Bicycling

If you prefer a full-screen version of the map in your browser, click on the image above. The 30-mile Cross Charlotte Trail through Mecklenburg County and Charlotte, when finished, will offer a transportation corridor that will allow users to bicycle or walk from one end of the county to the other, connecting spots such as […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]