Articles About Transportation
Taking a car day trip is obviously the way to see the most and get the most out of your day, right? Well … no. On a spontaneous weekend recently, I got to compare different ways of traveling. On Saturday my boyfriend and I took a driving trip from Boston, where I live now, to […]
By 2040 Charlotte will grow by 400,000 people, city transportation planners project – an increase equal to the population of the cities of Minneapolis, Cleveland, Miami or New Orleans. How can Charlotte handle all those new daily trips? The city’s Department of Transportation is proposing the city spend $5 billion over 25 years to keep […]
What, exactly, is Charlotte’s metro region, and how cohesive is that region’s transportation planning? Those questions have bedeviled planners for decades. Now, a new proposal from the U.S. Department of Transportation aims to make urban regions’ transportation planning more cohesive, a proposal possibly stemming from Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx’s frustrations as Charlotte mayor. But will […]
Is Jim Garges, Mecklenburg County’s normally ebullient director of parks and recreation, fretting right now? He might be, and for much the same reasons that Janette Sadik-Khan worried eight years ago as commissioner of the massive New York City Department of Transportation. For Sadik-Khan, the summer of 2008 was when her staff decided to gamble. […]
Charlotte’s historic and well-loved streetcar No. 85 may have left town for a sojourn at the N.C. Transportation Museum, but another relic of public transportation history may be about to get a shot at local renown. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission is restoring a 1972-vintage bus in hopes it can somehow be put to use […]
Most of the ideas about SouthPark offered last week by a group of out-of-town development experts were what you’d hope to hear from 21st-century planners: create connections, try public-private partnerships, build a better public realm. But a few of their comments might raise questions or even baffle some Charlotteans. The advisory panel from the nonprofit […]
Two new, high-visibility bicycling campaigns rolled out this week, each an attempt to get more Charlotteans riding—and with more support from the city. The most noticeable will be an Open Streets event on May 1, in which a city street, I this instance North Davidson Street, will be closed to motor vehicle traffic but open […]
Could the SouthPark mall area of Charlotte ever grow into a collection of neighborhoods that more resemble a city than suburban developments? What would it look like? What are the possibilities? The question is timely. Already, about 2,400 new apartments, as well as office towers and mixed-use projects are proposed or in the works. Tuesday […]
[highlightrule] “ ‘Status quo,’ you know, is Latin for the mess we’re in.” — President Ronald Reagan [/highlightrule] The tension and rhetoric about whether to build toll lanes on Interstate 77 is something I’m watching with dispassionate interest. I’m familiar with North Mecklenburg after work there some years ago, but my professional stake in the […]
An open letter to Charlotte City Council members: Today we are unveiling the new First Ward Park, which is extremely positive for our community. With this new park and the developments that will follow, we have a tremendous opportunity to avoid mistakes we have made in the past with respect to providing safe infrastructure for […]
It’s been only six weeks since globe-trotting “complete streets” advocate Gil Penalosa deplaned in Charlotte in October, wearing a slightly rumpled suit and armed with little more than a flash drive and a 500-slide PowerPoint. But what a week it was. By the end, I had a sense—no proof of course, but an intuition—that an […]
In what local preservationists call a major victory, a century-old depot—the deteriorating relic of a lost era of Charlotte-Gastonia passenger rail—will be moved a short distance and repaired. The old Piedmont and Northern Railway depot has stood since 1912 in northwest Charlotte, on Old Mount Holly Road beside what are now CSX-owned tracks used for […]