Mayor Pat McCrory and city leaders don’t want you to read this column. If you keep reading, you may figure out that Charlotte is about to get walloped with traffic gridlock, and that they have no plan to deal with it.
After UNC-Charlotte professor and expert in transportation issues David Hartgen published his latest statewide study a few weeks ago, warning that Charlotte is the least prepared region in the state in planning for future congestion, they went into damage control mode.
They don’t want you to know that as the region’s population increases 60 to 90 percent over the next 25 years, vehicle miles traveled will nearly double and total regional commuting time will increase by 102 percent. Essentially, Hartgen says, our traffic situation will mirror current day Chicago.
Meanwhile, according to our current plans, 57 percent of our transit dollars will be spent on mass transit service that focuses on less than three percent of travel and does almost nothing to reduce congestion and the air pollution idling cars and trucks cause.
It’s simply stunning that our long-range transportation plan contains little discussion of the impacts the near-doubling of employment and population on traffic. While congestion reduction is mentioned in our transportation plans, it is unfathomable that it is not among the goals of the region’s highway and long range plans, which instead strive to “provide mobility choices.”
Instead of addressing the congestion time bomb Hartgen describes, city leaders turned on the messenger. Hartgen doesn’t appreciate that regional leaders are trying to use mass transit as part of an ingenious plan to concentrate growth in five corridors, they whined on the mayor’s show on WBT last week. They probably figure you haven’t read Hartgen’s study or their own regional planning documents, which show a tidal wave of residential and employment growth just over our county’s borders that is beyond the control of their growth policies.
The city’s transportation action plan has a single bizarre mission: to make Charlotte “the premier city in the country for integrating transportation and land use choices.” It laughably calls for reducing vehicle miles traveled per capita as a key strategy for relieving congestion, as if the city can somehow control the growth and travel patterns of surrounding counties whose residents will commute to Charlotte.
Because he is not as enlightened as they are, Hartgen just can’t get it through his thick skull that you can’t combat congestion by widening roads, they repeat over and over.
It’s a lie on a lot of levels. Again, they are counting on you not reading Hartgen’s report, which is available at www.johnlocke.org/site-docs/traffic/charlotte.html. Hartgen isn’t proposing the wholescale widening of roads they describe, but targeted, coordinated widening and upgrades for specific sections of freeway, arterials, bottlenecks and intersections that together create the worst traffic jams in the region.
It’s ironic that city leaders claim we can’t “fix” congestion when the city’s own transportation action plan shows that if the city spent $4.2 billion on 247 road projects likely to reduce congestion over the next 25 years, we could save commuters 52,565 hours of delay. That’s only about a third of the 149,745 hours of daily delay the area would need to save to hold congestion near its current levels. Hartgen’s study merely builds on the city’s own traffic plans by proposing we spend an additional $4 billion to abate two-thirds of the coming congestion. What flips city leaders out is that Hartgen essentially proposes to take that money from light rail. (Hartgen supports a beefed-up bus system.)
Wherever the money comes from, our so-called leaders desperately need to acknowledge the coming congestion crunch and debate what to do about it. This community must make a choice between three futures — one with massive gridlock on our roads, increasing pollution and light rail that serves a tiny fraction of commuters, one in which even higher taxes support significant congestion reduction and light rail, or one in which we abandon light rail and fully attack congestion reduction. By doing nothing, we are choosing option No. 1.
That’s fine, as long as we understand the implications of that choice; as long as we accept the crushing impact gridlock will have on local businesses’ ability to truck goods in and out of here. If we want to surrender our growing warehousing sector to Atlanta, which makes no secret about taking us on in warehousing, be my guest. If trucks can easily move in and out of Atlanta, where do you think goods will be staged and stored?
Atlanta recently reconfigured its transportation funding system to prioritize congestion reduction. Billions of dollars in privately funded road projects are in the works there, including truck-only lanes to segregate slower moving trucks from traffic, bus lanes, toll express lanes for drivers willing to pay to escape congestion and the widening of one section of I-75 to 23 lanes.
And all this is being planned while naysayers like our mayor whine that something like that just isn’t possible here.
See Tara Servatius live at CL’s Political Party — April 4, 7 p.m. at the Neighborhood Theatre in NoDa (511 E. 36th St., 704-358-9298).
This article appears in Apr 4-10, 2007.
Tara,
Good article as usual, but you didn’t connect the dots (most of which you’ve laid out yourself in previous columns). Inter-county gridlock is actually useful for the Charlotte uptown crowd. The worse it gets, the more attractive it becomes for the people living over the county line to move here instead. This pushes up property values and provides more white professionals for the gentrification of areas close to downtown (as detailed in last week’s column).
this has been asked before and nobody answers. Original plans were for a total cycle of road maintenance city-wide every 12 years..this has continually been pushed back until it now runs over 22 years. Not only have they increased our taxes and our tax base, but they have not spent the ear marked funds on their intended purpose. so we are wellbehind the growth plan/build of roads, and well behind maintenance, which means we’ll be shutting down lanes for significant rework on already overladen roads.
I read your column in this week’s CREATIVE LOAFING about Charlotte’s future traffic woes and that more money needs to go towards roads vs. mass-transit. At the end of the article I read how the State of Georgia is getting ready to spend billions dollars to expand the Interstates around the Atlanta area via HOV/Toll Lanes-Roads.
I do not doubt what you’re reporting but how on God’s green earth can the GADOT put 23 lanes on I-75 ? ? Double decker lanes? Or are they going to go the NJ Turnpike route (i.e. double sets of 8-10 northbound & southbound lanes)? That’s going to cost billions of dollars by
Itself having to buy all of those businesses that are along I-75 right now. I mean, I-75 & I-85 in Atlanta are already at 8-10-12 Lanes. Where can you put these extra lanes at? Atlanta has an advantage over Charlotte in that the State Capitol of GA is also it’s largest city, so its always been easier for Atlanta to get their road money, but are they sure that they can get all of the money they need from the private sector to finance all of these HOV/Toll Lanes that they want to build?
I will agree that our Interstates in the Charlotte area can easily use more lanes, but how many more lanes can you add on? I-77 from Uptown to the SC Line you can add maybe 2 more lanes max, while north of Uptown you could add 2-4 at least in the median. However, once you get to the Iredell/Meck Co. line though, you only have room for the current capacity (4 lanes). A 6-8 lane bridge needs to be built over Lake Norman, but we all know that the NCDOT will never spend $200-300 million to build that bridge here (though they spend $120 million to build a nice sprawling bridge complex in New Bern for US 70/US 17 a few years ago) !!!!!!
I-85 is pretty much maxed out inside of Mecklenburg Co. now. In ston/Cabarrus/Rowan Counties you can add 2-4 more lanes, which gives the area some breathing room.
I think once I-485 gets done in 2015-16, that will take a lot of truck traffic off of I-77/I-85, so I don’t think we will be that bad off. You say that Atlanta is going after our warehousing traffic, but if you were a truck driver which would be easier to do; Get out of Atlanta or Charlotte at 5pm in the afternoon? With all the expansion that Atlanta-area Interstates have undergone (and will undergo in the future), it seems like they are destined to be the LA of the East. Look at all the 8-10-12 Lane freeways in SoCal and you know what; Traffic is still a mess any time of day!!!!!!
THE BOTTOM LINE: I think Charlotte congestion will always get worse simply because the NCDOT will not spend the bulk of their road money here. They will always build more 4 lane freeways going from Raleigh to (insert small Eastern NC farming town here) vs. expanding highway capacity in the state’s largest region. I don’t see what local roads in the immediate area that can be easily expanded that most commuters use during the day (i.e. Independence Blvd., NC16/Providence Road, Albemarle Road, etc.). Especially in Charlotte, as soon as you expand a road, all the developers want to plop down more high-end residential development and another new shopping center anchored by Harris-Teeter and/or Target. I think this is the root cause why even after expanding roads, traffic always gets worse in any city. I’m not saying roads shouldn’t be expanded, but I think in the long run we will only get a short-term reprieve from traffic (look at what will happen after I-485 from I-77 to Johnston Road gets expanded several years from now. AM & PM rush hour traffic will still be a mess!!!!!)
When I was growing up in Cleveland (there’s a place to be from – God forbid I ever have to return, even if I COULD find it under all that snow) there was a lot of furor over the traffic – this was like 1960-something. Shaker Heights was a nice neighborhood, and everyone wanted to live there. It grew. Traffic got bad. It was all over the papers.
When my dad relocated us to Southern California (there’s a place to be from – God forbid I ever have to return to the crowds, the rich entitled assholes, the pollution, the six-hundred-thousand-dollar condos filled to overflowing with meth labs) and there was a major change a-comin’ – called “Irvine”. A town that grew before all our eyes, it added half a million residents in a little over ten years and, not oddly, a great deal of traffic to the area. This was 1970-something. Everyone wanted to live there. Every city around us grew. Traffic got bad. It was all over the papers.
Be still my heart – there was a TV show about The OC recently, though not a single episode aired on my television. I surmise traffic played a role in the show.
When I dragged my family across the country to Greenville, South Carolina (there’s a place to be from – God forbid I ever have to return to that hell-hole with it’s pious, fervid religious stamp upon all things pagan…like liquor sales and people from California and Cleveland and anywhere else Satan dwells) there was a hew and cry from the downtown area and the south end of town: these “outsiders movin’ in here where they don’t belong” were crushing the capacity of the roads under the wheels of their gleaming SUV’s, and executives for Fluor, Michelin, and BMW snapped up cheap houses and fine-tuned the word “McMansion” amid cries of foul from the long-suffering locals. “Ain’t never seen a BMW here before five years ago,” a neighbor lamented once. “Ain’t never cared to see one since. Ugly goldanged things.” Business came to Greenville, the buckle of America’s Bible Belt, I was told. The East End was littered with nice neighborhoods, and everyone wanted to live there. It Grew. Traffic got bad. It was all over the papers. They didn’t get a TV show, though.
Ah, the life of a consultant, and along the way I have worked for notable stretches in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, and lovely Rochester, New York. Each of these cities have their merits, their problems – inner city failings, gangs, schools that Peter Gorman has yet to ruin once we run his ass out of Charlotte behind the teachers he’s fired. And oddly, there is a common thread. It’s not crack and meth. Homelessness. Crime.
It’s traffic.
San Francisco, Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Rochester: they all have nice neighborhoods – somewhere – and everyone wants to live there. They’re growing. Traffic – already bad – is getting worse. It’s all over the papers.
Hard to put down roots, but we did. Right here, in Charlotte. In hindsight, we should have looked more carefully at the Tega Cay area, or maybe Harrisburg. THEY don’t have to wait for Doctor Pete to f*ck up their kids’ educational possibilities. Still, the University Area has some charms, even if it’s being carved out of those beautiful woods that still fall under the chainsaw long after they said the sewage system couldn’t support more development. Shea Homes built us a flimsy, wobbly, well-appointed but poorly-painted little box of a house that I can repair just fast enough to keep from falling down around me, and here we are: Charlotte-ans with a mortgage. And a property tax bill. I’ve become interested in this place. I support it.
I started reading “Creative Loafing.” And the lovely Ms. Servatius wrote about…traffic.
And…well, Mallard Creek; all of Ballantyne; those little oases just off the most litter-covered freeways that cars ever sat on for hours, like Berewick and The Pallisades, and even the cheap seats here just off the University Area like Old Stone Crossing and the soon-to-open Stafford: all nice neighborhoods. Everyone wants to live there. They’re growing. Traffic is bad in spots, not too bad in others, but getting worse every day.
It’s all over the papers.
Feel the road rage, indeed. It’s coming, as it always does. There will be a reckoning, sure: when the good mayor McCrory starts to feel hints of agitation that his lovely mansion off Eastway is an additional seven minutes away from his paneled offices he’ll act. When enough city council-men and –women can’t make it from their day jobs to a meeting off Rae Road on time because end of day traffic on the profoundly stupidly designed four lane highway holds them tight in it’s grip, they’ll act. When the elegiac Dr. Pete hops in his pretty Mercedes (um, that’s just a guess. More likely a Lexus) to pick up his daughters at “just another typical Charlotte school” (uh-huh, we believe you, Pete) and finds it’s taken forty-five minutes to weave up the road to get there, he’ll add his voice to the fray. Yeah, there will be a hue and cry and it will be on every candidates’ campaign blotter to “fix” it.
And it won’t…get…fixed. Never. Ever. I mean it.
People will write Letters to the Editor “…I just can’t take it, they’ve ruined the place, all these out-of-towners coming here with their foreign ways. I guess I’ll just have to move.” And they won’t move, most of them, although some will, and they’ll end up paying a fortune for a little house somewhere else – anywhere else – with worse traffic, likely.
I dunno, Tara. Is this progress? Population expansion? Is this place so much better than, say, Chicago that everyone on the planet is flocking here to sit on 77 North for an hour or so? Is 77 North really that bad (answer: no. Ask anyone from Chicago)?
And don’t MAKE me think about LRT. It works in New York because it has to. Everywhere else LRT has been implemented after the late 1800’s, it’s failed. Here, everyone has a car. Do the math, McCrory. Idiot.
Me, I hate the traffic, even though I am an outsider with my heathen, foul ideas about things and lots of experience driving in places like Manhattan and San Francisco. I actually found myself thinking one day as I sat on 485 East at 4:45 in the afternoon, “gee, this traffic is pretty bad…but for God’s sake, look at the trash on the freeway. Do they just empty the garbage trucks into the swales?”
And I know how to fix it, too: make the freeways and roads wider and implement traffic management via lights and meters. That’ll help for a while, then we’ll grow more and the next mayor can get yelled at for it. Of course, taxes will skyrocket and someone might mention the developers who built all those houses (mine, too) should have footed part of the bill, but hey, McCrory: grow now, pay later!
Whatever. I like Charlotte a lot, and I may stay here a while. I hope so, because I’d hate to live where there’s a really bad traffic on the town’s event horizon. I get road rage real easy.
TARA SERVATIUS is only giving half the facts. Yes, here in Atlanta they are going on with several large road projects, but they are ALSO going to massivly extend the “express bus” system to the burbs, they are trying to extend the MARTA rail into congested Gwinnett County, and, they are in the final planning stages for a light rail/trolly system that will service the Peachtree Road area downtown, eventually to extend all the way to Buckhead at Lenox Square Mall.
So Ms.SERVATIUS, it’s easy to pick and choose what you report on, but report on ALL of it. Yes, in SOME cases, larger and wider roads are needed and do help. But mass transit by no means a waste of money. Our rail parking lots are filled to capacity every day by suburbanites coming into the city, as are the express bus park-and-ride lots as well. Without these, many thousands of additional cars would be on our roads within the city each and every day.
Roads are fine – but they are only PART of a whole plan that needs to be executed in the right way, to keep a city from experiencing gridlock. Charlotte should learn from our mistakes (including not expanding transit options to the burbs quickly enough) – and just building more roads isn’t the answer.