Feb. 6 in “Guerrilla wayfinding and the Charlotte dilemma” has hit the big-time, so to speak.

Asking, “How to get America to walk?” the BBC’s piece on Raleigh features WalkRaleigh’s Matt Tomasulo, who was behind what he calls a “self-motivated and unsanctioned” posting of signs telling passers-by how many minutes it takes to walk places in Raleigh. Note, too, that in the video Raleigh’s chief planning officer, Mitchell Silver, appears disinclined to call in the sign police to take down the signs. [Update: Silver reported via Twitter that the signs came down Wednesday. He is in charge of zoning enforcement, he said. He talked first with Tomasulo and they are working on a longer-term strategy to make the signs either a pilot project or permanent, Silver said.]

But maybe the best snippets are from the jogging stroller exercise class, where women with children work out, in a gym, with their strollers because they can’t, or don’t, actually take the strollers out for exercise or a walk. In one great visual, a woman points to a sidewalk that ends abruptly, keeping her from walking to a nearby grocery store.

All of which leads to a question I keep bugging my friends and colleagues with: Why isn’t there a pedestrian advocacy group in Charlotte to do what the bicycle advocates have been doing so effectively? Charlotte Area Bicycle Alliance (aka charlottebikes.org) was founded in 1997 and has successfully raised the profile of bicycling.  Is this bicycle nirvana? Of course not. But CABA has worked diligently to be at the table for policy discussions, and has clearly made a difference. So where’s the pedestrian counterpart?

Yes, the Charlotte Department of Transportation did hire a pedestrian planner a few years back, to its credit. But where are the people who’ll hound CDOT about cracked sidewalks and ankle-threatening potholes? Where are the people pushing, pushing, pushing for motorist- and pedestrian-safety campaigns, for more crosswalks and more pedestrian lights and for those pedestrian push-button signals to react sooner than 5 minutes (or so it often seems) after you push them?

(Related news: On Wednesday two young children were killed when they were hit by a truck as they walked with their father to a day care center. They were on a stretch of West Tyvola Road that lacks sidewalks and has narrow shoulders.)  

I know plenty of people who care about pedestrian issues, not least of whom is the city’s pedestrian planner, Malisa Mccreedy. But city staff can’t be the effective advocacy group that Charlotte needs. How about a Walk Charlotte? Somebody?

Guerrilla wayfinding and the Charlotte dilemma

I spotted this article, from Atlantic Cities.com, “Guerrilla Wayfinding in Raleigh,” about mysterious signs that have sprouted in downtown Raleigh, to help pedestrians, courtesy of a project calling itself WalkRaleigh. The Raleigh piece is a follow-up to this article on wayfinding in cities.

All of which brings us to three Charlotte-related thoughts.

1. Why don’t we have more guerrilla urbanism here? Tom Low of Civic by Design has been trying to work on an idea for pop-up porches, which isn’t a bad notion but it begs the question: If you’re getting official authorization for your plans, is it truly “guerrilla”?

2. Why isn’t there a WalkCharlotte project out there, like WalkRaleigh, doing similar things, such as what Charlotte Observer editorial cartoonist Kevin Siers (@KevinSiers) suggested today via Twitter: “Maybe we need urban guerrillas to post pedestrian crossing signs in Charlotte, since the city doesn’t bother.”

WalkRaleigh is a project of CityFabric, “Wear You Live,” a clever idea and definitely place-centric. Has anything of that sort been launched in Charlotte? If so, I’d love to hear/see more about it.

3. While we’re on the topic of wayfinding, what’s with those supposedly helpful signs on freeways and streets heading into uptown Charlotte, dividing uptown into color-coded quadrants, N, S, E and W?

Do you know anyone who has found those N, S, E and W signs helpful?  I don’t want to trash them if I’m the only one who isn’t being helped. After all, I worked uptown for decades and have a pretty solid idea where things are and can ignore those signs.

The problem of finding your way around uptown is significant, I realize. Anything that helps people is a good idea, especially with the continuing problem of confusing one-way streets – thank goodness the city has restored some to two-way – and the existence of too many barriers between uptown and the rest of the city: I-77, I-277, the Indy Freeway, Irwin Creek, Little Sugar Creek and various railroads.

But the color-coded signs do not work for me.

Maybe it’s because uptown Charlotte is not laid out according to north-south or east-west, but on the diagonal. Tryon may be named “North” and “South” but it runs northeast-southwest. Trade Street may be “East” and “West,” but it runs northwest-southeast. So the only way your mental map can dovetail with an uptown map showing Tryon running vertically is if your mental map knows nothing else about any other parts of Charlotte. (I have even seen some maps that place Tryon horizontally, which is a perversion not only of the actual compass points but also of the long-established tradition in maps of north being at the top.)

The best way to find your way around uptown, as with almost any city, is to get out and walk around in it. To Walk Charlotte, if you will.