What’s a city and what’s a suburb, and what’s their future?

Large totems mark the “center” of the Ballantyne development in south Charlotte. Photo: Google Street View

I’ve long been interested in how people use the terms “suburban” and “urban,” because their definitions seem to wobble all over the map. Thanks to the state’s formerly easy annexation law, the city I live in, Charlotte, has large areas well inside city limits – places that in another metro area would be separate municipalities or unincorporated sprawl. People here call them “suburbs,” though by some definitions they’d be “city,” not “suburb.”

But the issue of suburban vs. urban living is just as lively here as anywhere. So I’ve been interested to read two recent articles that tackle that broad topic, though in different ways.

First, Josh Stephens’ review in the California Planning and Development Report of the latest Joel Kotkin book, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us, dissects, or at least tries to dissect, what Kotkin means by “the rest of us.” Who is his “us”? And why does he assume that everyone who lives in a suburban-form landscape does so by choice, rather than because of housing affordability or job location or doubts about schools?  Hat tip to Planetizen for alerting me to this excellent piece, Fetishizing Families: Review of ‘The Human City.’

Next is an analysis from Daniel Hertz in the sometimes wonderfully contrarian City Observatory, about DuPage County, Ill., just outside Chicago. In “A Mystery in the Suburbs,” he looks at the county, where growth in recent decades has been of the ubiquitous automobile-centric, focused on highways pattern focusing on highways. Once robust, in recent years DuPage has seen some siphoning off of economic energy, as companies move back to downtown. 

This put me in mind of Ballantyne, a large suburban-style development at the far southern reaches of Charlotte city
limits built over in the past 20 years. There is, in fact, more mixing of uses in Ballantyne than in most 1980s or 1990s developments, but it’s in the style of houses here, shopping center there, offices across the street. It’s jammed with cars and not at all walkable unless you like to get mowed down on multilane freeway interchanges or giant thoroughfares. The developers have just announced a vast new development at the far western edge of the city.

Hertz writes:  … The spread-out nature of development means that no one bus line can have easy access to many homes or businesses either—and even someone who steps out of a bus relatively close to their destination has to navigate roads and parking lots that aren’t designed for walking. Partly as a result, the buses simply don’t come that often: at best, every 15 minutes at rush hour, which may be on the edge of acceptability for show-up-and-go service in the afternoon or late in the evening, but is a burden for someone who really needs to be on time for a job. Other buses come much less frequently, even at rush hour.”

Gee, does that sound like anywhere I know? Charlotte’s development pattern has made bus service difficult with the never-adequate funding available.

Hertz goes on: “Someone who wanted to commute to their job in DuPage County by transit would discover 26 rail stations which are probably within walking distance of neither their home nor their job, and a network of buses that aren’t much better, most of which come too infrequently to be reliable for very time-sensitive trips like a commute, and which require getting to and from stops that are located on roads that are hostile or dangerous for walking.

“In other words, the decisions of planners and developers over the last several decades have created a land use pattern that essentially locks in transportation choices for all future residents, who are now stuck commuting in ways they say they’d rather not. And DuPage, like other car-dependent suburbs around the country, may be losing some of its economic base as a result.”

Is that the future of Ballantyne, 30 years out? Will Charlotte, seeing massive population growth, continue to wave into being more large, suburban-style developments at the edge of the city where transit service is at best iffy, and whose future may be less than anyone would wish?

‘Why are all those new buildings so ugly?’

Apartments on South Boulevard greet the sidewalk with two floors of parking.  Photo: Tom Low, Civic by Design

The topic is an eye-catcher and, thank goodness, keeps catching eyes: Why do so many of the new apartment buildings going up in Charlotte’s fast-redeveloping neighborhoods all look alike? And look, um, not all that attractive?

The latest chapter in this civic conversation came Tuesday, with a two-part punch. Three local architects were guests on “Charlotte Talks,” an interview show on WFAE, Charlotte’s local public radio station. Listen to the show here.

Tuesday evening Tom Low, one of the guests, held a public forum, “Bland Charlotte,” at his monthly Civic By Design discussion group.

Low and others have written and spoken in recent months about their concern that speedy growth and development, especially in the South End area adjacent to the city’s only light rail line, is sub-par in urban design and architecture.

PlanCharlotte.org, the publication I run at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, has run several  articles on the topic:

Ditto, other local media outlets:

Tuesday night, Low showed a series of depressing photos of apartment complexes, mostly but not exclusively in South
End, with parking dominating the streetscape. What people are upset about, by and large, is not that they are multifamily but that they are clad in obviously cheap materials, they offer monotonous and graceless facades, and most important, instead of contributing to a growing urbanity of street and sidewalk activity, such as shops or restaurants, they offer to the public realm only metal grills, with parking lots behind.

As on the radio show, discussion at the forum touched on whether the problem lies with the architects and designers who should have the courage to say no when developers want those abuses of the public realm, or with developers, or with the finance system. While I think we need more extraordinarily talented and courageous designers, and more extraordinarily thoughtful developers, the essential problem to me seems to lie elsewhere. Because most people are not extraordinary.

As I listened, I was reminded of a phrase I used to hear when, in another life, I attended conferences of a national group, Investigative Reporters and Editors. You’d hear of amazing investigations into malfeasance by public officials, universities, businesses, schools or bureaucrats. Often, after describing abuses by one group or another, the investigative reporter would conclude with this: “Of course, sometimes the biggest crime is what’s legal.”

Which leads to my point. Those apartment buildings that people are upset about were built in accordance with city ordinances.

The flaw, once again, lies with Charlotte’s deeply outdated and flawed zoning ordinance. The city planners say they have finally begun working with consultants to rework the ordinance, but that is expected to take four years.

Meanwhile, too much is being built that is perfectly awful — and perfectly legal.

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

.

One N.C. city aims to protect older buildings with a height limit. (Hint: Not Charlotte)

Tall new buildings surround Romare Bearden Park in uptown Charlotte. Photo: Nancy Pierce

As discussion in Charlotte continues on how to protect the unique character of some older neighborhoods from intense development pressure, [Can Plaza Midwood save the places that matter?] one N.C. city is using a tool that’s been available all along. That city is Raleigh. [With height caps, Raleigh hopes to protect historic buildings]

It’s not a tool beloved by people who make money from building tall buildings. By limiting the heights of buildings, the city is, at heart, limiting the profitability of any development on that dirt. Note that overall, Raleigh wants to encourage tall buildings downtown, and density.  But with a cluster of 19 old, iconic buildings along its main downtown street, Raleigh wants to add a level of protection.

Most of the buildings that will get the height limits are on the National Register of Historic Places and Raleigh historic landmarks.  Under state and federal law, neither of those designations can prevent a building from demolition.

Charlotte also has height restrictions in some of its zoning categories, especially the transit-oriented and mixed-use development districts. But those height limits are so tall that they don’t, effectively, deter demolitions of older buildings, and there is an “optional” zoning that lets the city OK pretty much anything if the developer can make a good case for it.) Of course, the single-use-only districts have de facto height limits as well.  (My graduate student, Jacob Schmidt, recently analyzed the proportion of mixed-use vs .single-use zoning inside Charlotte city limits. More than 90 percent of the land area is zoned for single-uses.)

But if you own a property in uptown Charlotte zoned UMUD (uptown mixed use district) you can build as tall a building as the FAA will allow. That’s right — the only limits on height are based on whether airplanes might run into the towers. The
development-encouraging UMUD zoning was developed during the 1980s, when businesses were fleeing to the suburbs and the city wanted to encourage development uptown. At the time, it was a much-needed tool. UMUD zoning, coupled with several uptown bank leaders’ determination to keep uptown healthy, prevented uptown from dying completely for a couple of decades. So while Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and other N.C. downtowns are finally reviving nicely, with their older buildings intact, in Charlotte the side effect was to demolish virtually all the older buildings, including designated landmarks. With some welcome exceptions, our uptown is mostly shiny and new. 

I have heard at least one planner say that at one point the idea of uptown height limits was mentioned in a planning department meeting. But it was quietly buried.

It will be interesting to see, over time, how or whether Raleigh’s use of the height-limit tool makes a difference in its downtown development. 

“Why I ‘cheated’ at the light, while cycling”

Keihy Moore on her bicycle. Photo: Keihly Moore

 Got this email from my friend Keihly Moore (one of the key architects behind some of Charlotte’s Park(ing) Day events in previous years). After getting her dual degree in architecture and urban design from UNC Charlotte she’s now working in Boston.

Anyone who knows her knows she’s a dedicated and avid bicyclist. She even rode to work during the extremely deep snows in Boston last winter, getting featured in an article by the Boston Globe. (See “Employees get creative to reach work.”)

Her note highlights one of many challenges cyclists face when riding in traffic. Though she’s a careful, law-abiding cyclist, she realized that in some situations, it felt safer to violate the traffic signal. What do you think?:

Bike lanes and sharrows can’t solve the traffic light issue.

“I rode a different route in today because I had to drop my car off at an auto-body place. Most of the way in on the new route had bike lanes (thank God) but traffic was still moving 40+ mph, when it wasn’t stop and go – mostly stop. I’m not the cyclist that runs red lights. I follow the rules. But this morning, with aggravated, distracted, grumpy drivers surrounding me, all I wanted to do was to get out in front of them, away from them. And I realized it’s because cyclists have the odds stacked against us. The rules are not set up for us. Admittedly, today, I stopped at all the lights, but I left sooner than the other cars on three lights because I wanted to get out in front – and it worked. I was still safe, but I left the exhaust, anger, and dirt behind me.

It seems to me cyclists should have advance green lights (like pedestrians do). It’s safer for everyone, and cyclists are more visible.

I still hate it when other cyclists are dangerous and run red lights, weaving in and out of traffic. But I think there is a certain threshold where it is OK to get out in front before the light changes.
So I never thought I’d say I liked beating those lights, but I felt it was necessary for my safety and sanity.
Thoughts? Glad I wasn’t hit this morning,
Keihly

Better signaling and separated lanes, of course, could help prevent this kind of dilemma. But most U.S. cities, Charlotte included, are a long way from being able to offer those things. In the meantime, what’s a careful cyclist to do?

My Park(ing) Day blues spark a contrarian proposal

Park(ing) Day in Charlotte in September 2012, next to a food truck round-up event. Photo: Keihly Moore

I missed this year’s Park(ing) Day event in Charlotte because I work on a campus 12 miles from uptown and because Park(ing) Day takes place only on the officially approved sites on Charlotte’s main uptown street. (So much for guerrilla urbanism.)

And to be honest, I didn’t really miss it. But it wasn’t until I read this Next City piece by Josh Cohen,“Stop Building Mediocre Parklets, Start Building Pavement Parks,” that I realized my own dissatisfaction with how Park(ing) Day has evolved in my city. Cohen critiques the way Seattle’s parklet movement has turned into seating areas for nearby businesses. Since I’m not in Seattle, that’s not my issue. My frustration is different, because my city is different.

Don’t misunderstand. PlanCharlotte.org, the online publication I oversee, has been a champion of Charlotte Park(ing) Day events since my then-graduate assistant Keihly Moore organized one in 2012 on Camden Road in South End. The following year – also spearheaded by Keihly, who again rounded up plenty of partners – it was on North Davidson Street in NoDa.

Each of those events took an on-street parking place in a gritty neighborhood and converted it into a small park-for-a-day. Last year and this year the event took place on Tryon Street with a long list of collaborators that included Charlotte Center City Partners, the uptown advocacy and marketing group.

The whole idea behind Park(ing) Day is to transform a parking spot into a small park for a day, to show how places for people matter more than places for cars. It’s a way to make people think about the tyranny of parking in America and how our cities deserve more than huge expanses of asphalt. The message is particularly needed in Sun Belt cities like Charlotte, which are so thoroughly car-focused that the whole city gets a pitiful little Walk Score of 24.

In Charlotte the car rules every street and road and stroad (look it up). Except one: Tryon Street. Tryon Street uptown is the one street where pedestrians rule. Yes, there’s traffic, but it’s slowed by inconveniently timed traffic lights, service trucks, parallel parking and huge clumps of pedestrians. The Walk Score along North Tryon Street is an admirable 95.

Not only that, but Tryon Street is already studded with numerous benches for sitting, plenty of street trees, and a variety of parks (The Green, Polk Park), parklets (at Sixth and North Tryon) and plazas with seating and tables. Does Tryon Street need parklets? What Tryon Street needs is stores and window-shopping (a topic for another day).

The places that need parklets are the innumerable parking lots uptown and the hideous parking decks
that mar most of the uptown streets that are not Tryon. Indeed, uptown Charlotte needs more on-street parking, not less. The Walmart on Independence Boulevard needs parklets. Asian Corner Mall needs parklets. Eastway Crossing Shopping Center needs parklets. All the fading 1990s-vintage shopping centers near UNC Charlotte need parklets.

You get my point. Putting parklets on Tryon Street won’t open people’s eyes to needed improvements. Sure, they’re fun to hang out in. But getting people to hang out in uptown Charlotte is like dynamiting fish: too easy to even be sporting. If this were 1980, parklets on Tryon Street might cause a revolution in local thinking. But by 2015? Even the city DOT is now welcoming private efforts to install parklets in city rights-of-way.

Any anyway, Charlotte is no concrete jungle of hardscape. This city is so full of post-1950s-era single-family subdivisions and cul-de-sacs that we have no lack of grassy areas. If anything we need less grass and more buildings, designed close to each other so you can live, work, shop and play within a small area without driving.

So here is my contrarian suggestion: Instead of a no-longer-very-guerrilla movement that puts parklets on the city’s least car-dominated street, maybe Charlotte needs an unsanctioned, guerrilla urbanism movement to showcase actual urbanism. Buildings that are close together and front on a sidewalk. Storefront shopping. Apartments over offices over stores.

How about some creative acts of well-designed urbanity? How about, in addition to Park(ing) Day, for our spread-out, sprawling Sun Belt city, someone comes up with a Density Day?

What in the world is wrong with North College Street?

Street view, from Google Maps, of North College at Eighth Street, which tops the city’s high-accident list

This year’s list of high-accident intersections in Charlotte is up, and guess what. Once again one-way streets uptown are atop the list. Here’s the Charlotte Observer’s article. Notice, in the photo, the pedestrian ambiance (or lack thereof) along North College Street at Eighth Street, the No. 1 high-accident intersection.

See complete 2015 list as well as previous years. Note: it’s computer-generated and factors in the amount of traffic as well as the number and severity of accidents.

My observation this year is the same as two years ago, when I wrote about this report: One-way streets in and near uptown dominate the list. Is that a reason to switch more to two-way streets?

But Charlotte Department of Transportation officials disagreed with my thinking. Engineer Debbie Self, in charge of CDOT’s traffic and pedestrian safety programs, pointed out in 2013 that of the 150 intersections in uptown Charlotte, the majority involve at least one one-way street and most are not on the high-accident list. About North College Street in particular, in 2013, Self wrote:

“College Street in the areas of 7th, 8th & 9th Streets has been on the HAL [high accident list] for many years. It’s been hard to pin point a single underlying cause. Angle crashes account for about half of the crashes at College and 7th, 8th and 9th. CDOT will likely consider reflective back plates at the signals as a mitigation given our successful reduction in crashes at 5th/Caldwell.”   [CDOT had attributed the 2013 decline in accidents at Fifth and Caldwell to the installation of the back plates.]

A peek at recent years’ high accident lists prompts these questions: Why keep this as a high-speed one-way street through the heart of your downtown?  And since its high-accident intersections have comparatively light traffic, what is going on?

Some observations: 

I walk along North College a lot, going to and from the UNC Charlotte Center City Building, and the rest of uptown. (At least, I did. Ninth and Eighth streets have been blocked for almost a year from construction of the light rail tracks.) So where are the cars involved in 2014 accidents coming from, especially at Eighth Street? My guess is they’re going to and from surface parking lots near the rail line, which have not closed. If you’re pulling in or out of a parking lot, you are not driving quickly. So it’s likely some accidents are caused by speeding drivers on North College Street mixing with motorists turning into lots or onto Eighth Street.

North College is a major, one-way artery through uptown just one block from, and parallel to, the main uptown street, Tryon Street, where flocks of pedestrians, bus and delivery trucks as well as some timed-to-slow-you traffic lights combine to make speed impossible. But North College comes to us from the street-as-highway school of traffic design. Head north (the only direction you can) from the light at Seventh and you go down a slight hill, encouraging you to speed up. There is no light at Eighth Street, because it is a tiny little street — actually I love its narrowness, which adds a sense of historical quaintness — with little traffic. In a car one might just blow past it altogether. I imagine a lot of motorists do just that.

If you’re on Ninth Street, it’s hard to see what’s coming on College. If you’re tempted to turn right on red, ignoring the sign banning it, you might well get slammed into by a car zipping up College Street.

The No.3 high accident intersection is one block north, North College at Ninth Street. (Google Maps)

Meanwhile, with the opening of the UNC Charlotte building and growing numbers of uptown residents, plus more bars and nightlife, more people are walking even on this rather unpleasant street — a street decidedly not designed for pedestrians.

Further, this area is only a block from two light rail stops (Seventh Street and the to-open-in-2017 Ninth Street). The area should be notably more pedestrian friendly. But with back-of-curb sidewalks, a lack of street trees for several blocks and surface parking lots way too prevalent, it isn’t.

Solution? CDOT can’t alter property lines or force land owners to stop tearing down older buildings and replacing them with surface parking lots or force them to develop the property if they don’t want to. So CDOT is left with the standard toolkit for traffic-calming: traffic humps (not bumps, but humps you can glide over at 20 mph but not at 40), stop signs (ugh), traffic circles, more on-street parking. What about a bike lane? No, the cars will not be able to travel as fast. But this is one block off main street in a city of 800,000. Slower is OK.

Or, might I suggest, turning it back into a two-way street?

Cool 1945 map shows plenty of passenger rail into uptown Charlotte

In the category of “Found while looking up other stuff” I came across this amazing map of 1945 Charlotte, and all the passenger and freight rail lines that fed uptown. It’s from a 1945 Chamber of Commerce brochure, and you can find it, too, on the website of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission.

It’s a little difficult to tell from the cute drawing how many of those rail lines carried passengers as well as freight, but the Piedmont and Northern to Gastonia was an electrified passenger rail – today we’d call it commuter rail.

The line is still used. It runs west and northwest from uptown Charlotte near the NFL stadium, through the Wesley Heights neighborhood, then crosses the Catawba River and goes through Mount Holly, Belmont and into Gastonia. The N.C. Department of Transportation owns much of the right-of-way, except for an important segment beyond Wesley Heights and the river, which is owned by CSX. (See final paragraph of this report.)

The old Southern Railway passenger terminal was on West Trade near what’s now the Greyhound Bus station, but it was demolished years ago. The 1895 Seaboard Air Line depot, between North Tryon and North College streets – depicted on the 1945 map as S.A.L. RR now the Urban Ministry Center.

Rail junkies may enjoy this 2008 map of the N.C. rail lines, which lists ownership of the segments.

A chat with the godfather of Charlotte’s streetcar

Driver Danny McQueen on Tuesday, awaiting a carload of dignitaries to launch Charlotte’s streetcar. The historic replica streetcars now in use would be replaced during the expansion phase with modern streetcars. Photo: Mary Newsom
Before Tuesday morning’s ribbon-cutting that launched Charlotte’s new streetcar, it seemed appropriate to check in with Ron Tober. It was Tober who originally proposed adding the streetcar to the larger transit plan for Charlotte. One might even dub him the godfather of the streetcar idea.
Tober was the Charlotte Area Transit System CEO from 1999 to 2007 – the longest-serving CATS chief to date.  The original transit plan, crafted before the 1998 voter referendum that OK’d a transit sales tax, did not include a streetcar. It roughly sketched five corridors: South (now the Lynx Blue Line), North (the still unfunded commuter rail to Mooresville), Northeast (being built as the Blue Line Extension), Southeast (envisioned running roughly down Independence Boulevard), and West possibly to the airport and possibly not.
Other than the South corridor, where the city already owned rail right of way, and the proposed extension to the northeast, it was left unclear in those early days which corridors would get bus rapid transit and which would get light rail. That did not sit well with east and west Charlotte neighborhood champions, who clamored for rail service, not bus rapid transit.
In 2004, Tober proposed a streetcar to connect east and west Charlotte. It would run in rails along Beatties Ford Road, through uptown, and out Central Avenue to Eastland Mall, which at that time was open, he reminded me Tuesday morning. The streetcar idea was adopted into the 2006 transit plan update.
Some background: The newly opened 1.5-mile streetcar segment is not funded with the county’s half-cent sales tax for transit. That money goes to the Blue Line, the Blue Line Extension and to run the bus system. Not enough revenue has come in to pay to build more of the 2030 transit plan. (See New CATS chief faces funding questions.) The first streetcar leg was built with a $25 million federal grant and $17 million in funds from the city of

Charlotte.  A hoped-for 2.5-mile expansion would cost $150 million, paid with $75 million in federal dollars and the rest from city money.

My conversation with Tober:
Me: What made you think “streetcar”?
Tober described a process in which CATS planners were studying major investments, and looked at the bus routes with highest ridership: the No. 9 on Central Avenue and the No. 7 on Beatties Ford topped the list, he said.  “So why aren’t we doing something up in there? That was a big question mark for me.”  At a 2002 transit conference he saw a presentation on the then-new Portland, Ore., streetcar. He saw that a streetcar could spur development, potentially reduce operating expenses because it carries more riders per trip, and create connectivity between east and west Charlotte. “That was the rationale.”
Me: Why’d it take so long to build the streetcar?
Tober: “Money.”
Art at the streetcar shelters along East Trade Street.
Me:  Did you suspect the sales tax should have been higher?
Tober: “I really thought the half-cent would be enough.”  The 2009 economic downturn was more severe than anyone projected, he said. That threw off the revenue projections for years.
Me: Compare operating expenses – not cost to build – between buses and a streetcar. (Streetcars run in the street, with traffic, unlike light rail which has its own dedicated lane or rail path.)
Tober: Because a streetcar has higher capacity you can reduce the frequency, which saves labor costs for drivers. Seventy percent of CATS’ budget is labor. But CATS wouldn’t notice any big changes in operating costs until it could convert all of bus route 7 and 9 to streetcar.  That would also eliminate the layover time at the transportation center uptown.
We walked over to the Transportation Center on East Trade Street, where the roar of the bus engines and hissing of brakes made for a gritty – and noisy – series of speeches by dignitaries, including U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who as Charlotte mayor had championed the still-controversial streetcar.  Tuesday, even some streetcar skeptics and opponents were on hand for the celebration. Tober stood quietly, almost unnoticed, in the crowd.

Highways – loosening our collective belts

The first vehicles drive down the final leg of I-485, June 5. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Even as the national discussion turns toward whether we are overbuilding highways, based on inflated state traffic numbers, in North Carolina those questions are rarely heard. Last month the state’s largest city, Charlotte, population 800,000, where I live and work, saw the June 5 opening of the final leg of its loop highway.  It’s called Interstate 485 but it doesn’t touch another state, or even another county.

When the road was first discussed in the 1960s, the idea was to open more land for development, because in these parts, the growth-is-good mindset has not had much nuance to it. While the local news media saw headlines such as Last I-485 segment will be boon to locals, we at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work and direct the PlanCharlotte.org website, decided to look deeper.

We’ve published some interactive maps that show just how much of the county’s development has been shaped by the outerbelt highway here. A couple of images are reproduced below but find the interactive and zoomable versions at this link.

 In coming weeks we’ll map population growth and traffic counts at the interchanges.

Obviously this is a fast-growing metro area, and growth was going to arrive regardless of where we put our freeways. The questions were: Where was the growth going to go? Can the highway capacity keep up with the demand created by the new development?

 The answer to the first question is now obvious. The growth flooded to the highway, leapfrogging closer in areas that even today lack for investment.  Would even more growth have leapfrogged into adjacent counties without I-485, or would the lack of the highway access have kept the development closer to the core? Who could tell?

The answer to the latter question remains unclear, although I certainly have my doubts. Even before the final link of the loop opened June 5, last December the first leg of the highway, which opened in the 1990s, was expanded from two to three lanes each direction, at a cost of $83 million.

It’s still clogged.