The Overhead Wire

On Charlotte's Fight with North Carolina, Itself

2013-02-06T00:09:00.001-08:00

A fight is breaking out between former Charlotte Mayor/current NC Governor Pat McCrory and current Mayor Anthony Foxx over funding related to the local Streetcar and LRT projects. Charlotte, unlike many other states gives state level full funding grant agreements for capital transit projects. In 1998 Charlotte passed a half cent sales tax for transit expansion in the region with McCrory leading the charge. In 2007 the pro transit folks fought off another ballot measure to take away the half cent and won by 70% of the vote. This fight was partly started because of cost overruns that bothered libertarians, also chafing at the thought of having rail in the region. Apparently the most despised mode of all.

At this juncture, the city is looking to fund the streetcar project with local property taxes because there is no funding available from the half cent, which is tied up in the Northeast Corridor and operations of the expanded bus system. The bus system funding has worked so well, that its seen over a 100% ridership increase. Because of the lack of transit funding, the regional plan as seen below, is taking much longer than initially planned.

This seems to be the rub. McCrory believes that only the half cent set aside for transit should be used for expansion, and that funding from the state ($299m) is dependent on local funding being so constrained, that the city has to go through the state. Apparently trying to speed up the process of building out the network by locally funding is not allowed. One line at a time, and no streetcars. And forget that the roads don't pay for themselves. What this tells us is that decision makers in the state think that if Charlotte has its half cent of play money, the big boys can use the funding for the other interests.

But what else is going on in the region that would equate to other interests? How about the $3B in road projects that are happening in Charlotte currently. And they want to start a state fight over a few hundred million? What a disgraceful flareup. The State doesn't want to give money because they think Charlotte has enough, and Charlotte with the help of NCDOT wants to waste billions on sprawl highways. Building sprawl highways that have no use until the land around them is developed into oblivion. Charlotte pretends that it doesn't want to turn into over sprawling and traffic choked Atlanta, but it looks like being Georgia is the goal, and the state led by Pat McCrory, is more than happy to help them get there.

Grating on a Curve

2013-01-12T15:27:00.001-08:00

I was in Houston for a work meeting last spring and went on a tour with our good friend Christof Spieler who has taken a hiatus from blogging at CTC Houston while he is an active member of the board for Houston Metro. He was kind enough to take me around to a lot of the new construction going on to complete Houston's three newest light rail lines. I must say I was blown away at the progress and opportunities that the system holds.

Houston's Light Rail Plans via Christof Spieler

I know there is a lot of consternation in Houston from certain congressional parties that if they had it their way would never have let the city build its first line. But I'm sure glad they did because it's allowed them so much political support to push forward with the system they are installing now. While even that had its fits and starts as well as issues with general managers and vehicle orders, I firmly believe that this will be the most European system in the United States when completed.

North Corridor Construction

Unlike any other LRT system in the United States, they eschewed existing freight rights of way and made the conscious decision to run in the major corridors with dedicated guideways. This is going to bring unprecedented mobility to the newly served areas as well as perhaps a few issues as well.

While many say that Houston has no zoning, what it really means is that Houston has no use restrictions. Unless your neighborhood has existing deed restrictions, anything is fair game as long as it pencils in your pro-forma. Making that pro-forma more difficult is all of the setback and parking regulations that are required from the city. It costs a lot of money and changes development dynamics but the lack of use restrictions allow development such as the housing below. Townhouses on small lots that would never have been allowed in any other single family neighborhood.

Southwest Corridor in East Downtown (EDO)

This also raises the issue of affordable housing. While the lack of building restrictions keeps prices fairly low, extremely low in fact when compared to SF or NYC, it doesn't mean that neighborhoods won't see some drastic changes coming to their neighborhoods.

If you would like to see a few more of the images from the trip, check out my Flickr page

Silicon Valley's Transit AND Land Use Problems

2013-01-12T14:53:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of bashing of Silicon Valley lately. It's the butt of transit jokes because of its light rail line which is one of the least traveled LRT lines in the United States for its distance and service. At the time it was built, it was one of the first new non legacy lines in the country. Now that shouldn't be an excuse but we certainly know that in order to be successful you have to connect people with the places they want to go in a timely fashion. The 1st street line connects a lot of places, but it does it rather slowly.

So we would hope they learned from that mistake when they were planning BART and actually decide to connect places, but give people a faster option, but they decided to double down with aweful all in the same of saving money. Sure they are saving money using existing ROW for BART, but they are also skipping destinations they need to connect to make it successful.

Light Rail is Dark Purple, Caltrain is Red, Plannded BART is Steel Blue, Green are areas of high employment density.

You can see that the planned BART line skips all of the North Valley tech employment and instead makes people depend on a slow light rail system to connect. Even when BART is complete to Berryesa, it won't be as effective as it would have been going under or through this employment cluster into downtown. Yes it would have cost more but the investment would have been there for hundreds of years.

Additionally, as I've mentioned in previous posts (1, 2), when silicon valley does get dense, it's in horrible suburban layouts. You can see below along the San Jose LRT line how buildings suck ridership right out of the system with parking and bad design.

The last image above below shows how many buildings you could fit in this space if they had better non auto oriented design. And I guarantee this would drive ridership along the line.

Now there have also been discussions of how Silicon Valley needs to become Manhattan in order to keep talent that wants to live in urban places instead of valley sprawl. An article in the Awl made this claim but in reality, Silicon Valley doesn't need a hefty core of ultra tall buildings, it just needs to use the space it has better and become the DC or Paris of the Western United States. There's so much opportunity, yet it is completely wasted.

So in my eyes the transit is part of the problem for not making the connections that increase property values to do this type of infill, but its also the fault of developers who don't understand that a classic way of building for pedestrians is needed to attract pedestrians and quality of life that people are moving to San Francisco to attain. Sure some people don't want that, but we have more than enough supply of single family homes if there's more of a choice.