Chamber stays home. What should they see?

As I wrote in the Saturday Observer, the Charlotte Chamber isn’t going on an inter-city visit this year, opting to stay home and study what’s here. I gave some suggestions for what they should do and see, such as have a locavore dinner and hear from artists and people with lots of piercings.

But what would you recommend they see? (And for the purposes of this blogposting, let’s all assume those who wish to have already visited whatever topless bars they care to.) If you want to vote on the Chamber’s online poll, here’s a link.

Chatting with Chamber president Bob Morgan, I asked if he, too had observed more people uptown dressing more formally? Just in the past several months, it seems, I’ve seen more guys in suits and ties and fewer in khakis and knit shirts or jeans and sport shirts. Morgan said he’d noticed the same thing. We speculated people afraid of being laid off are dressing up more, and those already laid off are trying to look professional as they look for new work.

Then, he noted something else. In conversations he’s hearing, he said, “It’s no longer about work-life balance. It’s now about ‘work ethic.’ “

Not unexpected, of course. When times get tough, companies want workers who’ll put in long hours, not whine about pay/benefits and not have to deal with those pesky “family” problems such as sick kids or ailing parents.

Where are all the foreclosures?

A USA Today story last week uses data from RealtyTrac to show that more than half of the nation’s foreclosures last year took place in just 35 counties, in about a dozen states. Outside those foreclosure hot spots, the article says, “the foreclosure wave was barely a ripple — at least until it started swamping major banks that had invested heavily in mortgages.” Wachovia, it points out, was hammered by foreclosures in California and Florida. And we all know the rest.

Do gates really keep out crime?

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Director Debra Campbell tells me city planners and the city-county police department will study crime rates in and around gated communities to see if the gates really do reduce crime. (So, will they also be looking at crimes such as tax fraud, insider trading or Ponzi scheming? If you’ve lost your retirement savings, you might consider those white-collar offenses worse than just simple auto break-ins.)

Campbell said at a recent City Council meeting that the city doesn’t currently have a policy about gated developments, although its street connectivity policies would discourage them. Planners generally think gated subdivisions work against such things as a sense of community, social capital and mixed-income neighborhoods, in addition to bollixing up general traffic flow.

It’s a welcome attempt. Gated developments derive much of their popularity from the general belief that they’re safer. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I know we have often vacationed at a gated beach community, in which there are gated developments inside the gated development. So, um, if you need those extra gates, does that mean the first set of gates doesn’t work? Who, exactly, are you trying to keep out? If it’s that journalistic riffraff, well, the gates aren’t working.

Commuter rail: Finally?

A couple of rail-related news bits:

Item No. 1: Why hasn’t much commuter rail been built in the country in recent years? The Bush administration’s Federal Transit Administration had written some requirements for how to calculate such things as projected ridership when submitting requests for federal transit money. It’s complicated, but the upshot was that the rules made it impossible for commuter rail — which goes faster and has fewer stops than in-town light rail — to compete for the limited federal transit dollars.

That’s why the North Corridor transit line that the Charlotte Area Transit System wants to build had that “gap” in its funding plan — it’s the gap where federal funds might have gone, but weren’t available. The Triangle Transit Authority in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill was stuck for the same reason.

Now comes word the FTA has rescinded those old parameters, CATS chief Keith Parker said late last week. He didn’t know yet what the new parameters would be or whether new money would be available for commuter rail projects. But it’s got to be good news for CATS and the many people who’ve been hoping to see a rail line from uptown Charlotte to Davidson and even beyond, if Iredell County would cough up some money (not to mention good news for the TTA and our fellow North Carolinians in the Triangle.)

Item No. 2: A new Elon University poll finds 77 percent of North Carolinians would like to see commuter rail developed in urban areas, and 69 percent support regional rail systems.

While 51 percent of North Carolinians oppose collecting tolls to fund
statewide transportation projects, 77 percent would like to see commuter
railways developed in urban areas and 69 percent of citizens support regional
rail systems. Sixty-seven percent of respondents support a state-wide bond
referendum to raise money for transportation projects, while 57 percent of
residents support giving local governments the option of using a half-cent sales
tax to finance local projects. Residents oppose a fee based on the number of
miles they drive annually (74%) and increasing the cost of the driver’s license
renewal fee (55%).

Poll: New roads don’t top preference list

Interesting poll out from the National Association of Realtors and the advocacy group, Transportation for America, finds a majority of Americans believe upgrading and repairing existing roads and bridges and expanding transportation options (i.e. transit, bicycling and pedestrian options) should take precedence over building new roads.

A press release from the Realtors’ association says: “When asked about approaches to addressing traffic, 47 percent preferred improving public transportation, 25 percent chose building communities that encourage people not to drive, and 20 percent preferred building new roads. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed believe the federal government is not devoting enough attention to trains and light rail systems, and three out of four favor improving intercity rail and transit.”

You can download a PDF of the full report here.

Frank Gehry at 80

Big-name architect Frank Gehry turned 80 on Saturday, and the L.A. Times ran a profile and assessment of his work, from architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. (Gehry’s Disney Hall in Los Angeles is at left, courtesy of the L.A. Times.)

The recession has hit his practice hard: Two major projects, Grand Avenue in Los Angeles and Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, have been put on hold, and Gehry has half the staff he did a year ago. Interestingly, the piece points out that the reputation of the once-hailed Gehry is shifting.

” … The virtuosic approach to design that Gehry has embodied since his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened to rapturous acclaim in 1997 faces an increasingly pointed critique within his profession.”

And it has this interesting rumination about younger architects’ view of Gehry’ work and that of other celebrity architects:

“They are less interested in the bravura, photogenic icons that Gehry has lately produced – so-called signature buildings by a so-called starchitect – and more compelled by eco-friendly designs or anti-poverty efforts such as those aimed at providing affordable housing in rural areas. Other young architects are looking beyond the star model of architectural practice and toward communal, even anonymous, design initiatives.”

NYC banning traffic on Broadway

(Photos show Herald Square before and after, courtesy of www.nyc.gov)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week he’ll bar auto traffic from several blocks of Broadway. It’s a way to try to reduce congestion in the Times Square and Herald Square areas. While it may sound like a crackpot idea, there’s some counterintuitive evidence that, in other cities where streets were barred to traffic, the overall traffic did, in fact, diminish. Newsweek has a rather in-depth article on the proposal and the underlying thinking.

The New York Times web site has a kind of pro-con debate among urban observers such as architect/planner Alex Garvin and the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole.

Conventional wisdom in the U.S. has been that pedestrian malls didn’t work – cities that tried them gave them up. Even our own Rock Hill, which turned its downtown into a covered-roof shopping mall, eventually had to pop the top and revert to a more traditional downtown, complete with sky, clouds, rain and sun.

But, as the Newsweek article points out, New York is unique among U.S. cities, due to its population density, rigid street grid, high proportion of residents without cars and excellent public transit services. It’s certainly an idea worth watching. That said, Charlotte doesn’t have density, a grid or extensive transit, so anything learned from the NYC experiment isn’t likely to be applicable here, regardless.

Perdue: N.C. DOT office stays in Stanly

In one of those Relics From Another Era kind of situations, the N.C. DOT’s regional office in the Charlotte area is not in the city of 670,000 but in the lovely Piedmont city of Albemarle, population 15,000, in bucolic Stanly County.
Charlotte officials aren’t the only ones who think that’s a little nuts. The District 10 office covers Mecklenburg, Stanly, Union, Anson and Cabarrus counties. All, of course, have legitimate DOT needs and issues. But come on.
But WCNC reports, Gov. Bev Perdue isn’t thinking of moving that office to Charlotte. “Right now, I’m just thankful to not be closing offices down,” Perdue said when asked about the Department of Transportation’s office for the Charlotte region.
And why, you may ask, Stanly County? Old-timers say it’s because, in an earlier era, the road department offices were put in counties with state prisons, so they could more easily use prisoners to work on the road gangs.

CATS to join Google Transit

Google has a transit-finding component to Google Maps, and starting soon, the Charlotte Area Transit System (a.k.a. CATS) will be a part of the service.
You’ll be able to look online, click on where you are on the map, click on where you want to go, and you can get transit directions. Just like driving directions.

CATS chief Keith Parker says the program uses CATS routes and and schedules, so it will tell you when the bus or Lynx is supposed to arrive, but won’t be able to say, for example, Bus 20 is running 20 minutes late.

CATS isn’t spending money on this, he said. Google does it.

If you go to the link above, or try transit.google.com, right now, you’ll see a big map of the U.S., with no transit options offered in North and South Carolina. Hmm, you’d think Amtrak might want to at least load its passenger service into this.

This news came via a tip from Harry Johnson. Check out his Carolina Transit blog.

An addendum: In giving it a test run, I checked for directions from our house to the Dowd Y on Morehead St. No transit directions (yet), but there is an option for walking directions. I got the walking directions, but also a caution note popped: “Use caution – This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.” So very Charlotte.

Bits: Trails, transportation, go-go-suburbia

A few quick links of interest:

The Carolina Thread Trail project recently got its 100th Resolution of Support — from the Town of Wingate in Union County. That represents at least one entity from every county within the 15-county footprint. The Thread Trail is a proposed regional network of trails, including greenways, riverside trails and conservation corridors. Local communities plan and build their own portions.

Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe writes about The Transformation of Transportation — big increases in transit ridership all over the country, and opines that it makes more sense to put federal dollars into transit systems than to prop up auto companies that are eliminating jobs.

NationalJournal.com talks with new Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. LaHood says high-speed rail between cities is, if not No. 1 on President Obama’s priority list, then near the top. He predicted a substantial effort (read, “money”) in coming years in five or six regions of the country, beyond the $8 billion in the stimulus package that just passed Congress.

David Brooks’ recent N.Y. Times piece, “I Dream of Denver,” (it ran last Thursday in The Observer) provoked tons of discussion. Interestingly, in Brooks’ speech in Raleigh on Feb. 10 he challenged the viability of the suburbs. “The era of go-go suburbia — it’s obviously over now,” he said. People wanted the big house, the big yard, but found out there weren’t enough social bonds, he said. Suburbia, he says, “ignored key parts of human nature.”

But his column took a differnt tack. Here are a couple of responses, one from “Joe Urban,” A.K.A. Sam Newberg in Minneapolis, one from Ben Fried on streetsblog.
Here’s a link to the Pew Center report Brooks cites.