Bicycling

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 […]

Last month PlanCharlotte reported on events that bode well for an evolving local biking culture. (See “To create a bike culture, Charlotte needs …”) Perhaps the capstone came Nov. 4, when the Charlotte voters approved by a whopping 70.2 percent majority allocating $5 million in planning funds for a $35-million cross-county bike-pedestrian trail. Many of […]

[highlight]Would more Charlotteans bicycle more often if the city had more bike lanes? More bike lanes protected from traffic? Or more off-road paths, such as greenways? Would showers and bike lockers at more workplaces encourage more bicycle commuting? Maybe, instead, the most important thing to do is offer better education, for motorists and cyclists, so […]

In August, 34 officials and community leaders from nine Knight communities traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Malmo, Sweden, to study how to make their cities more livable. The trip was organized by 8-80 Cities and sponsored by Knight Foundation. The Charlotte team members who traveled to Scandinavia had a range of experience on bicycles; they […]

How did Copenhagen become an international model of urbanism? Four leaders from Charlotte and Mecklenburg County government, philanthropy and real estate will find out next month on a six-day study trip. Brian Collier from the Foundation For The Carolinas, Assistant Mecklenburg County Manager Leslie Johnson, at-large City Council member Vi Lyles and Crescent Communities CEO […]

Malmö, Sweden, may seem a lot farther away than Minneapolis, where a local delegation of Charlotte Chamber and other civic leaders recently visited to get ideas for urban development, but in today’s global culture, it is much closer than one might think. I spent a memorable week there during an 18-day study tour, exploring five […]

PlanCharlotte.org is asking readers to nominate spots in the Charlotte region that need a design makeover. (See our first installment in this series here and our most recent installment here.) Urban designers Keihly Moore and Alex Borisenko have launched a website, www.completeblocks.com, where they’re proposing a series of urban design retrofits, many of them nominated […]

A 10-foot-wide asphalt path that officially opened Tuesday offers a glimpse of what could be a more pedestrian- and bike-oriented future for some of Charlotte’s least pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares. The path, 0.9 miles along University City Boulevard from Mallard Creek Church Road to UNC Charlotte’s main entrance at Broadrick Boulevard, is the first bike-ped trail along […]

When you hear “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night … ” you probably think of the U.S. Postal Service. But if you found yourself around Plaza Midwood on one of this past winter’s cold and snowy Tuesday nights, you may well associate that phrase with something else: hardy bicyclists pedaling despite […]

As a planner, I’ve found most communities open to making concessions to pedestrians and cyclists in their transportation plans, a goal generally phrased as “providing transportation choices.” There’s an underlying assumption that transportation networks are for cars and trucks, and accommodating anything else is just for variety. For example, Charlotte’s Transportation Action Plan includes a […]