Meetings on The 203 Project – Library & ArtsCenter Space – TODAY!

Posted on August 4, 2018 by patrick

Just a quick note to everyone this morning- the Town of Carrboro has been pushing the word out that there are not one but TWO meetings being held TODAY, August 4th, to collect public input on The 203 Project – which will be the future home to the Orange County Southern Library branch, Town Parks & Rec offices, WCOM Radio, offices for The ArtsCenter and more.

If you’re a parent, I’d particularly encourage you to come and bring kids. The first meeting we went to (scheduled during bedtime for most families) was largely age 50 and up, and Carrboro is a much younger town demographically.

Here are the meeting times and locations:

August 4, 2018
Carrboro Town Hall
301 West Main St., Carrboro NC
12-2pm

August 4, 2018
Oasis of Love Tabernacle of Faith
8005 Rogers Rd, Chapel Hill, NC 27516
4-6pm

Here are some of the things I’ll be sharing if I can make it to one of the meetings today:

The 203 Project needs to focus on the needs of the building program first, and how to get to the building by bike, bus, and foot second, and parking access third. Downtown Carrboro has over 2,000 empty parking spaces at any given time and this project cannot free up more of them; only town leadership at a downtown-wide level can do that.
We have a small downtown with limited land available for economic development. While there is a terrific set of uses proposed for this building, we should also be seeking economic development at this site. Making the building taller, up to 5 stories- would allow for small company startup space on the upper floors. Some of the Alderfolks have talked about having “Affordable office space” for micro-businesses in town, and this building is a great place to do it. I’d like to see if we could get at least 5,000 – 10,000 square feet of such space into the building.
The ground floor should have a strong orientation to the sidewalks on S Greensboro St and Roberson to embrace what we hope will be very lively pedestrian spaces.

Hopefully some of you can get to one of these!

Comments for Second Public Hearing on Library Site at 203 S Greensboro St

Posted on October 3, 2017 by patrick

I sent some comments to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen this evening for tonight’s public hearing. Sorry for not formatting them better, but time was short! Here they are:

First, I appreciate Mr. Spencer’s efforts to capture what was heard last time- I think he got much of the input from the public captured well, and better still- I see it expressed in the new material he created.

Here are my reactions:

1. On the north side of the block, fronting Roberson Street, remove the drop-off lane. Drop-off-pickup lanes are generally a suburban construct so that traffic can keep moving at high speed. That should not be a purpose that is encouraged on Roberson. Drop-off and pick-up in the urban context should happen at the curb, and these movements help to calm traffic. Removing this zone allows for the extension of the sidewalk to the entrance to the underground parking.

2. Carrboro has a chance to do real street trees here. If the trees are against the building on Roberson, they do not act as effectively as a traffic control device, and provide less shade in summer. Put the sidewalk between the trees and the building, and it will be easier to look into what I hope will be big windows into the library, while providing more shade for people using the sidewalk.

3. The parking underground cites 88 spaces per underground tier. I think the project can function with two parking tiers, or even one, meaning either 88 spaces or 176. I suggest dedicating less than 20 spaces to Town Use and leaving the rest as public parking which would be Shared, Managed, Unbundled, and Paid. I talked about what each of these mean in my prior comments.

https://citybeautiful21.com/2017/09/19/development-at-203-s-greensboro-needs-less-parking-startup-space-to-complement-library/

4. The remote parking options continue to replicate the primary problem with how “parking” issues have been addressed in downtown Carrboro for years, which is the thought that there will need to be parking built, and that it should be a public deck. We ***MUST*** get beyond this limiting mindset and think about DISTRICT parking downtown where public and private lots contribute spaces to a PUBLIC PARKING DISTRICT.

What does this look like? Let’s say you do a one tier underground parking facility at 203 S Greensboro. 15 spaces reserved for the town, the remaining 73 are public. They get added to the Public Parking District. At any time when those 73 spaces are less than 85% full, it is free to park. When those spaces are more than 85% full, a price is added to help free up some spaces. This gets managed with smart parking apps like those in Chapel Hill, Asheville, and Durham.

How do we add private spaces to the Public Parking District? The parking study clearly shows that one of the emptiest lots in all of downtown is the Bank of America lot, right next to 203 S Greensboro. The Town, having set up the Public Parking District, approaches Bank of America and says: “We see you have 35 spaces that are mostly unused during the lunch crush time for restaurants. We have set up a software-managed Public Parking District. We invite you to put ten spaces into the Public Parking District, keeping 25 for yourself. They will be priced to keep them 15% empty. At times of day when they are 15% empty without charging, they will be free. For participating, after covering the cost of managing the system, the Town of Carrboro will provide some of the revenue received from pricing back to your business, and some of the revenue will go to the town to help fund access projects to downtown Carrboro, including Parking Signage and lighting, wayfinding, bike and sidewalk projects, and additional bus service.”

Once you have 10 spaces there, you approach another business- perhaps the lot owned by the folks who own the Clean Machine building. You add the Century Center Lot to the Public Parking District as well, running on the same rules. You keep going from business to business, and others will join. You will *FIND* additional parking it by freeing it from those private lots. Businesses who are open 9 to 5 can elect only to participate after 5:30 pm. Bars that open at 11 am can elect only to participate to 10:30 am.

This is going to cost orders of magnitude less than additional parking construction, and perhaps bring the Town and businesses revenue. It also means that someone in a minivan with 3 kids driving from Lake Hogan Farms who wants to park at 203 S Greensboro will *ALWAYS* find a space. That’s what pricing does. If you’re that parent, are you willing to pay $1.25 to have a convenient, easy place to park to take your kids into the library? If they can pay by smartphone app, the answer is definitely “YES.”

So let’s stop trying to site decks, and work on freeing private spaces by becoming the leader of a downtown Public Parking District, and invite private partners to join.

5. In terms of the site layout Jim Spencer has created with the space to walk between the buildings, consider whether an upper floor connection for the levels above the ground makes sense. This could provide a sense of enclosure to the space and also make it easier for employees to move around.

6. We’re trying to do economic development, right? Then this building should be five stories. The Level 3 floorplate should be replicated on Level 4, and again on a 5th level. We only have one downtown, and if we are tapering building height to transition to residents on the south side of Carr Street, we are literally reducing the economic capacity of Carrboro’s (population: 20k plus) most productive real estate to honor the theoretical aesthetic concerns of maybe 10-12 people. Folks who live next to downtown should be prepared for the buildings to get taller over time, and to their credit- those who spoke from the Carr Street neighborhood at the meeting seemed to understand this.

Development at 203 S Greensboro Needs Less Parking, More Startup Space to Complement Library

Posted on September 19, 2017 by patrick

On September 19, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen will be discussing a proposal to redevelop 203 S. Greensboro St into the Southern Orange County library and several other public uses for Town of Carrboro departments.The current plan significantly over-provides parking and under-supplies useful commercial space in a downtown whose own recent parking study found that there are over 1,280 unused parking spaces in downtown Carrboro (click here, see page 9 of PDF) at virtually all times of day, 365 days a year.

Before moving forward with this plan, the Board of Aldermen should modify the project as follows:

Reduce the overall parking program to 150 spaces, using only the below ground and 1st levels for parking.
Add a minimum of 8,400 square feet to the project on the upper floors that would be leased to private, taxpaying uses
Explore if building more sq footage brings cost per square foot down, especially if building full, flat floors across floors three and four
Pursue a partnership with American Underground to fill some of the space with startups, and/or use a commercial broker to lease the space
Allocate the 150 parking spaces as follows:
1. 20 spaces for use by Town (all departments combined)
2. 130 public spaces (can be used by library patrons, artscenter, town workers, etc as long as they follow parking rules)
Price the parking in the deck to keep 15% of public spaces free at all times, adjusting the price by time of day according to demand. If the deck can have 15% of spaces free without charging at some time of day, parking should be free in that time period.

Why The Aldermen Should Take These Steps

Let’s unpack these moves one by one.

1. Reduce parking to 150 spaces. Here’s the ground floor of the proposed building. South Greensboro Street is to the left, Open Eye Cafe is be directly above the building. The ground floor of our new signature Town building would be a 14,000-odd square foot library and 19,000 or so square feet of parking. As you go up, the pattern remains this way- about 33,000 sq feet of development of which 58% is parking and 42% is everything else. The below ground floor is 80% parking. This is just too much. If you look at the total program proposed, it comes out to 5.4 spaces per 1000 gross square feet (GSF) of building. To put this in perspective, malls and big box stores generally provide 4 spaces per 1000 GSF. After the administration in Washington signaled its intent to pull out of the Paris Climate accords, Carrboro put green lights up on Town Hall to signal its commitment to climate action. If we are going to build more parking for our public buildings than Southpoint Mall builds for its shoppers, then I would suggest we take those green lights down and stop pretending we’re committed to fighting climate change. A lot of communities don’t even have parking requirements downtown anymore (i.e. Durham) because they are working to help people use more sustainable travel modes by not subsidizing auto usage.

14,390 square ft of Library, 19,000 square feet of parking!

2. If we took out two levels of the parking deck, according to the cost per square foot and cost per space of parking for the Town in the June 20th presentation, we could add 8,400 square feet of space and pay the same amount to build the building as if we built 55,000 square feet and two more levels of parking. However, we would have more space to lease that would hopefully bring a return on investment to the Town over the years.

3. The cost of this building is projected at $250 per square foot. I am not sure if this is high, but the irregular shape of each floor to wrap around the parking deck may be driving the cost up. The Board should seek advice from Jim Spencer, the architect, on whether having more conventional floor plates on the third and fourth floor in lieu of parking would bring the overall cost per square foot down. If so, then the Town could consider even more square footage that could be rented to the private sector.

4. Pursue a partnership with American Underground. For those who don’t know, American Underground is the wildly successful startup incubator in the basement of the American Tobacco Campus in Durham which has since expanded to two more buildings in Durham and one location in Raleigh. Now that Carrboro has direct bus connections to Durham with stop one block from 203 S Greensboro and one block from American Underground(AU), it’s a great time to leverage a lot of the common cultural affinity between Carrboro and Durham and see if AU is interested in establishing a “Western Outpost” for their ecosystem in Carrboro. We may be able to offer less costly expansion than the increasingly expensive office space market in Downtown Durham, while still offering many of the amenities that both downtowns share.

5. Allocate the 150 spaces as follows: 10 for town employees, 140 public spaces. The current proposal has 30 spaces for Parks and Rec. If the Town wants to get businesses in downtown Carrboro to get their employees to stop using up public parking that visitors and customers could use, they should lead by example. Last year, a delegation from Chapel Hill and Carrboro visited a very successful mixed use project in Boulder, Colorado that had multiple users using one parking garage called Boulder Junction.

Boulder Junction in Boulder, CO has its parking Shared, Managed, Unbundled and Paid

Boulder Junction’s parking operates on four principles: it is shared, managed, unbundled, and paid. “Shared” means that any person can use any space; there’s no “parking for XYZ business only” signage. “Managed” means that there is a strategy for how the parking is to be used, and an entity providing policy and enforcement to ensure the strategy is carried out. (in this case, the city of Boulder) “Unbundled” means that if you rent space in the building, you are not automatically allocated a parking space- you must also rent spaces individually as well, whether you rent by the hour, day, week, or month. Finally, “paid” is relatively obvious. While the Carrboro Parking Study’s chief failure is no mention of the word pricing, the Town actually went ahead and priced the Rosemary Street lot by Carrburritos and Bowbarr recently, so we’ve crossed the Rubicon and now charge for parking in Carrboro. So let’s do it right. Let’s start where we are as a Town, and implement a system that lets the first 2 hours (or 3! or 4! or whatever we decide!) be free, and only thereafter charges the user. This system is deployed in the North Deck at the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, and people can pay using the Parkmobile app. It’s convenient, promotes turnover, prevents park and ride in inappropriate places, and allows for parking to be free as long as it makes sense.

Taking these four principles, a purist approach would put all 150 spaces into this system. But the Town has storage for some departments in the basement, and there are probably some needs for moving equipment in and out of the building for key events that should have those spaces reserved for town staff. But ten spaces should be enough.

Beyond those ten spaces, the Town should be encouraging downtown employees to park on fringe lots and either walking, biking, or busing to the core sites downtown (203 S Greensboro and the Century Center).

On page 20 of the parking study, you can see that VHB documented 151 cars parking for over 7 hours in our “2-hour stay” public lots. VHB estimates that 50 to 60 of these are town employees, and another 90 to 95 belonged to other downtown employees or UNC students stealth park-and-riding to campus.

I’m sure town employees who currently enjoying parking downtown may be disappointed with this recommendation. But hopefully they recognize that if they can park a little further away, they can support vitality for downtown businesses, and get a few more steps in to finish their commutes, or snag a CHT bus from a lot a little further away.

6. Price the deck for 85% occupancy. This is considered a best practice in the parking industry. If you set the price so that 15% of spaces are empty, then you can pretty much guarantee that with people coming and going, you will ALWAYS find a space at your destination. No more circling and hunting for a space. If demand for spaces is such that 15% of spaces are empty even if the price is free, then that’s what you charge – $0. Based on the Carrboro Parking Survey, it appears weekday lunch hours represent the greatest crunch given our current conditions. In this case, the parking at 203 S Greensboro might have a charge at lunchtime, but not earlier or later in the day. We’d have to set up the system and see. That said, once the system is up and running, businesses could opt in, just as they did in Asheville.

If you take these steps together, and only add the 8,400 square feet while reducing to 150 spaces, you still get a parking ratio of 2.4 spaces per 1000 square feet, which is higher than many downtowns like Carrboro require today. That’s a reasonable outcome to transition downtown away from auto dependence and towards greater economic vitality, while also delivering needed Town office space and the library everyone wants to see happen.

It’s time to do parking pricing right, on the Town’s terms, in a strategic way that balances our goals and puts us on a path to unlock the 1,280 spaces that are tied up in 140+ individual lots, while raising money for alternative modes. This worthy project is the place to start that new effort.

If you agree, please let the board know by emailing boa@townofcarrboro.org.

Orange County Wants Your Ideas For The Southern Orange Library Branch

Posted on March 24, 2014 by patrick

I was thrilled a few days ago to get a message from Orange County Library Director Lucinda Munger, announcing two upcoming public input sessions for the Southern Orange County Library Branch, now planned to be built in downtown Carrboro.

It’s great to hear that this project is moving forward and that the staff is thinking about how to make it a public resource that reflects the community. I asked Lucinda if she could expand a bit more on what type of input they’re seeking, and here was her response:

This is really the community’s chance to tell us about what they want this to be like: – what it feels like when you first walk in, what should it look like and what types of activities does the community want to see at this library that will service the not just Carrboro, but the Southern portion of the County. Also, they will be asked what do they think about the proposed site – pros and cons. Plus, the library will be starting an continual online conversation thru the Friends of the Carrboro Library Facebook page, www.facebook.com/OCSouthernBranchLibrary, and an online survey – with the same questions as at the meeting – beginning March 25.

Here are the days and times for the meetings:

Tuesday, March 25: 6 to 8 p.m., Hickory Tavern, 370-110 E. Main Street, Carrboro
Saturday, April 12: 12 to 2 p.m., Town Hall, 301 W. Main Street, Carrboro

I’m definitely hoping to attend one of the meetings, and will be sure to post the link to the online survey when it is available. Come out and support your community library, and share your vision for the future!

Interim County Manager Recommends Downtown Carrboro Location for Southern Orange County Library Site to Move Forward

Posted on November 3, 2013 by patrick

Carrboro Cybrary (Photo by Carrboro.com)

For anyone who has been following the discussion of where the Southern Orange County Library will be located, the County Commissioners will pick up the discussion thread again on Tuesday evening, November 5th. The library discussion is Item 7 in the 468-page PDF (55 MB!) agenda, and begins on page 369. The meeting will be held at 7:00 p.m. at the Central Orange Senior Center, located at 103 Meadowland Drive in Hillsborough.

At this point in the process, there are three sites under discussion, all located in Carrboro:

1128 Hillsborough Rd
401 Fidelity St
120 Brewer Ln

A quick perusal of the item shows that Carrboro Town Manager David Andrews sent a letter to Interim County Manager Michael Talbert on October 23 that states:

In response to your letter from October 1, 2013, and in particular in response to the inquiry on the Town of Carrboro’s interest in ‘swapping’ property located at 1128 Hillsborough Rd (Shetley Property) for the site of MLK, Jr. Park, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen have not taken an official position as to whether they will or will not support such an arrangement. However, initial conversations with members of the Board indicate that there is not currently support for such an action.”

Elsewhere in the document the County report indicates that the County staff believes that some type of a land swap is needed to make the 1128 Hillsborough Rd site feasible for a library location. On page 370, County staff also expresses the following concerns regarding the 401 Fidelity St site:

There is significant exposed weathered rock crowning in the center of the most logical building site for a potential library structure and associated parking, indicating sizable potential subterranean rock formations. County staff requested a legal opinion from Carrboro with regard to associated liabilities involving development adjacent to a cemetery-specifically related to the County’s interest in rock blasting that is probable should this property be chosen for library development. The Town Attorney provided an opinion. (See Attachment E within Attachment 1 -10/23/13 David Andrews letter) There are strong concerns from Orange County staff that probable blasting adjacent to a cemetery exposes the County to significant liabilities that will not only drive up the cost of the project, but may cause concerns with residents and stakeholders in Orange County. County staffs’ experience is that rock blasting and removal adds significant cost to a project ranging from a 5-15% increase of a project’s overall cost. Potential liability costs associated with disturbing existing cemetery burial plots adjacent to the building site through a probable rock blasting process are incalculable.

Given these circumstances, but also undoubtedly influenced by the Twitter-reported enthusiasm among County Commissioners and complete unanimity among the Carrboro Aldermen that the Brewer Lane site is the best, Interim County Manager is recommending:

1) Receive and discuss the letters from the Town of Carrboro;
2) Eliminate 1128 Hillsborough Road and 401 Fidelity Street from further consideration for a Southern Branch Library; and
3) Direct staff to conduct further Phase 1 Site Criteria Analysis for 120 Brewer Lane and provide follow-up information to the Board.

For many of the reasons enunciated in my March 2013 post on this issue, this is absolutely terrific news. It is also exciting to see from the October 21 Chapel Hill News article that Library Director Lucinda Munger is already considering how to tailor potential programming for a library at 120 Brewer Ln to serve nearby children and families, as well as close-by community resources such as the Skills Development Center and The ArtsCenter. This is inspired thinking and I look forward to hearing where her efforts lead.

I hope the County Commissioners will take Interim Manager Talbert’s recommendation, and follow a path that a lot of citizens want to take, not to mention saving the county $20,000 to $30,000 in the process by not studying two sites with clear shortcomings.

The Distribution of Population in Orange County and the Site of the Southern Orange County Library

Posted on September 16, 2013 by patrick

Back in the spring, at an Orange Board of County Commissioners meeting where I and other citizens spoke in favor of building an urban library in Southern Orange County, one of the most common themes from county staff in the discussion was that a significant number of rural residents would be served by this library, and that they would come to the library by car and need a place to park, implying that this criterion should play a primary, and perhaps even decisive role in the siting decision of the library.

For the remainder of this post, let’s put aside the question of whether or not parking is easier for rural residents in an urban or suburban location, and just look at where the population of Southern Orange County is located.

Orange County 2010 Census Population Data

Orange County, in addition to containing all or part of four municipalities (Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, and Mebane) is split into seven townships. These townships are more or less remnants of a briefly operating system of local governance in the post-civil war period that lasted less than 15 years. Nevertheless, the county still gathers data based on these geographical boundaries which can help us examine the present-day distribution of population. In the 2010 Census, the total population of Orange County was estimated to be 133,801. Below is a map of Orange County townships and their 2010 Census population:

Orange County Population by Township, 2010

As you can see, over 75% of county residents live either in the Chapel Hill or Hillsborough townships, with almost 68% of the county population in Chapel Hill township alone. The Chapel Hill township contains both the town of Chapel Hill and the town of Carrboro, as well as just under 14,000 residents living slightly outside the Chapel Hill / Carrboro town limits.

Implications for Library Siting

One of the criteria that County staff discussed in their prepared memo on March 19, 2013 was:

“Able to provide comprehensive library services to all the residents of southern Orange County.”

Given this criteria, I believe it is reasonable to say that “Southern Orange County” could be reasonably defined as the two southernmost townships, Bingham and Chapel Hill. These two townships had a combined population of 94,498 in the 2010 Census. Of those 94,498 people, 93% of them lived in Chapel Hill township, and 7% of them lived in Bingham township. This means that if you’re trying to maximize your ability to serve “all the residents of Southern Orange County,” you should probably focus heavily on how you’re going to serve the people in Chapel Hill township most effectively.

In the past few months, a new visualization tool has appeared that gives us an even closer look at population distributions, the Census Dotmap website, which maps every single person in the USA using one dot per person in their Census Block, the smallest level we can look at the data without actually placing people in their homes, which the Census will not do for privacy reasons. Here’s a look at the entire county using that tool:

Census 2010 Dotmap with Orange County Township Boundaries

The simple take-away is that the darker the section of the map, the more people live there. I drew in the county boundary using a graphics tool so if you go to the Census Dotmap website, don’t expect to see the townships there. Still, even without the townships drawn in, you’ll find that you can pick out the county border pretty well along the Alamance and Durham county lines. It’s harder with the Chatham and Person/Caswell borders, but the effects of the Orange County Joint Planning Agreement and rural buffer are still evident.

You’ll see that Southern Orange County’s population core is in the sections of Chapel Hill and Carrboro roughly bounded by Estes Drive on the north, MLK/Hillsborough/Country Club on the east, Fordham Blvd/Clubreth/Smith Level Rd (including Southern Village) on the south, and Old Fayetteville Rd on the west. Scroll down for a closer look at that population core, traced in dark red. For orientation, the primary commercial section of Franklin Street is highlighted in Carolina Blue. The sunburst graphics are as close an approximation as I can make at this scale of the following locations that have been mentioned as potential Southern Orange County library sites:

1128 Hillsborough Rd (Orange)
401 Fidelity St (Blue)
301 W Main St – Town Hall (Purple)
201 S Greensboro St – Roberson St Lot (Red)
300 E Main St (Green)

Southern Orange County Population and Various Potential Library Sites

The county staff’s preferred site, 1128 Hillsborough Rd (shown in Orange) from March 2013 is outside the “core of the core” section of Chapel Hill Township, while the other four sites are within that critical center of population.

Recap: Southern Orange County Population

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be discussing more benefits of building the library in the population heart of Southern Orange County. But for now, I’ll close by reviewing the following facts about Orange County population.

Unless there is a sudden, drastic change of plans to put the Southern Orange County library somewhere north of Eubanks Rd, the existing Orange County library on West Margaret Ln in Hillsborough will be the closest library to pretty much everyone in the five northernmost townships: Cheeks, Hillsborough, Eno, Little River, and Caldwell.
Of the combined population of the two southern townships, the population split is 93% Chapel Hill township, 7% Bingham township.
Of the combined population of the two southern townships, 78%, or almost 4 out of every 5 residents, live in the Chapel Hill or Carrboro town limits.
If the county staff’s linear projections are correct, Bingham Township will add 2,686 residents by the year 2050; while Chapel Hill township will add 51,996 residents by 2050.
If the county staff’s exponential projections are correct, Bingham Township will add 3,854 residents by the year 2050; while Chapel Hill township will add 90,825 residents by 2050.

With the exception of the graphics, I got all of this population and projection information from the County website’s demographics page. This data acknowledges that nearly 80% of the people most likely to use the library are in-town residents of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and the county’s own projections looking forward indicate significantly higher projected growth in Chapel Hill and Carrboro town limits than in unincorporated Chapel Hill Township or Bingham Township.

Future analysis of any potential library sites should acknowledge this baseline data about where population is located.

Town of Cary Pursues New Downtown Library with Wake County’s Help

Posted on June 19, 2013 by patrick

Downtown Cary by Flickr User Paul J Buda

While this blog’s primary focus is Carrboro, I think it is important to stand up and clap for what looks like a good decision in the making a few miles to our east in Cary. Specifically, the town is working cooperatively with Wake County to put the next iteration of their library in their downtown, and multiple town council members seem to understand the benefits of integrating the library with a broader set of community activities.

Councilman Don Frantz suggested that commercial development wrapped around the parking deck could defray the cost of the public facility.

Bingo! This is one of the most important points that downtown library supporters in Carrboro have been trying to make: a standalone library on county-owned land is a public facility that is only operated using public revenues. A library occupying the floor of a mixed-use building with public and private uses will have some private investment to help with its construction and ongoing operations costs and may even help catalyze further development of a downtown project that is close to “ready to go,” but not quite there yet.

One of the refrains that was repeated earlier this spring in the county staff’s deeply flawed arguments for 1128 Hillsborough Rd as a library site was that there would be opportunities to co-locate the library with a park so that children could play there, and lest anyone believe Cary’s inclinations should validate that idea, they describe the park as follows: “Cary leaders are thinking less of a recreational park than a carefully designed common ground filled with ‘hidden treasures’ and framed by what would be the largest buildings in downtown.” I think it’s hard to overstate the differences between the type of park Cary is planning downtown and what MLK park on Hillsborough Rd is intended to be.

The article goes on to note that the library would be located adjacent to a hotel. It’s hard not to notice that the library siting decision is clearly linked to economic development in the minds of the town staff and elected officials, and they see opportunity in placing the library downtown.

Cary gets it. Carrboro gets it. Wake County gets it. Orange County? Stay tuned…

Measuring Transit Access to Potential Southern Orange County Library Sites

Posted on April 8, 2013 by patrick

When considering where to site a public library in Southern Orange County, one of the criteria studied by both town and county staff has been the presence of public transportation, in this case, Chapel Hill Transit bus service. Evaluating this criteria has been conducted by noting the distance to the nearest bus stop in materials we have seen thus far. However, transit service is not evenly distributed at every stop and different bus stops provide different levels of access to the rest of the transit network at large.

Fortunately, there is a great tool called Mapnificent that allows you to calculate how far you can travel from a specific point on transit at a certain time of day. This calculation is completed using the Google Transit data for a community that is publicly available.

Using Mapnificent, I created the following maps for the three county sites that the Carrboro Board of Aldermen sent to the Orange County Board of Commissioners, as well as two other sites that were previously mentioned by Carrboro elected officials: 201 S Greensboro St and 300 E Main St. Here are the results. The tool was set to see how many places could reach the library sites within a 15-minute bus ride at 9 am on a weekday.

The light-colored areas can reach the library site within 15 minutes by bus and walking. The remainder of each map cannot.

1128 Hillsborough Rd – County’s Preferred Site as of March 2013

1128 Hillsborough Rd: 15-Minute Transit Shed

As you can see, the site has limited access to most Chapel Hill residents and the most heavily populated parts of Carrboro along Jones Ferry Rd and NC 54 are generally not included in the 15-minute travel zone to this library site.

401 Fidelity St

401 Fidelity St: 15-Minute Transit Shed

401 Fidelity St fares better, covering the major North-South and East-West roads in Chapel Hll, and getting down to part but not all of Southern Village. Coverage is barely reaching Carrboro High School.

301 W Main St (Town Hall Site)

301 West Main St: 15-Minute Transit Shed

The Carrboro Town Hall site shows expanding coverage through more of Carrboro, as well as improved access to Glen Lennox and other neighborhoods near Eastwood Lake.

201 S Greensboro St (Roberson St Parking Lot Site)

201 South Greensboro St: 15-Minute Transit Shed

Everywhere in Carrboro that has bus service can reach this site in less than 15 minutes by bus. In Chapel Hill, residents along Eubanks Rd and Ephesus Church Rd can reach the library in 15 minutes by bus.

300 E Main St

300 East Main St: 15-Minute Transit Shed

With 300 East Main’s super-central location, now even residents in Durham County have 15-minute or less access by bus to the library. Luckily for us, if we put the library there, those Durham residents might spend some money with our merchants while they visit.

Obviously, there’s more that goes into library site selection than how easy it is to take the bus there. But conversations I’ve had in Carrboro suggest that this is an important criteria for many people, not only for environmental and local economy reasons, but also for social justice ones- like making the library as easy to access as possible for households that may not own a car.

The level of transit service to the library cannot be judged simply by “is there or isn’t there a bus stop nearby?” We also need to look at the amount of network you can reach from that stop, and (perhaps a topic for another post) the level of frequency and hours of service available throughout the day, evening, and weekends.

A Little More Time and A Little More Communication Could Get Us an Awesome Urban Library that Works for Everyone in Southern Orange County

Posted on March 19, 2013 by patrick

Hollywood Library and Bookmark Apartments, Portland

A Library Project to Emulate:
Hollywood Library, Rain City Cafe and 47-unit Bookmark Apartments, Portland (photo courtesy Wikipedia)

This is going to be a long post, so to make it easier to use, you can either read it all the way through, or use this bullet-point summary with hyperlinks to each portion:

Orange County is leading a process to site a library in Southern Orange County within the Town of Carrboro. The Carrboro Board of Aldermen sent three sites for review to the county staff in November 2012, and indicated their interest in a few others as well. (Jump to Background)
The Orange County staff has a clear preference for one of the sites named by the Aldermen, but supports that preference with several unsubstantiated claims or in at least one case, information that is directly contradicted by publicly available data. (Jump to County Staff Response)
The County staff’s preferred site represents a location choice in conflict with values that Carrboro has repeatedly said are high priorities for the town. (Jump to Values)
The County selection criteria themselves are biased towards choosing a suburban location for the library over a more urban location. (Jump to Criteria)
Pursuing the development of an urban library in Carrboro provides an opportunity to address several community priorities at once, including local economic development, education, workforce housing, sustainable mobility, and social justice goals. (Jump to Opportunity)
The County Commissioners should reject the staff recommendation to proceed with these two sites, direct the County staff to explain fully what their values and perceived constraints are for a library, including the reasons WHY the staff believes anything is infeasible, too expensive, or undesirable, and engage further with the town of Carrboro on a mixed-use library/economic development combined initiative. (Jump to BOCC Actions)
The Carrboro Board of Aldermen should clearly state to the Orange County Board of Commissioners that any site forwarded by the Town for study by the County, should in fact, be studied, AND that mixed-use, multi-purpose, multi-story buildings and developments should be on the table as PRIMARY options for the library, with single-use library-only sites as fallback choices. The Town should help address County concerns about a lengthy review process by studying successful mixed-use libraries in other cities. (Jump to BOA Actions)

Background

Orange County and the Town of Carrboro are working on a process to locate a southern branch of the county library system in the Carrboro area. On November 20, 2012, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen reviewed and discussed (link goes to Agenda, see item D4) several potential sites and forwarded them all on for consideration to the county staff.

As WCHL reported, the Aldermen expressed additional interest in potentially siting the library even closer to the core of downtown than the three primary sites proposed, with Mayor Mark Chilton suggesting that Town Manager David Andrews look into creating a RFP for proposals on how to incorporate the library into a mixed-use development downtown, and specifically mentioned the 300 East Main St development.

While not reported in the WCHL story, Alderman Jacquie Gist also made the thoughtful suggestion of a multi-story building incorporating a library at 201 S Greensboro St (the previously proposed and now stalled Roberson Square project).

The evaluation document from the November board meeting was to a certain degree, incomplete- with several items were left unaddressed and labeled “THIS CRITERIA WILL BE EVALUATED BY ORANGE COUNTY STAFF.”

This was surprising to me as some of the items left to County staff include criteria such as “Visual appeal,” when Carrboro has an Appearance Commission, and “Alignment with planning tools” when Carrboro has its own Planning department.

County Staff Response

Friday, March 15th, at about 8:00 am, the County Deputy Clerk posted the agenda for the Tuesday March 19^th Board of Commissioners Meeting, which surprisingly contained the county staff evaluation of only two of the three sites forwarded by the Aldermen to the county.

View the staff item on the library by clicking this link, downloading the March 19, 2013 Agenda, and viewing item 7-B.

The county staff dismissed the 301 W Main St site (Carrboro Town Hall) out of hand with the commentary below:

“Staff recommends the elimination 301 West Main Street site (i.e. the Town Hall) from consideration due to significant constraints, most notably the condition of the building, limitation on usable space for the library, limitations on future expansion, and potential parking conflicts.”

No further information was included about what types of parking conflicts the county staff foresees, which types of expansion would be constrained by the site, or what the specific space limits on the property were. The county staff analysis did not acknowledge or assess 300 East Main St, 201 S. Greensboro St, nor mention the RFP proposal discussed by Mayor Chilton.

Here are a few more items from the county staff evaluation:
It’s still a mystery to me why Orange County Staff is responsible for assessing what is visually appealing in Carrboro when Carrboro has an Appearance Commission, but as you can see, the county staff seems to consider single-family housing more appealing than multi-family and businesses. Also, county staff believes that this portion of our neighborhood has a “cluttered look and feel.” I’m not sure what that means, but putting aside that confusion for a moment, if we always invested in the “better-looking” neighborhoods in the community, wouldn’t we eventually wind up with serious disparities in public investment and facilities between the richer and poorer parts of our communities?

Here’s the staff analysis for “Able to provide comprehensive library services to all county residents:”

No reasons for explaining why there is a differentiation between these two sites. Just one word for each site.

County staff did not address either accessibility for pedestrians or accessibility for public transportation, but they did chime in on “Accessibility for Vehicles:”

This is ironic given that one of the reasons the 401 Fidelity site was contemplated was that it could take advantage of the foot, bicycle, and vehicle traffic from the Farmers’ Market on Saturday mornings. Here that context and synergy is listed as a detriment rather than an advantage to the site. Of course, the current main County library building, in which many county employees work, is one block away from Churton Street, a road with much more significant volume-to-capacity ratio problems (PDF), so that has not deterred the county from siting libraries in the recent past.

Perhaps the most puzzling piece of the staff response in the document, however, is the assessment of Centrality of either site to Southern Orange County, in which the staff asserts that the 1128 Hillsborough Rd site is more easily accessible to more people of southern Orange County than the 401 Fidelity St site.

Southern Orange County

A quick series of tests using Google Maps’ Driving Directions shows this makes no sense. First, let’s review the 2010 Census Population for the two Southern Orange County Townships, Bingham and Chapel Hill. See the map to the right for orientation:

Bingham Township: 6,527 (7%)
Chapel Hill Township: 87,971 (93%)
Chapel Hill / Carrboro City Town Limits: 73,979 (78%) – (within Chapel Hill Township)

It’s safe to say that if you’re trying to assess whether a site is more centrally located for residents in Southern Orange County, you should mostly be checking access to a site from places throughout Chapel Hill and Carrboro. For the following places, it’s a shorter drive to 401 Fidelity St:

Southern Village Town Green (100 Market St, Chapel Hill)
Downtown Chapel Hill (Franklin @ Columbia Streets)
Downtown Carrboro (300 e main st)
East Franklin at Estes Drive
100 Meadowmont Ln
Fiesta Grill, NC 54 West of Carrboro

It is the same distance in miles but a minute or two longer timewise to 401 Fidelity from north of Estes Drive, but at the level of all of Southern Orange County, these sites either have the same level of drive access or there’s a slight edge to the 401 Fidelity site, probably mostly due to its proximity to denser neighborhoods and NC 54. Transit and pedestrian access is a different story, but I’ll talk about that later.

In summary, the staff clearly prefers the 1128 Hillsborough Road site, even though several of the staff’s alleged advantages for that location are confusing, counter-intuitive based on the site’s context, or not supported by data. I’m not terribly excited by either of these sites, and the 1128 Hillsborough Rd is a bad choice. The key point is that much better analysis can and should be done to inform this decision.

Conflicts with Carrboro Values

Carrboro is a community with a strong commitment to building walkable neighborhoods, and has invested its own money to accelerate sidewalk construction in town. The town is also working with NCDOT to REDUCE the number of lanes on Main Street to make it more friendly to cyclists and pedestrians, and easier to cross on foot. However, when considering the sites forwarded by the Aldermen to the County and those alternative sites mentioned at the November 20th meeting, the County prefers the least walkable site according to Walkscore.com. Here are the walkscores for the five sites mentioned in the Background section of this post.

300 E. Main St: 92/100 – Walker’s Paradise: Daily Errands Do Not Require a Car

201 S. Greensboro St: 92/100 – Walker’s Paradise: Daily Errands Do Not Require a Car
301 W Main St: 82/100 – Very Walkable: Most Errands Can Be Accomplished on Foot
401 Fidelity St: 63/100 – Somewhat Walkable: Some Amenities Are Within Walking Distance
1128 Hillsborough Rd: 31/100 – Car-Dependent: Few Amenities Are Within Walking Distance

Carrboro is also a community with a history of commitment to social justice, and seeking to advance equality within the community. The median household income of the Census Tract that the County staff prefers is almost $136,000/year! The median household income of the Census Tract holding 401 Fidelity St is just over $34,000/year. The median household income of the Census Tract holding the two sites above with 92 walkscores is around $43,000/year.

Bias Against Urban Outcomes

Several of the criteria used by the County are fundamentally biased towards sites in suburban or rural locations, and against urban ones. It is possible to create criteria that answer similar questions about how effective library services could be provided without being biased against one development pattern or another, but that has not been done here.

Criteria 4 – “Meets minimum acreage.” This requirement is pointless and should be thrown out. You don’t need minimum acres to fulfill a library’s mission. You need minimum amounts of Gross Square Footage (GSF) for the library facility itself. You may or may not need additional new parking, but the criteria should not assume it. There was a terrific report in 2003 titled “GOOD SCHOOLS,GOOD NEIGHBORHOODS: The Impacts of State and Local School Board Policies on the Design and Location of Schools in North Carolina” (PDF) that lays out the case for why less expansive schools are a critical piece of getting more children to walk to school. The same principles hold true for libraries. Turn to page 6 for the executive summary and their key recommendations, which include:

Build smaller schools on smaller sites
Select school sites that maximize bicycle and pedestrian access
Collaborate with local planners and municipal elected officials in selecting the location for new schools
Promote the renovation of old schools that serve as anchors to their community.

It is interesting to note that in regards to the last bullet that the site that the County Staff dismissed out of hand, Carrboro Town Hall- is an old school.

Criteria 5 – Space for building and on-site parking. The Hillsborough branch of the Orange County library has shared parking; there is no need to assume that parking should be provided onsite specifically for library use.

Criteria 7- Space for expansion. This criteria is not well explained, but the answers seem to predicated all outcomes on assumed horizontal expansion, not vertical, and expanded access via extra car trips, not any other modes

Criteria 8 – Setbacks and road widening are fundamentally criteria based around speeding up cars to the detriment of everything else. This criteria should also be thrown out. I haven’t spoken to anybody in Carrboro in years who wants a road widening anywhere in town.

While road widenings are common anywhere that a significant number of left turns may occur along a rural road with few intersections, this is much less common for in-town settings where larger street grids are present, and given that Carrboro is working with NCDOT to complete a road diet to reduce the number of car lanes on West Main St, I’m sure that most Carrboro residents do NOT consider road expansion/widening for car traffic to be an “amenity.”

Criteria 11 – Access for transit. The County staff did not provide any comments on transit service. The town comments report the locations of bus stops but do not identify significantly varying levels of transit service. The CW bus which serves the stop nearest to the 401 Fidelity St location only has outbound service towards Jones Ferry Rd after 12:15 pm on weekdays. The J route, several blocks away at the corner of Davie and Jones Ferry, offers service every 15 minutes for most of the day, but access is along a road with poor pedestrian facilities, though improvements are planned. If the 301 W Main (Town Hall) site had been studied, it would have had the best transit service access of any site with nearby service from both the J and CW routes. The F bus service, serving the Hillsborough site, is decent but the stop closest to 1128 Hillsborough makes it a longer bus ride from much more of the Chapel Hill Transit network than 401 Fidelity or any downtown Carrboro site would be.

Not capturing the frequency of transit service and its level of network access, as opposed to merely its presence, allows sites with lower levels of attractiveness for transit users to rate just as well as the highest-traffic stops in any system, which again, makes this metric as currently deployed biased against urban locations.

Opportunity Presented By An Urban Library

1. There are several great benefits to building an urban library in Carrboro, but let’s start with perhaps the least obvious benefit- building an urban library in Carrboro will make it EASIER FOR RURAL RESIDENTS TO PARK at or near the new library.

Prior to the rebuild of the Chapel Hill library, finding a space there in the afternoons was often next to impossible and required circling the lot and waiting for other patrons to leave. That site has poor access for transit, cyclists, and pedestrians and because that access is poor, people who live nearby who might otherwise walk- DRIVE to the library instead.

If we put a library in downtown Carrboro, a whole slew of potential users who are already biking, walking, and busing to downtown for other purposes will add the library to their trips that they complete by non-auto modes. This means that parking spaces that are reserved for library patrons either in a surface lot or parking deck are more likely to be used by people living far away from the library, and not people close by who have additional mobility choices. If we build a library in a location that has poor access and encourages more people to drive, now rural residents and people from further away driving to the library will be competing for parking with everybody they were competing with downtown, plus Carrboro residents who chose to drive because the location is hard to walk, bike, or take transit to.

A downtown library also builds resiliency into the parking system- if the library spaces for some reason fill up, there are several public downtown parking lots that may offer additional capacity.

2. The next reason that an urban library is a great opportunity is that it provides a chance to leverage public investment to incentivize private development. There are a few projects in downtown Carrboro that would expand the commercial tax base and add jobs in service, entertainment, or office categories- if they could get enough of their space pre-leased to proceed. Having the library at University Mall clearly created beneficial spillover effects for businesses such as the Red Hen, Chick-Fil-A, Southern Season, and the U-Mall Farmers’ market. Putting a library at 300 East Main might accelerate one of their next phases of development, or help put the Roberson Square property back in play, as Jacquie Gist suggested on November 20th.

The County recently raised a 1/4-cent sales tax for economic development, and while there may be more highway-oriented development goals for county areas near Mebane, for example, in Carrboro the economic development opportunities are likely to reinforce the walkable, urban characteristics that Carrboro has that many other towns lack. The County Commissioners should look at an urban library site in Carrboro as an opportunity to fulfill an expansion of tax base goal while also delivering on providing library services.

3. An urban library in Carrboro will have positive social justice and environmental effects. If you have not seen the Rich Blocks Poor Blocks website, you should go check it out now. Enter Carrboro, and set it to show Incomes. Putting the library in an urban location will provide better access, on foot, the most equitable transportation mode- to some of the lowest-income Census Tracts in Orange County. The fact that an urban location will be more walkable, bike-accessible, and transit-accessible will also reduce the carbon footprint and emissions of people of all incomes traveling to the library compared to a suburban location.

What the Orange County Commissioners Should Do

Given the state of the analysis provided for these sites, the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) should reject the staff recommendation to spend $10,000 to $15,000 studying these two sites to hasten a final decision. Instead, the BOCC should add the Town Hall site back onto the list of potential sites along with 401 Fidelity St and 1128 Hillsborough Rd, and add 300 East Main and 201 S Greensboro St to be screened as well. The BOCC should then engage the Town of Carrboro about how to develop criteria that do not automatically exclude urban outcomes, and consider if the RFP approach mentioned by Mayor Chilton regarding a joint library/economic development venture might generate any interest with developers that are likely to work in Carrboro.

Finally, the BOCC should ask the staff to clarify why their analysis came out like this. Does the current library staff think working next to a cemetery is undesirable? If that’s an issue, they should state that. It would be good to know if the staff really likes 1128 Hillsborough as a site or simply really dislikes the other sites. If County staff think any site is too expensive, too complicated to develop, or to constrained, they should explain why in clear language, i.e.: “the parking for the library and two other uses would conflict at peak times for evening book checkout based on our current patronage at the Hillsborough branch.”

What the Carrboro Board of Aldermen Should Do

Lest the County miss the message, the Aldermen should communicate clearly to the BOCC the importance of a library in Carrboro being an urban rather than a suburban project. Carrboro Town Staff could move the ball forward by helping to proactively address county concerns about a complicated review process. The best way to get started might be to research mixed-use libraries in other cities, and see what zoning designations in Carrboro could accommodate a facility like the Hollywood Library in Portland, OR; Villard Avenue Library in Milwaukee, WI; or the Montgomery County flagship library in Rockville, MD.

What Concerned Citizens Should Do

If the picture at the top of this post looks interesting to you, or if you think that downtown Carrboro is much better place for a library than somewhere north of Estes Drive, please email the Orange County Board of Commissioners and email the Carrboro Board of Aldermen and tell them as much. If possible, come to the BOCC meeting tonight, March 19th at 7:00 PM at 2501 Homestead Rd, and share your ideas in person. I intend to be there to share mine.

This library is not planned to open until 2016-2017. While we should not delay in moving the library project forward, there is certainly time to be more thoughtful about an outcome that succeeds on multiple objectives above and beyond checking the box of “there’s a library in Carrboro.” Hopefully the Town and County can collaborate to figure out how create an outstanding project for Southern Orange County and Carrboro.

CityBeautiful21

Urban Planning for the 21st Century

Category Archives: Libraries