Charlotte-based architect and urban planner Martin Zimmerman talks with Melissa and Chris Bruntlett about their latest book and their family’s first few years living and navigating Delft, a 1,200 year-old city in the Netherlands, mostly by bike, at speeds rarely exceeding ten miles per hour.
Read moreWhen WFAE, The Charlotte Ledger and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute launched a joint newsletter last year to cover transit and transportation, we assumed that the main focus would be the 1-cent transit sales tax vote.
Well, that vote didn't happen and the transit plan is in a bit of limbo, but we've still found plenty to write about, from...
Read moreCharlotte transportation leaders laid out an ambitious goal this week: By 2040, half of all trips in the city should be taken in something besides a car.
That would be a major shift. Right now, somewhere around three-quarters of trips within the city are currently made using single-occupant vehicles, transportation staff said at the City Council transportation committee meeting.
... Read moreMarch 2022 is arguably when Charlotte and the country turned the corner on the pandemic.
With Omicron waning, Charlotte’s major banks brought back their employees, at least on a hybrid schedule. Bank of America returned vaccinated workers on March 1. Wells Fargo came back two weeks later.
March is a good baseline for what a post-pandemic transit system may look like, in a time...
Read moreThe future of transportation has arrived in Charlotte — but the future comes with a few asterisks.
This year has already seen a slew of announcements about futuristic transportation options in the Charlotte region (to say nothing of a new robot security guard uptown and...
Read moreJohn Holmes III was a budding urbanist in Charlotte, reading books like "Street Fight" and wondering why we built our cities to drive everywhere. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran working at Chick-fil-A, Holmes was trying to reconcile his workplace's busy drive-thru with his own ideas about building better cities. When he posted his opinion online about a new drive-thru-only Chick-fil-A, he quickly...
Read moreCharlotte’s $13.5 billion transit and transportation plans might be on hold, but plans for how to build the signature Silver Line light rail are still pushing ahead.
Officials from the Charlotte Area Transit System reviewed a new study about how to facilitate transit-oriented development around each of the Silver Line’s 31 planned stops. The 29-mile light rail line, which would run...
Read moreHow do you make a sprawling city that came of age in the automobile era less car-dependent?
One approach: Don't devote so much space to cars.
That's the thinking behind the Joinery, a new, 83-unit apartment complex that's opening just north of the Parkwood station on the Blue Line light rail. The six-story building has no parking on-site, except for a few spaces devoted to...
Read moreThis story was originally published in Transit Time, a collaborative newsletter published by The Charlotte Ledger, WFAE and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute.
Like a lot of roads in the Charlotte region, Matthews Township Parkway (N.C. 51) is becoming more congested.
Apartments, office buildings and...
Read moreCharlotte is planning to ask voters this year to approve more than $100 million worth of new transportation bonds — an amount that would allow the city to make progress on goals like building more sidewalks but still fall short of covering many crucial needs.
Municipal bonds aren’t quite as sexy as a multibillion-dollar new light rail line or as captivating as a pitched political...
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