Transit chief: P3s help but won’t solve transit funding woes

Sharon Road West station on Charlotte’s light rail line. Photo: Nancy Pierce

The idea of using public-private partnerships to help fund transportation systems, including mass transit, is one of today’s hottest topics in transportation policy circles. But the head of Atlanta’s MARTA cautions that P3s, as they’re known, aren’t a silver bullet for transit systems.

Keith Parker, who headed Charlotte’s transit system 2007-2009 and since 2012 has been MARTA CEO, was in town Tuesday, as a rail conference was kicking off. Parker spoke at a small event organized by the Transit Funding Working Group, a Metropolitan Transit Commission committee that’s been pondering how CATS can move forward despite huge gaps between the 2030 plan and available money to built it out.

The working group has studied P3s, and a P3 conference was held here in March. In transportation, public-private partnerships are being used for bridges, tunnels, toll roads and High-Occupancy-Toll lanes such as the new HOT lane planned for Interstate 77 north of Charlotte. A private company, Cintra, has contracted with the N.C. Department of Transportation to build the lane and use the toll revenue to operate it. In Vancouver, a P3 built one of the region’s rail lines.

P3s are touted as a way to get around a growing national problem of too many transportation needs and too little tax revenue to pay for them. With cars’ gas mileage increasing, a decrease in driving among young people, and a national gas tax that’s not been raised since 1993 and isn’t indexed for inflation, trend lines for transportation funding are heading down.

In Atlanta, Parker has won praise for helping improve MARTA’s relationships with the Georgia legislature and for bringing efficiencies to MARTA operations. And next week may see the first expansion of the system since it was launched 42 years ago in Fulton and DeKalb counties. A referendum is set for Nov. 4 in Clayton County, Ga., asking voters there whether to approve a 1-cent sales tax to expand MARTA into their county.

Parker, who described how MARTA is partnering with developers for transit-oriented developments on MARTA-owned land, cautioned the audience about the limitations of P3s, especially for transit programs. “They don’t solve your revenue issues,” he pointed out. And continuing revenues are needed, as well as capital expenses for building the transit lines and stations.

He quoted a popular misconception: “If you just go to the private sector they’ll build all your trains for you.”  That thinking? “It’s just a myth,” he said.

The Atlanta system is funded with a 1-cent sales tax in two counties. It receives no funding from the state of Georgia.  Mecklenburg County’s system is funded with a half-cent sales tax in only one county.

For more on the recent transit funding challenges facing Charlotte, see “Mayor: Transit sales tax funding may be at risk” from PlanCharlotte.org.

Clearing the air on the Liz Hair Greenway

Liz Hair Greenway, near Carolinas Medical Center. Photo courtesy Mecklenburg Park and Recreation Department

The cloud of cigarette smoke on the Liz Hair Greenway just below Carolinas Medical Center should be clearing up shortly. If you’ve walked or biked the narrow pavement of that greenway between Morehead Street and East Boulevard, you’ve probably gone past the smokers. They’re mostly visitors or staff from the hospital, which forbids smoking on its property. The greenway is handy, and sometimes the hospital security guards even point it out to smokers.

But Tuesday, Mecklenburg County commissioners passed a new ordinance that makes most government buildings and most parks in Charlotte and Mecklenburg smoke-free. (In Charlotte, the Park and Recreation Department is a county, not a city, agency.)

As a compromise from the original proposal, six county-run golf courses and 18 parks that are considered “regional parks” are exempted. So you’ll still have to choke on second-hand smoke in Freedom Park, Reedy Creek Park and other regional parks.  (A list of those parks is at the end of this post.)

The problem on the Liz Hair greenway stems from both the location of the hospital and the narrowness of the greenway between Morehead Street and East Boulevard. That section was built in 1988, back when many people here considered greenways risky spending. Today, it’s one of the most popular greenways as it connects Freedom Park to the new, wider and more generously landscaped Little Sugar Creek Greenway near the Metropolitan development. It’s narrow and crowded, and that means greenway pedestrians and cyclists are pretty much eyeball to eyeball, and lung to lung, with smokers.

An October 2012 article in the Charlotte Observer, by Michael Gordon, described the scene this way:

“For about 20 paces of shade beneath Medical Center Drive, Charlotte’s health-conscious and not-so-muches squeeze into the same county-owned space. Neither is particularly happy with the arrangement. ‘Generally, I hold my breath when I come through there,’ says Collette Nagy, a Charlotte writer who biked under the bridge late Sunday morning, her dog Pepper riding in a knapsack on her back. ‘But I feel sorry for them. I wish they’d get unhooked. I don’t think verbal abuse will help.’ “
Here’s how Gordon described the scene: “At times, there’s very little room for all the humanity to squeeze through. Around noon, about 10 smokers and their children were sitting or standing around the bridge, as a surge of greenway users – many with their children – dodged and weaved around them. There were near-collisions and some frowns. Even in the open air, the smoke under the bridge can be thick.”

The problem of smokers even drew a mention from a Portland, Ore., visitor, on the website Trip Advisor: “Hold your breath if you cruise past Carolina Medical Center at lunch time – the staff is out smoking on the greenway.”

Regional parks where smoking will still be allowed:

Detroit: ‘Failed city’ or urban upswing?

A lush urban garden in downtown Detroit.

DETROIT—Since I’ve been thinking of things in dualities (see “Two North Carolinas“), this trip to Detroit fits neatly into that pattern. As I was heading out of the office about 8 p.m. Monday, I ran into a high-ranking academic and civic leader returning from a reception on campus. (No, I’m not naming him because he had no idea I’d be writing about what he said.)

“What are you up to so late?” he asked. “I had things to finish ’cause I’m going out of town.” “Where you going?” “Don’t laugh cause I think it will be really interesting. I’m going to Detroit.” “Wow, what a failed city.”

But.

That’s one way to look at it, for sure. But there’s another Detroit, the one where 50,000 residents took part in creating the Detroit Future City plan. The one where young entrepreneurs are creating a network of nonprofit and business startups and art projects. The one where a local foundation has brought 60 talented young innovators to town to work solving problems. Of the first class of 30, Kresge Foundation CEO Rip Rapson told us, 28 are staying in Detroit.

Rapson was the kick-off speaker at the Meeting of the Minds conference. While part of his talk was about the way Kresge and other foundations have stepped in to get Detroit on the path to survival, he was also clear that financially the city is a mess. And the problems can’t be solved simply by smarter city budgeting. There are insurmountable structural problems, having to do with the tax base and some specific-to-Michigan-state-constitution realities.

(Warning, myth-busting paragraph ahead.) In case you’re thinking, right about now, well it’s those lavish pensions, think again. Rapson said the average pension for city police and firefighters is $31,000 and the average pension for other city employees is $19,000. Drastic cuts to those were not an option, he said.

The hotel for the conference is just around the corner from the federal courthouse in downtown Detroit. And a federal bankruptcy trial is going on this week, to determine the future of Detroit’s finances.

Is Detroit a failed city? Or is it a city on the rebound? It’ll take years, decades really, to learn the answer. My bet is on the rebound.  (More posts to come from Detroit, as I get time.)

Few sunbathers on a cool, cloudy September day at Detroit’s Campus Martius park.

Two North Carolinas

You hear not so infrequently that there are two North Carolinas. What those two North Carolinas are, though, is not necessarily precise. Is it Republican / Democrat? Rural / urban? Prosperity / poverty? Newcomer / old-timer?

Last Sunday I drove up to Pilot Mountain State Park for a day hike with a friend. I zipped north on Interstate 77 in my new blue Prius, exiting at N.C. 268 near Elkin and heading east. As I drove through a rural area of Yadkin and Surry counties, I was listening to WFAE, the Charlotte NPR station, particularly to a report on the fiscal problems of the Atlanta Symphony – you know, standard public radio fare.

But as I drove down into some low-lying areas, the signal faded and instead my radio was picking up a Sunday morning religious broadcast, quoting Bible scripture and urging prayer. Then I’d drive up a hill and NPR and its learned, muted voices would re-emerge from the radio. Religion. NPR. Religion. NPR.

As I looked out the car window, I could see the standard views of foothills Appalachia – some well-tended brick ranch
houses, then some less-well-tended houses with old trucks in the yard. I passed fields of fall-brown cornstalks, and still-green soybeans. But I also noticed a surprising number of vineyards, and signs pointing to other vineyards.

I rounded a curve heading up a hill and there, on the left, was a cluster of new, garish brick mansions, surrounded by a fence and a gate: Herrera Estates. A short time later I drove past what looked like an abandoned business, its sign still boasting of tobacco equipment. I saw, I think, one tobacco field in a part of the state where 30 years ago you’d have seen dozens. Was it the former tobacco farmers who were turning to grapes and wine? Or were those newcomers?

There were the two North Carolinas: the old rural farming properties, firmly rooted in tradition and traditional religion. But bumping against that North Carolina was the one of vineyards and mansions, and tourists driving Priuses (Priuii?) listening to NPR.

But it was tough to know, just breezing past, which were the newcomers and which the old-timers? Were the vineyards the new people, or the long-time farmers with a new crop? Were the people in the large new houses new to the area or local folks flush with new money? Would the newcomers be conservative or liberal? Looking out the car window, it was impossible to tell.

All I could see was evidence of some new fault lines cutting through those communities. But who was on which side? That was unknowable.

The kind of problem a city is

This new piece by the Atlantic’s CityLab.com writer Michael Mehaffy looks at the newest thinking about cities, and concludes, in essence, that Jane Jacobs was right. (see“5 Key Themes Emerging From the ‘New Science of Cities.”)
Mehaffy writes: “In the past few years, a remarkable body of scientific research has begun to shed new light on the dynamic behavior of cities, carrying important implications for city-makers. Researchers at cutting-edge hubs of urban theory like the University College London and the Santa Fe Institute have been homing in on some key properties of urban systems—and contradicting much of today’s orthodoxy.”
The researchers, Mehaffy says, are finding that they’re essentially proving the value of much of what urban writer Jane Jacobs (not a planner, not an architect, not an academician) explored in the 1950s 

through the 1990s:

 
“Jacobs was also famous for excoriating the backward-looking “pseudo-science” of that era’s planning and architecture, which she said seemed “almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.”  She urged city-makers to understand the real “kind of problem a city is”—not a conventional problem of top-down mechanical or visual order, but a complex problem of interacting factors that are “interrelated into an organic whole.”

He quotes physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute saying they are just doing “Jacobs with the math.”

The five key themes?
1.Cities generate economic growth through networks of proximity, casual encounters and “economic spillovers.” The creativity and prosperity of cities like New York, Mehaffy writes, is “ a dynamic interaction between web-like networks of individuals who exchange knowledge and information about creative ideas and opportunities.” Many of those interactions are casual, taking place in “networks of public and semi-public spaces—the urban web of sidewalks, plazas, and cafes. More formal and electronic connections supplement, but do not replace, this primary network of spatial exchange.” 
2. Through a similar dynamic, cities generate a remarkably large “green dividend.
3. Cities perform best economically and environmentally when they feature pervasive human-scale connectivity. “…to the extent that the city’s urban fabric is fragmented, car-dependent or otherwise restrictive of casual encounters and spillovers, that city will under-perform—or require an unsustainable injection of resources to compensate.” (Sound like any place you know?) 
4. Cities perform best when they adapt to human psychological dynamics and patterns of activity.
5. Cities perform best when they offer some control of spatial structure to residents. 
These theories seem to point to future difficulties for auto-oriented, disconnected Sun Belt-form cities such as Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, etc.—places that today are growing like gangbusters. Can those cities recover the old networks of connectivity they had when they were small, pedestrian and streetcar-oriented towns of the 19th and early 20th centuries?

A fish tale from the ‘Wish I’d taken a photo’ file


I spent a bit of time on Wednesday editing an article for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute website about a unique fish that’s been around since the Jurassic Period and swims in North Carolina waters and throughout the eastern United States. It’s called a bowfin.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation website calls it the “disrespected living fossil.” It’s the lone survivor of a group of fish dating to the dinosaur era.
In the article I was editing, nature writer Crystal Cockman gives plenty of interesting info. Such as: The fish can – I am not making this up – breathe air, as it has both gills and a sort of lung.
My fish story is this: I caught one of these weird fish in south Arkansas when I was 12. We were visiting my grandparents in Smackover, Ark. – no I am not making up the name of that town, either – and were fishing in Smackover Creek.  We were using worms for bait, because that’s all we ever used, and bobbers and cane poles. I thought I must have hooked a large catfish, but a very feisty one. It fought like crazy and was fun to catch. When I
brought it in, it was maybe 12 to 15 inches long, and nobody knew what in the world it was.
We took it home to my Grandpa, Leland Primm, born and raised in Smackover, and he said, “Well that’s nothing but a ole grinnull.” I am making up the spelling for what it sounded like he called it. We wanted to cook it for dinner.  He warned against it: “Ain’t nobody eats grinnull.”
But we decided to try to fry it up in cornmeal anyway. And it was AWFUL! The more you chewed, the drier and more cottony it got in your mouth until you could not swallow it. We all spat it out.
Years later, with the coming of the Internetz, I decided to Google “fish grinnell” and learned that it’s another name for bowfin. 
Editing Crystal’s piece I Googled it again, and found a website with a wonderful list of all the bowfin’s various names. One is “cotton fish – derives from the opinion that eating cold or improperly cooked bowfin is like having a ball of cotton in one’s mouth.” Yep.
I wish we had taken a picture of me with my grinnel, as I’m choosing to spell it. We had no idea it was such an amazing species.

‘Do not try to design neighborhoods through a computer screen’


The photo at right arrived about 10 days ago from Davidson-based transportation planner John Cock.
Cock and I were among a group of fans of the late Warren Burgess, who died at age 56 in May 2005.
The plaque was installed a few weeks ago beside a bald cypress tree that had been planted in his honor in Davidson’s Roosevelt Wilson Park shortly after Burgess died.
Burgess – or Warren, as I’m more comfortable saying – was for more than 20 years an urban designer on the staff of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission. He was Davidson town planner from 2000 to 2003. To this day, he has a fan club of sorts, people like Cock and former Davidson planner Meredith Judy whom Warren mentored, as well as other urban designers and planners in the area, like David Walters, the just-retired head of UNC Charlotte’s Master of Urban Design program.
You may have noticed over the years that there are some occupations that lend themselves to memorial plaques,
statues, road-namings and the like. City planner is not typically one of them. But Warren was cut from a different bolt of cloth, and gave so much of his heart to Charlotte and Davidson that it’s only appropriate that it be noted somewhere.
After seeing the plaque photo, I looked back at two columns I wrote about Warren when I worked at the Charlotte Observer.  The first was in 2000, when he left Charlotte city hall for Davidson. I noticed something unusual at the sheetcake-and-punch ceremony for him at the government center. As I wrote then:
“Among the people saying nice things were Dottie Coplon, a relentless neighborhood activist who has battled both planners and developers, and Bailey Patrick Jr., lawyer and lobbyist for some of Charlotte’s most successful developers. It’s not often those two are singing from the same song sheet. But getting people together is one of the things Burgess does best.
“… The Thursday event symbolized something important about him. …  When you think about it, Warren is really just a bureaucrat, but he’s a bureaucrat with a difference: He wears his heart on his sleeve. … Sometimes, when people talk about “fighting City Hall,” it’s planners and zoning laws that they’re fighting. Burgess , who works at City Hall, understands that, but he still tries to help.” 
 He always walked over and over through neighborhoods where he was doing a plan, to get to know its terrain, its history and its residents. He sketched relentlessly, making drawings at meetings to supplement his notes. He cared – as the plaque notes – about trees, but also about creeks, front porches, sidewalks, plazas and parks, all the things that make up a city. He had these words of advice to other planners:
“A city is made up of people,” he told the farewell party. “Do not try to design neighborhoods through a computer screen.” 
When Warren died in 2005, I wrote: 
“Burgess left his fingerprints all over this city, in the plans he drew, the enduring vision he had for his city and the people and places he touched.
“Cities need catalysts, and Warren was a catalyst. He was always putting one person in touch with just the right other person, and dropping a good idea in just the right place, and in doing so altering the course of the planet.”
He spoke for the trees. But just as important, he spoke for the people who plant the trees, for the people who make up a city.

Here’s one list Charlotte isn’t on – and ought to be

Syracuse is yet another city where advocates are pushing to tear down a section of elevated interstate highway (in this case I-81) and turn it into a boulevard. “What we’ve done is take an incredibly important piece of this city off of the development map,” developer Robert Doucette tells Governing magazine. “This highway runs through the part of the city that should be some of the highest-producing parcels of land in the region.”  (See Why Would You Have a Highway Run Through a City?)
The article lists New Orleans, which got federal funds to study removing the Claiborne Expressway, Cleveland, New Haven and Detroit as either moving toward or studying urban highway removal. Among the comments, one mentions Buffalo as also discussing the fate of its skyway, which cuts through a waterfront area. (The whole comments section itself is an interesting pro-con discussion.)
The article notes that one factor in the teardown trend – or more accurately, the teardown wannabe trend – is the age of the highways. Most were built in the 1950s and 1960s and are aging out.  Charlotte’s uptown freeway loop

was planned in the 1950s, and many of its interchange designs are notoriously outdated. The first leg, the Brookshire Freeway, opened in 1971. The other leg, the Belk expressway, finally completed the loop in the 1980s.

City planners and uptown boosters have puzzled over creative ways to try to turn those bleak underpasses below I-277 into something more welcoming than the current concrete spaces. (The one near Johnson C. Smith University has some colored lights.) And the gulch where the Belk expressway goes below grade, between uptown and South End/Dilworth, cries out for a freeway cap.
Before anyone moans about there being no place for the traffic to go, remember that when cities tear down elevated freeways, they usually replace them with other high-volume streets, designed for use by pedestrians as well as motorists. In other words, folks, there WOULD still be streets to carry the traffic.
Despite intermittent grumbling among planners and a study by Charlotte’s DOT during the Center City 2020 Vision Plan process of whether the Brookshire section could be boulevard-ized (CDOT was dubious), there’s been little push to tear down the loop highway strangling uptown Charlotte. Too bad. That’s one list it would be great to get on.

Can a place progress from Dead-End-Ville to Connectivity City? It’s tough

 Corneliusnews.net reports that the town of Cornelius in north Mecklenburg is proposing connecting a neighborhood street, Floral Lane, to Statesville Road (U.S. 21).

One of the most politically fraught decisions any elected or government staff officials can make is to connect streets that used to be dead-ends. It’s easy to understand why residents protest, as the Floral Lane residents are doing.

The first house I bought was on a dead-end block in Charlotte’s Chantilly neighborhood, where my street ended at Briar Creek. I liked the lack of traffic on the street, with only residents and their guests traveling in front of the house. I felt my cats were safe to go outside there. People who live on cul-de-sacs have the same welcome lack of cars going past.

But when a whole city is overloaded with dead-ends and cul-de-sacs, that sends huge numbers of cars onto the few streets that do connect. The result: far more congestion than you’d otherwise have.

Consider Providence Road in south Charlotte. It’s horrifically congested, especially the farther you get from uptown. One reason is that all the vehicles heading from south Charlotte towards uptown have to travel on comparatively few thoroughfares, because south of Myers Park and Eastover, the neighborhood streets don’t connect to any other neighborhoods. If the same number of vehicles that clog Providence Road daily were spread through dozens of interconnected streets, rather than all jamming Providence Road, the congestion problem would ease considerably.

But how does a town or city progress from Dead-End-Ville to Connectivity City? That’s the hard part. If you simply open one new street connection, that street will absorb far more than its share of the traffic. What to do?

I’ve said for years that Charlotte (and I’d add Cornelius and other cul-de-sac landscapes to this statement) needs to connect dozens and dozens more streets to each other. But whenever the city does that, it owes the residents of those streets the ability to co-exist with more traffic. That means building sidewalks, crosswalks – signalized if necessary – and installing traffic calming devices like humps or roundabouts.

Connect the streets, but build the necessary infrastructure so that people can live with the cars. It’s not rocket science. It’s just more expensive.

Foodies get their due, in new urban study

Foodies around the N.C. Piedmont visit downtown Shelby, for Alston Bridges Barbecue. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Foodies can take a bow. A new report released by Sasaki Associates says it found that 82 percent of city-dwellers appreciate their city’s culinary offerings, reports Anthony Flint for CityLab.com. Almost half the respondents said a new restaurant is the top reason they’d explore different parts of their city. And the majority said they consider food and restaurants the most outstanding aspect of cities they love to visit.

Sasaki is a Boston-area architecture, planning and design firm. Its report was a survey of 1,000 people who live and work in Boston, Chicago, New York, Austin, San Francisco, and Washington. They were asked what they like and don’t like about the area where they live in terms of architecture, activities, parks and open space, and transportation.

Architects might not want to read this next paragraph:

When asked what kinds of buildings people admire as they’re walking down a downtown street, 57 percent said they stop to admire buildings that are historic. Only 19 percent admire buildings that are modern. And in a rebuff to the mine-is-bigger-than-yours tower developers, just 15 percent said they admire the tallest buildings. In addition, 54 percent of respondents said they agreed the city should invest in renovating historical buildings as a way to improve their city’s architectural character. Only 22 percent “would like more unusual architecture (get Frank Gehry on the phone!)” and only 17 percent said they’d like to see more skyscrapers and iconic buildings.
East Charlotte offers many ethnic options.

And Charlotte’s stadium- and arena- and ballpark-besotted uptown boosters might be interested in this:  

When asked what would make them want to visit a new part of their city, participants overwhelmingly (46 percent) said “a new restaurant.” Just 16 percent said they would do so for a sports event.

Coincidentally, I’ve been having an email exchange with Nancy Plummer, one of the founders of the now-venerable Taste of the World festival in east Charlotte. You buy a ticket, board a bus and visit three or four of the ethnic eateries in and near Central Avenue. Next one is Oct. 2. To learn more, click here. Plummer and her colleagues on the Eastland Area Strategies Team founded the event in 2005, a time when many local residents were worried about the influx of immigrants into neighborhoods in east Charlotte, among other areas. To counteract the fears, Plummer and others decided to use food as a way to bring visitors to their part of the city. It worked remarkably well. The most recent tour sold out in 14 days.
People, cities and food. It must be a good recipe.