Hold the front page! Charlotte’s outerbelt is stimulating sprawl!
It’s official. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission has released a study showing that new development along the partially completed loop road is occurring far faster than anywhere else in the city. Developers are even building large developments along the route well in advance of the road’s completion. The clogged intersections and slow traffic that bedevil the completed sections of highway are apparently destined to be repeated all around the perimeter of our city.
I was talking recently with a visiting academic who makes his career out of analyzing urban policy, studying cities nationwide. One of his questions about Charlotte was: “Do people still believe the beltway will solve their transportation problems?”
Do you? Do you think the reason the state is spending hundreds of millions of dollars of public money is to reduce our traffic congestion? If you do, you’re not alone. I still meet plenty of folks around town who believe this fairy tale to be true. After all, if this massive project isn’t intended to move traffic more swiftly, to enable us to get where we want to go faster, what’s the point?
Sadly, the facts say exactly the opposite. Congestion increases with the construction of beltways; the outerbelt is all about opening up land for development, not transportation.
“Does Charlotte ever look at other cities?” asked my visitor. “Do they know that in every city in the USA that has constructed a beltway, traffic has increased? There’s not a single city where outerbelts don’t get clogged. The freeway rings around Washington and Baltimore, for example, are parking lots during peak hours.”
I wished I could defend my city, but I couldn’t. We’re headed down the same road to suburban gridlock as every other city, especially Atlanta, whose failed policies still hold sway within our copycat metropolis. We proclaim how much we want to avoid Atlanta’s mistakes, but it’s all talk. Matching the cliched definition of insanity, we repeat the same actions over and over, and expect a different result.
It won’t be different here. The writing has been on the wall for years.
I’ve been broadcasting this same message — that the outerbelt will exacerbate sprawl to the detriment of other parts of the city — for the last seven years, since my first articles in this newspaper. I’ve explained many times how the outerbelt is designed in ways that guarantee increased congestion. I-485 comes with a multitude of interchanges — far more than are needed for efficient transportation — each one surrounded with intensive development, with roads spreading out for miles into (previously) unspoiled countryside, opening up great swathes of farmland for subdivisions and shopping centers.
This pattern of development happens for the simple reasons that the civic leadership and the development community want it to happen. The city needs an array of new shopping centers and office parks to subsidize the costs of low-density residential sprawl. These subdivisions cost more tax dollars to service than they bring into the city’s coffers through property taxes, and need to be paid for by new commercial developments creating large tax surpluses.
Developers want this pattern to continue because it is easier, often much easier, and more profitable, to work in greenfield, or undeveloped, sites than managing creative infill projects in neighborhoods full of NIMBYs who oppose each and every development regardless of quality. Developers who make good infill projects deserve medals. By contrast, many developments around the edge of our city are often mediocre, and designed for only a short lifespan, leaving the community to carry the costs several years down the road.
I wish more developers had civic consciences, but that rarely goes with the job. As they see it, their (legitimate) task is to turn a profit and move on. Issues of lasting quality are not uppermost in their minds. In this vacuum, it is the city’s (and the county’s) job to set out proper community standards, to require good design.
But the outerbelt shows just how far away from these goals of sensible design and planning we truly are. With large populations living, working and shopping all along the new freeway, thousands of people use I-485 as their local commuter route, driving to work, to shop, to worship, to play, and home again, often just a few miles in each direction. There is no “interstate” dimension at all to this highway. It is purely a local road for residents and workers.
To make matters worse, we know that most of the developments built around the interchanges and beyond are only accessible by car, so driving is forced upon us for every facet of our daily life. In the “land of the free” we have no choice. Within this crazy system, many of us prefer (illogically) to creep along these freeways in over-large vehicles designed for off-road adventures, with very inefficient gas mileage. We will spend a gallon of gas to buy a gallon of milk. We use more petroleum at the very time when our national interest would be better served by reducing our dependence on Middle East oil; furthermore, we pump out tons of pollutants from our tailpipes, radically impairing our air quality.
If the air we breathe gets much worse, we will have crossed the Rubicon of pollution, putting the health of our citizens at considerable risk. As a result, all federal funds for road building may be cut off. That so few people seem worried about this leads a skeptical observer to believe that this city, and others across the nation, are just waiting for the Bush administration to relax air quality rules, allowing us the freedom to breathe more toxic pollutants into our lungs for the national good.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, some commentator on local talk radio recently advocated his solution to this congestion: make people work staggered shifts. Just the thing to support family values. Mom works the day shift; Dad works nights (or vice versa) and the parents pass the kids between them like batons in relay races. Great!
In this sad story of Charlotte, it’s ordinary folks who are left to carry the burden. Civic leaders bury their heads in the sand, allowing developers to lead us onward like lemmings.
And we know what happens to them.*
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2002.
