Articles About Transportation

Writing about Vauban, Germany, the renowned eco-district just inside the Freiburg city limits, has been on my wish list for several years, ever since my self-guided tour of trend-setting European models. I was eager to see this famed quartier, formerly a French army encampment, where roof-top solar panels abound, heating bills are astonishingly low, and […]

[highlightrule]To sign up for the UNC Charlotte bike-share program visit gotchabike.com/charlottewheels [/highlightrule] Bike sharing has arrived at UNC Charlotte. The program launched July 31 with 100 bikes and 10 hubs for the bikes. The UNC Charlotte bike share program, Charlotte Wheels, is run by Gotcha Bike. The Gotcha Bike app lets users reserve and return […]

In addition to studying how to accommodate growing ethnic diversity – needed in many cities, not just Houston and Charlotte – there’s another lesson Houston might hold for Charlotte: Finding the money to build out an ambitious greenway plan. They call them bayous. We call them creeks. But both Houston and Charlotte have a number […]

Are master plans really worth the effort? Skeptics discount them, charging that they are little more than feel-good exercises in wishful thinking. Such critiques have currency for some plans but not all. When done right, a plan states which policies are more important and includes metrics to gauge outcomes; it charts timelines for putting recommendations […]

Charlotte is joining dozens of other cities around the world, as well as the departments of transportation for North Carolina and the U.S., in declaring its intent to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries – including bicycle and pedestrians as well as autos. It’s a movement called Vision Zero. And it might result in the […]

If New York, famous for traffic congestion and less-than courteous drivers, can do it, why can’t Charlotte? A public discussion Tuesday, April 4, in uptown Charlotte will feature the New York traffic official who oversaw 400 miles of new bike lanes, helped launch the country’s largest bike-share program and transformed 180 acres of asphalt into […]

The City of Charlotte is proposing creating two protected bicycle lanes through uptown Charlotte to connect the Little Sugar Creek Greenway, part of the Cross Charlotte Trail, to the Irwin Creek Greenway on the other side of uptown. Vivian Coleman of the Charlotte Department of Transportation’s Uptown Connects study told a Charlotte City Council committee […]

More cycling in Charlotte is good for you, even if you never mount a bicycle. More butts on bikes means less congestion and noise on local roads, cleaner air, fewer traffic fatalities and ultimately a lighter burden on our health care system. Purchasing, operating, and maintaining a bicycle is also many times cheaper as a […]

If you’re like most people in the Charlotte area you drive a lot, and most of that is alone. Now a new initiative is encouraging people to try to limit those single-person trips by car. Sustain Charlotte, a local nonprofit that focuses on solving the city’s sustainability challenges, has launched an effort until Oct. 31 […]

Should the regional transit commission take on the operating costs of the Charlotte streetcar? Former Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx makes that suggestion during an interview in which he reflects on his tenure as U.S. transportation secretary. Foxx says he’s proud of making lemonade out of lemons at the department, of pushing it to better consider […]

Along with a new light rail station on the UNC Charlotte campus, the Blue Line Extension will mean transportation changes on- and off-campus – in parking patterns, bus routes and campus shuttles – and the debut of a bike-share program. Many of the changes were outlined Tuesday night at a public forum on campus. The […]

A years-long debate over where to locate the county’s still-unfunded southeast transit corridor – the Silver Line – may be ending this month. But even as that long debate over whether Independence Boulevard is the right route appears likely to be put to bed, this issue still looms: There is no money to build the […]