Can light rail reshape this auto-oriented corridor?

I have auto-related uses on the mind this week, because at a 4:30 meeting today the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission is going to recommend yay or nay on a proposed auto mall (a collection of car lots from different dealerships) in the University City area. You can download the agenda for that meeting here.

(Update, 5:20 p.m.  The planning commission's zoning committee unanimously recommended that the site be rezoned for an auto mall. Two commissioners who had earlier expressed opposition to the rezoning, Tom Low and Deb Ryan, weren't at the meeting. The City Council makes the final decision.)

The city planning staff has switched from recommending against the rezoning to recommend for it, if some design and site plan issues are resolved. Interestingly, their issues earlier were not because it's for a large chunk of auto-oriented uses within a quarter mile of a planned light rail station area, where the overall city policy calls for transit-oriented (i.e. walkable, compact, mixed-use) development. Instead the staff focused on design issues. (See the commentary on PlanCharlotte.org, "Don't derail transit areas with an auto mall.")

Yesterday, I  had occasion to drive on North Tryon Street, from the UNC Charlotte Center City campus to the main campus on University City  Boulevard.  I decided to count the auto-oriented businesses on North Tryon Street up to the corner of U-City Boulevard.  I started at Atando Avenue (where the idea occurred to me), so the count starts there.  Want to guess? The answer is ....

Regional planning and sticker shock

Will stickers on a map matter? Photo: City of Charlotte

After suggesting in print that people should attend last Thursday's regional planning workshop, part of the CONNECT Our Future effort, it was only fitting that I, too, go. And a good time was had by all. Except ...

We were assigned tables as we went in, and I ended at a table with two other Marys - Mary Hopper, recently stepped down as director of University City partners and a former chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, and Mary Clayton, a transportation planner with Parsons Brinckerhoff. Also at the table were three UNC Charlotte urban design grad students, and a handful of other folks.  I am not sure that the table was representative of the population at large, but whatever. It was a good collection of people.

Our table moderator, Nadine Bennett, a planner with Centralina Council of Governments, which is administering the $5 million federal grant that funds CONNECT, asked us all to talk a bit about who we were and what we thought the region's biggest issues are. Just about everyone said "transportation." And just about everyone said, "We don't want to become another Atlanta."  One of the graduate students was, I am not making this up, from Atlanta, and she was particularly forceful on this point.

Bennett said that she had been the moderator for, I think, 17 different tables during a two-month series of workshops in 14 counties and at every one of those tables, people had said, "We don't want to become another Atlanta."

What's up (or not) with a zoning ordinance re-do?

It's been almost three months since a consultants' report concluded the city's zoning ordinance is seriously in need of updating. (See my PlanCharlotte.org article, "Report: Charlotte ordinance confusing, lacks modern tools" from July.

What's happening next?  Planning Director Debra Campbell discussed that at an Oct. 7 meeting of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, an appointed advisory board to the city's Planning Department and City Council. 

Campbell said the planning staff is discussing how to link the zoning ordinance assessment process with their planning process. The planners want to look at whether a revised zoning ordinance would mean revising the way plans are done, which today are the "Euclidian model," Campbell said. For non-planners, that means based on single-use zoning districts.  (The term "Euclidian zoning" isn't about Euclidian geometry, but is named for the 1926 Supreme Court case, Village of Euclid, Ohio, v. Ambler Realty Co., which ruled that land use zoning is constitutional. The Euclid zoning ordinance was based on single-use districts, a type of land use generally considered suburban or rural, not suitable for large cities.)

 

"Our plans are very use-based," Campbell said. "They're colors on a map." In other words, local plans tend to map large areas and, with color-coding, delineate land uses should go where. Instead, Campbell said, "I want them to focus on both use and character." Sometimes, she said, getting too deep into the planning process can seem dry and boring to the general public. "In general people want to be involved with what’s it going to look like, what’s it going to feel like?"

Laura Harmon, the department's director of development services, said the staff would have a better idea of how to link plans and the zoning ordinance "in the next month or two."

Said Campbell: "If there's a fatal flaw that I have, it's that I like to go slow ... I like to bring folks along with me."

Lakeshore lessons for a city without a shore

A created wetland, part of the flood management program at Corktown Common Park. Photo: Waterfront Toronto

TORONTO – No, alas, I am not attending the Toronto International Film Festival. I'm here for a conference, Meeting of the Minds. (Follow on Twitter at #motm2013). Monday, a group of us toured a massive, years-in-the-making redevelopment project along Toronto's waterfront. It's called WATERFRONToronto.

But what might any of that mean for Charlotte? We are not a city perched on the edge of one of the Great Lakes (in this case, Lake Ontario). The only lakes nearby are artificial and nowhere near downtown. But it rains on Toronto the way it rains on Charlotte, and pavement sends pollutant-carrying water streaming downhill. Even if it isn't polluted (but it probably is) the stormwater can flood low-lying areas, including buildings in floodplains and storm sewers. In Charlotte we send our stormwater into our creeks.

So I was interested to see some of the ways the city is working not only to reclaim old, industrial areas that used to flank the lakeshore, but how it's trying to deal with the water that comes from the sky, and from flooded rivers.

Next to the lakeside, the new Sherbourne Common is a storm-water treatment plant, designed as a park with water-filled art.

Art at Sherbourne Commons uses the treated stormwater. Photo: Waterfront Toronto

The water that pours through its fountains is storm-water that's been purified. A grassy field treats the water. A splash park with jets of spurting water is designed to become an ice-skating rink in winter (this is Canada, after all.)

Farther east along the lakeshore is Corktown Common, a park built specifically to filter and store stormwater. It's planted with native plants, offers a playground and a splash-park for kids of all ages.

In search of 'hipsturbias' yet to come

Downtown Waxhaw: A 'hipsturbia' of the future? Photo: Nancy Pierce

Just the term "hipsturbia" makes you want to hear more. It appears to have been coined in a New York Times article in February, "Creating Hipsturbia," which created serious buzz. It described a trend of formerly urban hipsters moving out to suburban towns because they couldn't afford housing in the city, but who didn't want to give up their trendy accouterments or shopping:

"As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.

But only if they can bring a piece of the borough with them."
 I took part in some lively discussion Tuesday at a Civic By Design forum on whether Charlotte or its environs has any "hipsturbia" spots or even hipsturbia-in-waiting areas. As you would imagine, even trying to define the term (much less defining what's a hipster) was a discussion point.

• Must places that attract hipsters be "gritty"?  
• Does a place that planners would say is a walkable, mixed-use urban neighborhood (example: Baxter in Fort Mill, S.C.) lack hipster cred if it's all new?
• What about some of the region's smaller towns with historic downtowns surrounded by standard suburbia, places like Belmont, Waxhaw, etc.? Does the presence of a traditional historic downtown overrule the dominance of suburbia?

Some of the comments:

Transportation officials dispute my one-way theory

When I wrote last month about the surprising (to me) prominence of one-way streets uptown on the city's High Accident List, aka HAL ("One-way to higher traffic accidents?") , I said I had asked for a response to my observation from Transportation Director Danny Pleasant. He responded today. Here's what he said: 

Mary – Sorry it took a while to respond. I was in one of your favorite cities, Boston, earlier this week. It could not have been more beautiful. I explored the city on foot along two incredibly vibrant one-way streets: Boylston and Newberry. I’m not sure it would be possible to create more robustness, regardless of whether the streets were one-way or two.

Here is information regarding Charlotte’s one-way streets, prepared by Debbie Self, a talented engineer in charge of CDOT’s traffic and pedestrian safety programs:

“It’s fair to say there is not a significant safety concern with one-way streets. In uptown, there are roughly 150 intersections (100 are signalized and 50 are unsignalized). Of that total, the majority of intersections involve at least 1 one-way street. So one could say most of the intersections in uptown that have one-way streets are not on the HAL. There are 15 uptown locations (defined as inside the I-277 loop) on the 2013 HAL.

Other noteworthy comments:

• Uptown collisions tend to involve fewer injuries because the travel speeds are much lower. Injury rates are not reflected in the HAL.


• A few of the Uptown locations rose to the top 10 based on more accurate traffic volume counts. The updated traffic counts were lower which resulted in a higher ranking on the HAL (the crashes by year remained about the same). Some of last year’s top 10 locations moved down because of higher volumes or a safety enhancement was completed.


• 5th/Caldwell had fewer crashes in 2012 because CDOT installed reflective back plates on the traffic signals to address angle crashes.


• College Street in the areas of 7th, 8th & 9th Streets has been on the HAL 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.


• The HAL is published annually to raise awareness of intersections with an elevated crash rate. It is a tool to identify location that have potential opportunity for mitigation of crashes and/or reduction in the severity of crashes.

Distractions/not paying attention continue to be the highest contributing circumstance for all crashes. That’s true for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. We want to emphasize keeping your mind on the task at hand – walking, driving, or biking.”

Find answers behind candidate rhetoric

Campaign season is here. As always with local elections, voters must first try to sort out he candidates who know which end is up regarding local government, and only then dive into figuring out who they agree with on the issues.

This is not always easy. Read on for some helpful questions for Charlotteans.

(If you're wondering, in North Carolina municipal elections are in odd-numbered years. In Charlotte, the mayor and City Council members serve two-year terms and are elected in partisan elections. So you can hardly turn around between elections. This year we have a Sept. 10 primary, with the possibility of an Oct. 8 runoff election, and then a Nov. 5 election.) 

In an earlier life, I had the honor and duty as an editorial board member at the Charlotte Observer, of helping interview all the city and county candidates as part of the editorial endorsement process. You might be surprised to learn:

1. How many candidates are crazy as loons. People who complain about editorial pages' so-called bias (hey, they are PAID to have opinions) sometimes concoct intricate conspiracy theories about some endorsements, when the truth is that you really don't want to endorse a nut bucket, yet you can't call someone a nut bucket without risking a libel suit. The good news is that usually the nut buckets don't make it through the primary. And in my experience, looniness crosses all party lines.
2. How hard it is to get candidates to take a position. Sure, some will be forthright. But too many won't go beyond being in favor of low taxes, fighting crime and loving barbecue and sweet tea.