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.

http://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.

Carrboro Parking Study Gathers Good Data, But We Need to Start Charging for Parking at ONE Lot

Posted on April 24, 2017 by patrick

On Tuesday night, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen will take up a resolution to turn the recently completed Carrboro Parking Study into a plan for downtown parking. When they do, they should recommend some additional actions to town staff beyond those in the study.

Those additional actions are:

To initiate steps to begin charging for parking at the Rosemary Street lot (on the corner of Rosemary Street and Sunset Drive) as soon as possible, using new parking technology like Asheville already has, with prices that vary according to demand, including the price dropping to FREE when demand will not keep the lot 85% full. A Request for Proposals from parking app/technology vendors may be appropriate.
To invite downtown businesses with significant parking capacity and light usage to put some of their private spaces “in play” as part of the public pool of priced spaces. This is also a feature of the Asheville system, which allows businesses to make their spaces public when they are not using them.

Why are these actions needed?

There are several good recommendations in the Carrboro parking study conducted by VHB. Those recommendations include making parking signage consistent, and installing Walk Carrboro wayfinding signs to let people know it is a short walk to downtown destinations from less centrally located lots like the Town Hall lot.

The study also clearly states that no new parking needs to be constructed in the next five years because of how underutilized the existing supply is due to so much of it being limited to single use parking within private lots. It’s great that the study made this clear, as it is the most important finding.

However, the primary recommendation, which the VHB staff called out in bold, saying “The significance of this initiative cannot be understated,” – is encouraging shared parking arrangements among downtown businesses. There’s only one problem with this key strategy- it’s been available to us for decades, and basically nothing has happened. There’s nothing about this study that makes it more likely to happen. Will the town Economic Development director spend more of their time trying to establish these agreements? Will the town transportation planner, a position that has just been vacated? Unlikely. Both of those positions have a big purview already.

The town of Carrboro should not waste time trying to play matchmaker between business A and B, or businesses C, D and H. Instead, it should establish a paid parking system that works for public lots that allows individual businesses to add some number of their private spaces to the public system. This expands the number of spaces available to the public without needing to build new public spaces.

But Carrboro Just Isn’t Ready to Charge for Parking!!

I’ve heard this, over and over again, for the 16 years I’ve lived here. But then DC, DW and I went to eat at Al’s Burger Shack last week and saw this:

Yes, Chapel Hill has put in a new parking lot, right next to the Rosemary Street Lot owned by Carrboro.And here’s the kicker:

Yup, Chapel Hill is charging hourly. 3 feet from the free Carrboro lot. Guess how full the Rosemary Carrboro lot is going to be if we don’t put a price on it? Spoiler: VERY. This lot was among the fullest in the data from VHB, but with a new paid lot from Chapel Hill immediately adjacent, everyone who wants to park in that lot will try the Carrboro one first unless we equalize the pricing. This is why moving to a parking pricing program for Carrboro that allows businesses to put spaces into a public pool makes more sense than ever.

It’s time to charge for some of our parking, and provide a system that businesses can join. This is evidence that our downtown is a valuable and cherished place where people enjoy spending time.

At Busiest Time of Day, Downtown Carrboro Has Over 2,000 EMPTY Parking Spaces

Posted on June 14, 2016 by patrick

Yes, you read that right. There are usually 2,000 (or more!) parking spaces empty at all times in downtown Carrboro. But we don’t have a way to allow private businesses to partner seamlessly with each other and the town to make these spaces available to the public in a way that balances individual lot owner goals and overall access goals for the downtown, so these spaces go unused when they could be more full.

Until we figure out how to address this untapped parking capacity for the benefit of business owners, the Town, and residents, there is absolutely no reason to build another parking space with public money in downtown Carrboro. It represents a massive opportunity “hiding” in plain sight.

In February, the consulting firm hired by the town to conduct the parking study, VHB, reported the following:

The Town of Carrboro owns 359 public parking spaces in 3 lots
The Town of Carrboro leases 356 public parking spaces in 5 lots
Private Property owners control 3,333 private parking spaces in 145 lots
Total Downtown Parking = 4,048 parking spaces
Carrboro’s parking supply is 82% private spaces and 18% public spaces

Lunch Time is Crunch Time

VHB conducted parking counts and determined that peak usage for parking lots overall occurred between 11 am and 1 pm.

Parking Occupancy In Downtown Carrboro By Time of Day

As you can see, the public parking spaces (the combined blue and red area) are more uniformly full, while the private spaces vary greatly. It’s also worth noting that the town leases or owns 715 parking spaces in total, and these counts never get above 500. So our public parking system still has capacity at all times of day.

This second chart by VHB shows how much capacity is available in terms of public, leased, and private spaces.

Parking Utilization By Type

Parking Availability Varies by Block and By Lot

VHB put together two helpful maps showing parking occupancy by block and by lot. Here it is by block, with publicly owner or leased facilities emphasized. For example, the dark green rectangle to the right of the letters 300 E Main is the parking deck by Hickory Tavern/Hampton Inn. It’s clear that parking, while still having capacity, is most scarce (up to 85% full) in the Carr Mill Mall section in the middle.

Downtown Carrboro Parking Utilization by Block

When you break parking availability down by lot, you see much wider variation in how full the lots are.

Downtown Carrboro Parking Supply By Lot- 11 am to 1 pm

Still, three of the public lots, including those on Laurel and West Weaver St near PNC Bank, are close to half empty or have greater than 50% of their spaces available. Even the large lot just south of Open Eye Cafe shows at least 30% vacancy at lunch time. The small lots by Friendly Barber are tapped out, as is the lot by Carrburritos and Bowbarr on Rosemary. The parking deck also shows at least 30% vacancy.

What The Green Means – Opportunity

But look closely at the green lot in the middle towards the bottom, just a little bit below the “W” in the “E Weaver St” text. I’ve circled that lot in PURPLE. (click the image to make it bigger)

This is the Bank of America Lot. It has 25 regular spaces plus some for people with disabilities. What the parking study is telling us is that at the biggest crunch time for parking, a lunchtime rush hour, when a lot of people come to downtown Carrboro to eat at restaurants, with Tyler’s to the left of it, Acme to the right, there it is – stuck in the middle with at least 15 parking spaces free, ALL the time. The lot surely has signs saying “Parking for Customers only” so nobody parks there unless they’re going to the bank. But the bank clearly has far fewer customers coming by car than their lot can accommodate. In fact, VHB’s analysis tells us that Bank of America could keep the ten parking spaces closest to their door for themselves, and rent out the other 15 for public use- and not ever have a customer come to the bank and not be able to park for free in one of those ten spaces.

So why doesn’t this happen? Simply put, there’s not a system to buy into. This problem is too big for any one business in town to tackle on its own, but if the town set up the infrastructure and technology to make it EASY for Bank of America to release its parking spaces, the barrier for the bank to become a partner would be greatly reduced. What would such a system look like? It would look something like the system Asheville already has for its public spaces, but would allow businesses to opt in for some portions of their parking lots. I’d call it “CarrPark.” If the town set up a system like the one in the link for its public and leased lots, then opened up invites to businesses, then lots like the Bank of America who clearly have capacity could be invited to join, and even get some revenue for renting their spaces. If Bank of America wanted to be cautious, they could only decide to lease ten spaces to the CarrPark pool at first. That means the public supply would go from 715 to 725. If it worked well, and Bank of America customers were still happy, the bank could consider moving to 15 spaces, and the public supply would go from 725 to 730. See how this works? Incrementally, without having to worry about giving up ALL their parking, business owners could expand the general parking pool, making everyone feel LESS of a parking crunch.

How to Price a “CarrPark” System

Best practices suggest that if you set the price of parking lots to to the lowest price possible that keeps them 85% full, but no more- then people find parking to be easy and convenient. If a parking lot in the CarrPark system is less than 85% full at any time, it’s free! When demand goes up, though- the price rises to help keep the lot convenient. Revenue from the system would cover the cost of operations and provide some revenue to business owners for each space they share as an incentive to participate. Revenue beyond the incentive would be used to fund other access improvements to downtown such as better evening transit service and bike/ped access projects.

Carrboro Parking Meeting June 16th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM, Town Hall

The next meeting on the Carrboro Parking Study will be Thursday, June 16th, at 5:30 PM at Town Hall, and the agenda includes future parking management strategies. I hope to see something like the CarrPark system presented as one of the options. Please attend if you can!

Carrboro Advisory Boards Should Push For Gathering Space at Lloyd Farm

Posted on June 2, 2016 by patrick

Tonight, at 7:30 pm in Town Hall, the various Carrboro Town Advisory Boards will meet to review the Lloyd Farm rezoning proposal before it goes to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen later in June. This site represents a significant opportunity to do something compelling or make a lasting mistake for Carrboro.

All in all, Lloyd Farm is a mildly better than average suburban strip mall concept with a bunch of single story buildings surrounding a large parking field fronting a Harris Teeter. The “better than average” points come for significantly more attention to bike/ped mobility through the site than is usually present in proposals like this. That said, here are the key problems with it:

The layout is driven first and foremost by traffic engineering concerns; the two drive-thru parcels are particularly awful.
The green “Plaza Lawns” are located in places that almost guarantee they will never be used as public spaces.
No multi-story buildings on a large site that could accommodate them and surface parking
Too small a residential component for a town struggling with increasing housing affordability challenges

I’m not sure the last two are going to be addressed at this point in the game, so I’m going to focus on ONE MEANINGFUL CHANGE that could significantly improve this project.

Re-Configure the Lawns and Parking to Create a Gathering Space, So That There is An Urban Core to a Suburban Site

The image above is the most recent site plan with a few minor changes:

It removes the 7,810 square foot building in the curve of the road, and places parking there instead. (Blue circle)
It moves the square footage of those buildings into two buildings that front a place reminiscent of the the Weaver Street Market Lawn among several buildings. Just as people can walk into the center of Southpoint Mall’s primary walkway between Barnes & Noble and the Apple Store, you could do the same between these two buildings. Harris Teeter would still have a massive parking field out front, albeit in a slightly different shape than they are used to. If they can build a two-story Harris Teeter at North Hills, they should be able to handle this.
The public space allows for more urban cafe-style dining fronting a space for people rather than a space for cars. This could be accomplished with greenspace, hardscaped space like a brick plaza, or both. Ideally I think the developer could steal brick and planting design cues from the UNC campus, and then allow for dining along both sides of the space. The Piazza at Schmidt’s development in Philadelphia strikes this balance well, see below:
This closes the movement of trucks from behind Harris Teeter to the road with the bus pull-out closer to the apartments. Trucks will then need to make a 90-degree turn in front of Harris Teeter and then head north to the road to go left towards Old Fayetteville Rd, or somehow move south of the public space and adjacent retail and exit that way.
Finally, this move does take some retail away from the terminus of the greenway coming from Carol St. I understand how if I was coming from Carol Street, I would find this a bit of an aesthetic loss. However, I think that transition by walking and biking can be made reasonably well if there is also a greenway east of the bioretention area (PURPLE dotted line) that leads to the crossing near the proposed bus pullout. This consolidates crossings from the two directions that pedestrians and cyclists may arrive near a potential bus stop, and give them the smallest amount of parking lot/road combination to cross to reach the stores and the public space.

This Site Needs More Housing, For ALL Ages

It’s also worth noting that there’s just not enough housing being built on such a large site. Carrboro is not going to be able to address its rising housing cost challenges without building new units. Although there are 200+ new units here, this site can accommodate many more, and more stories of height over podium parking. Additionally, it’s disappointing to see only senior housing being proposed. While there are clearly needs for housing for senior citizens in Carrboro, since the Board of Aldermen proposed to look at every decision through the prism of equity at their annual retreat, it is worth noting that generally speaking, older Americans are generally wealthier than everyone else. The chart below shows the median net worth by age in the USA. The data is from the Census Bureau in 2015 via an article at the financial planning website fool.com. Given this distribution, it is hard for me to see how we can talk about equity in a complex that doesn’t allow people under 55 to live there.

One Chance to Get This Right

In closing, I strongly recommend that the advisory boards to be energetic in encouraging the Lloyd Farm development team to use this opportunity to provide a special place on the edge of Carrboro. Not only do I think this concept of a gathering space would garner them more support for approval, I think they’d actually get higher rents! I suspect that the primary pushback will be about their anchor tenant (Harris Teeter) and expectations regarding parking. If they are getting roughly the number of spaces they expect in view of the front door of the store (as my proposal above provides) I think they should be willing to compromise.

Restoring Sidewalk Space for People By Gardening: Local Business Edition

Posted on May 3, 2016 by patrick

Today I was out walking with DC along West Weaver Street, and I started noticing all the curb cuts for various driveways. Really, a curb cut is a big red flag for people walking that implicitly says “stop relaxing and look out, you could be endangered at a moment’s notice by a car here!”

But then I walked by Carrboro Family Vision, and noticed what a great job they had done to unplug this dynamic. Look at how they’ve succeeded through the magic of Google Streetview’s older photos.

Carrboro Family Vision Building – 2012

Carrboro Family Vision Building – Upgrade in Progress September 2014

Carrboro Family Vision – April 2016

This was my view on a recent beautiful sunny Saturday. Instead of parking spaces, we have planters, flowers, a friendly notice of services available, and a garden path to their door and bike rack. (not visible in photo but it’s right around the corner) The curb cut still remains at left, but this space has been reassigned from cars to people very effectively.

When businesses need examples of how to be more pedestrian friendly at the curb, this is a great outcome to hold up. Great job Carrboro Family Vision!

Are the Carrboro Aldermen About to Waste A Significant Amount of Money?

Posted on March 8, 2016 by patrick

Let’s hope not! But it’s hard to tell from tonight’s agenda packet if that’s the case or not. The Town is paying consulting firm VHB what appears to be over $120,000 (the link loads a PDF, see page 4 of 5 for Planning Department Budget) to conduct the now-underway Carrboro Parking Study. That’s not the problem- this study has been needed for many years and is already producing some good information about the real (and imaginary) access and parking challenges that downtown Carrboro faces.

But one would think that before the town makes any additional major decisions about parking in Downtown, we would wait to see the results of that study to make sure that any actions taken are both in keeping with a broader, strategic goal and also, the best use of town funds.

Unfortunately, in tonight’s Board Packet, agenda Item 16-092 (see page 17 of 65) asks the Aldermen to discuss a leasing arrangement for parking at 300 East Main St. The item has virtually zero information and no clear recommendation, so it’s nearly impossible to tell what the staff goal is here. That said, it seems like right now would be the WORST possible time to make any decision about the Town’s parking lease at 300 East Main St, since we are on the cusp of having some of the most important insights about parking in Carrboro in over a decade.

Let’s not waste the considerable amount of money we’re spending on an important parking study by pre-empting its results and taking hasty action on an item that the public can not even discern the nature of from the agenda packet. I urge the Aldermen not to take any action on this item, and to encourage the staff to be more specific about proposals coming to their table.

The Difference Between Space for Parking and Space for People

Posted on February 11, 2016 by patrick

This is a quick look at how much more space cars take up than people, visualized. While the context here is a street, think of it as a parking lot for a moment. Then, as you think about how to enhance what we love about downtown Carrboro, think about whether we need to focus on providing more parking downtown, or improving other ways to get there. See you tonight at the Carrboro Parking kickoff!

Carrboro Parking Study Needs Your Input Thursday Eve (Feb 11th)

Posted on February 9, 2016 by patrick

If you care about having choices in how to get to and enjoy downtown Carrboro, it is very important that you attend the Carrboro Parking Study Kickoff Meeting at Carrboro Elementary school Thursday evening from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

I’ll be there to share a simple message, and I invite you to join me to reinforce it. That message is:

I apologize for going large font on everyone, but really, this is the heart of the matter. People love downtown Carrboro because it is full of life, energy, commerce, culture, food, art, music, protest, you name it. And all of those great things come from PEOPLE. Some of them happen to come downtown in cars, but really, it’s the PEOPLE that make the magic. Cars don’t have wallets and shop in our stores. Cars don’t play in local bands in our venues. Cars don’t wait tables in our restaurants. PEOPLE do. The town staff, fortunately, seem to get this. From a 2013 staff memo sent to the Board of Aldermen:

In, Parking Evaluation, Evaluating Parking Problems, Solutions, Costs, and Benefits, a publication from the Victoria Transport Institute, the author notes, “A problem correctly defined is a problem half solved.” As the Board continues to refine its overall parking objective–from the continuum of creating a greater number of parking spaces, to encouraging more consumers to the downtown, to reducing the number of existing parking spaces, to removing automobiles from the downtown and thereby reducing the Town’s carbon footprint—it may become easier to frame potential policy changes and LUO text amendments.

Citizens need to encourage the Board of Aldermen to continue in this direction described in the staff memo. Here are a few strategic initiatives to consider that could move us in this direction.

The People Who Drive Downtown Most Often (and Stay the Longest) Represent the Biggest Potential Pool of Parking Spaces to Free Up: Employees If we can identify what barriers keep downtown Carrboro employees from coming to downtown by means other than a car, and address those- we can get all those people to work and free up a lot of parking capacity downtown without adding a single new space. The most obvious example here is that we have 33 restaurants and bars downtown, and while most places finish serving dinner in the 9:30 – 10:30 pm range, the bus service back to most in-town neighborhoods has a final trip leaving downtown before 9 pm. Workers may be able to bus in, but needing to drive home also necessitates driving in, and taking a parking space for the entire dinner shift in downtown.
Recognize That Not Every Access Strategy Needs to Be Used by Everyone In Order for Everyone to Experience Better Access The more people with cars who sometimes drive to downtown that we can help try walking or biking downtown, the more parking will be available for folks driving in from places where biking, walking, or using transit are not as easy. On some days, those people who can walk or bike may still drive, but working to make sure walking and bike access is assured for those within a closer distance makes it more likely that parking spaces are open for those coming from further away, or those not on a bus line.
Consider the Power of Many Small Changes Let’s consider a downtown employer with 10 employees, all of whom drive to work every day. Generally speaking, that employer will have a much easier time getting all ten of them to find a way to only drive 4 out of 5 days instead of getting two of them to stop driving downtown altogether. Either approach still reduces this group of ten’s collective demand for downtown parking by 20 percent. I doubt that there is any single strategy that will solve the downtown access issue, but a host of strategies that all temper parking demand by 3% here and 6% there can cumulatively have a big impact.
Identify the Ways That Parking Pricing Is Superior to Aggressive Towing, and Explain Those Benefits to Residents, Businesses, and Visitors If we charge for parking, and do it in a smart, technology-driven way, we get all of these benefits:

Gives visitors to downtown more choice in how long they shop
Costs taxpayers less to enforce than enforcing free 2-hour parking
Prevents all-day Park & Ride Parking to UNC in town lots
Makes it possible to find a lot with many open spaces online or by smartphone
Makes it more likely that visitors to downtown find a space easily
Reduces cruising for parking which leads to increased congestion and emissions downtown
Generates potential revenue for improvements that expand bicycle, pedestrian, and bus access to downtown
Helps generate revenue for businesses with parking when their business is closed

If you want more details about any of the benefits of Parking Performance Pricing, I wrote a detailed post here.

I hope you can attend the meeting Thursday evening- see you there!

ArtsCenter-Kidzu Building: A Compelling Idea That Needs Some Work Before Going Forward

Posted on January 20, 2015 by patrick

The Short Take: The Town of Carrboro has been approached by two cherished local non-profits (Kidzu and The ArtsCenter) with a proposal to build a new “Carrboro Arts and Innovation Center” (CAIC) involving town funds from a not-presently-existent revenue stream. The proposal has several issues that should discourage the Town from moving forward until these challenges can be resolved or greatly improved upon. These issues are exacerbated by a lack of public policy guidance documents, most notably a Town Comprehensive Plan, that would guide such proposals to be more in sync with community priorities from the outset.

I urge the Carrboro Board of Aldermen to NOT move forward with this proposal at this time, and to step back and ask themselves:

Broadly: What can the Town do to better prepare itself for major proposals such as The CAIC and the Lloyd Farm project? Why is the Town so unprepared to deal with ideas like this?
More Narrowly: What pieces of the ArtsCenter proposal are at an inappropriate level of detail (too much? too little?) to effectively evaluate whether the Town should:
- Support such a project?
- Support such a project AND participate in it financially?

The Long Take: There are multiple issues to consider with this proposal and I will try to take them on one at a time.

Background on my Point of View

For those who don’t know me who are reading this, I’ve lived in Carrboro for about 15 years, and my interest in the arts is one of the reasons I live here. I’ve been a performing musician since high school, and have played locally at the Festival for the Eno, Blue Horn Lounge, Cafe Driade, the Carrboro Music Festival, Open Eye Cafe, Johnny’s, The Station, and yes, The ArtsCenter. Our family has patronized concerts, theater events, public meetings and art shows there. With a small child in our family, we have also recently been members of Kidzu. I am a supporter of both of these organizations and what they do in the community, both in spirit and as a patron of their activities. I hope that those who have spent time assembling the CAIC proposal will read the remainder of this post while keeping in mind that I am someone who wants to see both The ArtsCenter and Kidzu succeed.

What’s Good – Carrboro, The Arts, and Institutions for Young Families

The exciting part of the proposal is the promise of an expanded ArtsCenter in a town where the populace loves the arts from a participant point of view as much as a concertgoer/theatergoer/galleryhopper point of view. A great space for the arts is in keeping with Carrboro’s strengths and brand as a community. There’s no doubt that the idea is compelling. Additionally, Carrboro’s percentage of population under age 10 is almost 16%, so a place like Kidzu also makes sense to be in the community.

However, as we move from the general to the specific, these positives get overwhelmed by details (and in some cases, the lack thereof) that detract from other things residents cherish about Carrboro, most notably its nature as one of the truly walkable communities in North Carolina and the Southeast.

What’s Problematic:

The Architectural Style

To start with the challenges of the proposal, I’m going to focus on what I’ve learned from the media coverage as I have not been able to attend any public forums. Below are some images that I believe came from the Chapel Hill News. They show a modernist/postmodernist building that is heavy on glass and steel. The building has uneven projections from multiple sides, which certainly probably raise the cost of the building over continuous walls in the same space. I assume that the building would not actually have all the text labels on the outside and that those labels are to help explain interior functions.

ArtsCenter Visualization 1

ArtsCenter Visualization 2

First, if the town wants to take on debt to build a building for non-profit organizations, we should have a plan for how the building could be used if those nonprofits fail and cannot use the space as proposed. I flag this because the track record of re-using modernist buildings is not that good.

Carrboro’s Town Hall, a former school, has found adaptive re-use, as has Carr Mill. Meanwhile, the BCBSNC property sits empty because it ignored many timeless building practices for trendy abstract art statement-making.

If the Town is going to build a building, it should build in a style that has a record of attracting new uses when the original ones fail or leave, and we should try to build it without expensive, hard-to-maintain materials and profiles.

The Building’s Orientation to Its Surroundings

I’ve been to DPAC for a show and I walk by there all the time. It’s a beautiful facility on the inside, and it sounds great. That said, I don’t know that its interaction with the rest of the city is all that great in Durham. To be fair, I’m not sure the site of DPAC presented many opportunities for synergy when it was built, but this site has the opportunity to embrace one of Carrboro’s most busy intersections for pedestrian activity. Unfortunately, the design seems to “hide” the CAIC behind two trees and there is no relationship with Main Street, the most important or “A” street on which the property fronts. Instead, the primary orientation for people walking to and from the entrance is towards the “B” street of lower importance, Roberson Street. Additionally, nearly the full length of the ArtsCenter’s interface with the block is for drop-off/pick-up for cars.

The present design honors the car first and the pedestrian second. This needs to change, and any project at this location needs to do more to honor Main St and contribute to it as a place.

The Multiple Roles of the Architect

Mr. Szostak is on the board of the ArtsCenter. What happens when the ArtsCenter is pushing for a design element that raises the cost to the Town, and the Town wants to reduce it? Wouldn’t it be awkward for an architect to fulfill the Town’s (his client’s) wish while upsetting his Board colleagues? It doesn’t seem fair to ask the architect of a Town building to negotiate that tension. Also, shouldn’t the Town, if it’s undertaking a signature building project, seek proposals that would include competitive bids for the design work? There’s no doubt Mr. Szostak is a talented architect. I suspect he’s done many good things for the ArtsCenter board as well. If this proposal goes forward, the Town should consider how to prevent conflict between the non-profits and itself via the roles of the architect.

Architecture, Decorum, and Placemaking

Former Mayor Mark Chilton once said that Carrboro’s architecture has “a certain humility” to it. I think he was onto something, but I would say it a little differently, perhaps that our architecture has a “common dignity” to it. I think that any new ArtsCenter building would best serve its purpose by contributing to the common dignity of the street scape rather than making a big statement unrelated to the rest of downtown.

Calls for New Revenue Streams

To the extent that any of this proposal relies on new revenue streams, it is hard to ignore that the NCGA has recently taken away the privilege license tax from municipalities and is looking to redistribute some of their sales tax revenue to rural areas. This is a legislature that also put new limits on sales tax for counties last year. A realist proposal would not include a component of asking the NCGA for new revenue sources for a municipality.

Collateral from Non-Profits

The proposal suggests that the Town would only move forward if the ArtsCenter or Kidzu could offer some collateral. Realistically, what assets do these organizations have, and what is the value of these assets?

Continued Failure on Parking Policy From the Town

It is extremely painful to see that one of the four key points this agreement suggests that the Town would not move forward without the appropriate parking infrastructure. Forgetting all the other points I have made, this is more than enough to oppose the entire proposal until we get off of the idea that because we have a new use of any type in our walkable, transit-served downtown we need more (implied: free) PARKING. During the Carrboro music festival this year, theoretically our biggest visitor event which will DWARF the busiest night at any new ArtsCenter, the deck was not full. Why on earth would we put public money toward any structured parking (which eats up truly finite economically productive land in the downtown) without pricing the parking we already have? (which would also bring revenue). Or without stepping up enforcement? (which would bring revenue and reduce predatory towing)

I’ve already hashed out most of the reasons for being smarter about parking in this post. Please take a look.

How We’re Getting Input On This

I’m also disappointed that what we’re doing to decide how to proceed with this project is to hold a public hearing. First, let me say that holding a hearing is vastly better than not holding one. Still, what’s happening is that everyone is debating the merits of this proposal against itself, and not as part of a broader vision for downtown and the community. It’s the same type of short-term, single-faceted thinking that led the Town to recently consider turning the bike lanes on Fidelty Street into car parking. It’s almost as if because one idea emerges, we forget everything else we’ve agreed to as goals for the community.

The recent Lloyd Farm meetings with the community highlight some of the same problems. In frustration, one neighbor said to the developer “we’re not supposed to be designing the project for you!” This line brought lots of laughs, but it held a lot of truth. But I also had sympathy for the developers. Our zones and our code don’t tell them what we want; many of the ideas in our zoning and codes are decades old and are not made for this moment in our community’s life, but we keep governing off of them.

Of course, with both the CAIC and Lloyd Farm, the missing document that is supposed to manage all these tensions is a comprehensive plan. Carrboro needs one.

Closing

As I finish this piece, there are a lot of pieces of the CAIC proposal that need work. I hope The ArtsCenter and Kidzu will step up to the challenge and address those issues in a refined proposal to be considered somewhere down the road. I also hope the Town will take a hard look at whether our current policy tools are adequate to deal with Carrboro’s growth in the next twenty years.

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Urban Planning for the 21st Century

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