Mary Newsom

Recent Posts

via The Naked City Blog

Can Charlotte Become More Walkable and Bikeable?

By Mary Newsom | | No Comments
AARP volunteers get ready to begin a walkability audit uptown with guest speaker Gil Penalosa of 8-80 Cities in October.  Photo: Juan OssaIt 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.
via The Naked City Blog

My Park(ing) Day Blues Spark a Contrarian Proposal

By Mary Newsom | | No Comments
Park(ing) Day in Charlotte in September 2012, next to a food truck round-up event. Photo: Keihly MooreI 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 what 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, someone comes up with a Density Day.
via The Naked City Blog

What in the World Is Wrong With North College Street?

By Mary Newsom | | No Comments
Street view, from Google Maps, of North College at Eighth Street, which tops the city's high-accident listThis 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?
via The Naked City Blog

Highways, Congestion and a Power Broker’s Lessons

By Mary Newsom | | No Comments
Frontispiece of The Power Broker maps Moses' roads, bridges, parks and playgrounds. The headline in this morning's newspaper could not have been more appropriate for the day I have to, at long last and reluctantly, return to the UNC Charlotte library my copy of Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.I checked it out in September 2013. It's roughly the size of a cinder block and just as heavy, and the librarians graciously let me keep renewing it, since apparently no one else wanted the tome. Which is sad. Published in 1974, it should be required reading for anyone studying public administration, transportation, planning, urban studies, political science, sociology and journalism. I finally finished it a few months ago but after so long it felt almost like a family pet and I didn't want to part with it.The headline today: N.C. DOT says Monroe Bypass construction has started. The article by Steve Harrison notes a lawsuit over the project is still active, and it could well be stopped for a second time.As it happens, one of Robert Moses' faithful techniques for getting money for his projects was to start work on them with only part of the funds he needed – having promised, of course, that the funds in hand would fully cover the cost. Then, when the money well ran dry, he'd successfully argue that so much money had already been spent it would be a waste not to finish the project, and he'd get more millions from the city or the state.  I suspect someone at N.C. DOT has read The Power Broker, or at least absorbed some of its lessons about how Moses extracted public money for his projects.The Monroe bypass will be a state-funded toll road intended to "relieve congestion" on Monroe's existing U.S. 74 bypass, a highway built to keep traffic congestion out of downtown Monroe. Today, of course, downtown Monroe has no traffic congestion to speak of, since the city and county allowed so much congestion-generating development on U.S. 74 that it successfully sucked all the economic energy out of downtown and into a now-fading enclosed shopping mall and a series of strip centers, fast-food restaurants and chain businesses – each with its own separate, congestion-generating driveway. Monroe's old bypass is like virtually every other bypass built in America in the past 50 years: clotted with traffic and deteriorating, cheaply built structures.The sad irony of the Monroe Bypass proposal – not to mention Charlotte's own Interstate 485 outer loop bypass highway (which will finally be completed in about a week), its own version of U.S. 74 a.k.a. Independence Boulevard, Gaston County's proposed Garden Parkway, and a dozen other projects I could mention in North Carolina alone – is that planners figured out as early as the 1930s that building highways was not relieving traffic congestion.Consider this passage from The Power Broker. Reminder: It was written in 1974. Caro is writing here about the 1930s. From page 515:"The Grand Central, Interborough and Laurelton parkways opened early in the summer of 1936, bringing to an even one hundred the number of miles of parkway constructed by Moses on Long Island and in New York City since he had conceived his great parkway plan in 1924. ... One editorial opined that the new parkways would, by relieving the traffic load on the Southern and Northern State parkways, solve the problem of access to Moses' Long Island parks 'for generations.'"The new parkways solved the problem for about three weeks. ... Some city planners noticed that the traffic pattern on Long Island had fallen into a set pattern: every time a new parkway was built, it quickly became jammed with traffic, but the load on the old parkways was not significantly relieved."If this had been the pattern for the first hundred miles of parkways, they wondered, might it not be the pattern for the next forty-five also? Perhaps consideration should be given to trying to ease Long Island's traffic problem by other means..."Caro describes throughout the book Moses' staunch opposition to mass transit, his blatant racial discrimination, and the illegal, politically infused methods he used – all while Moses was hailed nationally and internationally as "the man who got things done," the honest "non-politician" and so on.It's one of the most persuasive works I've ever encountered for the importance to our democracy of expert journalists who look deep into local and state governments and pay attention to what is really happening in their city's neighborhoods.I acquired The Power Broker a few weeks before I heard Caro speak in September 2013 to a roomful of journalists gathered for a Nieman Fellows reunion. He recounted the advice his editor at Newsday gave him, when he asked how to be an investigative reporter. The advice: "Turn every page." Indeed.-------- To read more about Robert Moses, I recommend Roberta Brandes Gratz' The Battle For Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, and Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City, by Anthony Flint.
Load more stories