Rare Opportunity Today: Carrboro and Chapel Hill #Sneckdown Photography!

Posted on January 29, 2014 by patrick

It’s near midnight on January 28th as I write this. As everyone wakes up on the 29th, we will have a rare opportunity in the Triangle to see how the snow reveals which parts of our intersections are not needed to allow cars to move freely. Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms (see 3-minute video below) has pioneered the art of taking film of leftover snow and plowed roadways to show where intersection treatments for pedestrians could be improved, while keeping traffic moving at lower and friendler-to-pedestrians speeds.

This type of photography has gotten its own Twitter hashtag this winter, combining “snow” and “neckdown”- the term for narrowing a roadway at an intersection, into “#SNECKDOWN.” Here’s a screen capture of a great example from a few days ago in Massachusetts:

So keep your camera handy on Wednesday and document our local #sneckdowns! Who knows when we’ll have this chance again…

A Few Things to Think About When Planning for Downtown ACCESS, Including Parking

Posted on January 18, 2014 by patrick

Carrboro Parking Deck At Sunset from Weaver Street Market Lawn

Carrboro Parking Deck (center, beyond The Station) At Sunset from Weaver Street Market Lawn

The Carrboro Board of Aldermen has pledged to take up downtown parking as one of their major issues to work on in 2014. Before they kick off this effort, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on how to frame this issue in a way that leads to a larger toolbox of potential solutions to get more people and wallets downtown.

Why is Getting Parking Right in Downtown Carrboro Critical?

Carrboro values local businesses and a local living economy. There is a limited amount of land in our downtown core, where most businesses that come to Carrboro want to be – and every surface parking space we add in the downtown core is a lost opportunity to put a more compelling use on it- another local business, more residential units, or a community facility such as a library. If one of our homegrown businesses wants to expand, and we are locking up an increasing amount of land as parking, the likelihood that business will find a bigger space to move into in Downtown Carrboro is reduced. At a certain point, the degree to which we commit to adding parking puts a de facto upper bound on how big a local business sector we can develop in our downtown, and businesses that want to expand may have to move out of Carrboro altogether.

Nobody wants this to be the case. So what can we do?

Strategy #1: Put People First. Stop Defining Parking Spaces As A Goal, Start Defining Parking Spaces as One Way Among MANY to Provide ACCESS for People

There’s a section of the memo the Town Staff prepared for a meeting in May 2013 that I think is particularly well-put together. It states:

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.

Some downtowns that are marginal business locations absolutely require free parking because they have no transit service, no arterial bike lanes and separated bike paths leading to the town center, no sidewalks to adjacent neighborhoods, and low residential densities immediately outside of downtown. They may also be located in communities that are not growing. If foot traffic is absent, then creating greater access for cars from greater distances is often perceived as critical. Frankly, this line of thinking often leads to the downtown being a bit of an old-timey sub-regional tourist destination with a proliferation of antique shops.

But the scenario in the prior paragraph is not Carrboro- in fact, Carrboro, the densest town in North Carolina, is in many ways the antithesis of this. Carrboro is a place people WANT to do business, and the numerous development proposals and construction downtown provide ample evidence this is true. Carrboro has excellent bicycle network connections to downtown, a decent sidewalk network, and a transit network that produces over 1000 weekday boardings in between Cliff’s Meat Market and Carrburrito’s.

The key point here is that if we want local business to thrive, we want more PEOPLE to walk through their doors. A person could arrive at a local business on foot, by bike, by bus, by skateboard, by taxi, or by personal car. We should focus most of all on increasing ACCESS to downtown for PEOPLE (who carry wallets/purses/cash/credit regardless of how they arrive). By doing so, we can help local business thrive and still accommodate additional growth downtown.

Strategy #2: Recognize That Not Every Access Strategy Needs to Be Used by Everyone In Order for Everyone to Experience Better Access

Pick up a Chapel Hill Transit map and you will see that all of the bus service in Carrboro is south of Homestead Rd. Now, so is most of the population of Carrboro, but still- if you live in Lake Hogan Farms and are thinking about downtown access, I think the following is a pretty rational point of view:

“Well, I’d love to get downtown without my car, but I can drive all the way to downtown much faster than I can walk 15 to 30 minutes to a bus stop and ride a bus that will take me another 8 to 10 minutes to get downtown. My time is valuable and driving downtown makes the most sense for where I live.”

But what about the much larger group of people who live within the area served by the CHT bus routes that touch downtown Carrboro? I think this is also a pretty rational point of view:

CHT Bus Heading to Garage by Flickr User bendertj

“Well, I’d love to get downtown without my car, but I’m going to a show at the ArtsCenter that probably ends around 10:00 – 10:30 pm and the last time the F bus leaves downtown is 9:20 pm, so I’ll drive even though I like using the F bus to go to UNC during the week.”

Adding one more parking space somewhere downtown adds storage space for one more car downtown, and adds access for one to perhaps a maximum of four or five other people in most cases.

Running a bus route later provides additional access to hundreds of people who live along the route. While not everyone in those neighborhoods will suddenly stop driving downtown and taking the F bus at night, in a town like Carrboro, more than a few of them will.

And the spaces that were used by those who are now taking the later bus- are freed up for the Lake Hogan Farm resident above who doesn’t have the same opportunity to use the F bus.

The same is true for biking and walking trips to downtown. 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.

Strategy #3: The People Who Drive Downtown Most Often (and Stay the Longest) Represent the Biggest Potential Pool of Parking Spaces to Free Up: Employees

When it comes to freeing up parking spaces in Downtown Carrboro, Annette Stone, the town’s Economic Development Director, recently noted:

“Then there are the unintended consequences of catching people in our enforcement net that we didn’t intend,” Stone said. “We are trying to prevent people from parking, riding and walking out of down town, [but] we are catching our employees that are down there. It just shined a big light in our face of what we have had to deal with.”

While this is a problem, it is also an opportunity, as people who come to downtown five times a week to work are the ones for whom a change in habits would have the most impact in freeing up parking for shoppers, diners, and show or concertgoers. So why might employees drive to downtown Carrboro despite having some alternatives to driving alone to get there? It’s fair to say that restaurants are one of our larger evening job categories. Here are the dinner hours for several downtown restaurants. See a pattern?

Sample of Restaurant Dinner Hours in Downtown Carrboro (Friday/Saturday nights)

ACME: 5:30 – 9:30 pm
Venable: 5:30 – 9:30 pm
Tyler’s: 5:00 -9:00 pm
Elmo’s: morning – 10:00 pm
Carrboro Pizza Oven: lunch – 10:00 pm
Amante Pizza: lunch – 11:00 pm
Glass Half Full 5:00 pm – 10:00 pm

The last CW bus departs downtown Carrboro at 9:05 pm on weeknights, including Fridays. On Saturdays, the last CW leaves downtown at 5:48 pm. For the F bus, the last departure is at 9:20 on weekdays, and the bus does not run on Saturdays. The weekday J route has departures as late as 11:35 pm (GREAT!) but on weekends, the JN route does not touch downtown Carrboro.

The key point is that with most restaurants having shifts end somewhere between 9:15 pm and 10:30 pm, any employee that doesn’t live in a few select spots along the J route who might take the bus to work will not do so- because there is no bus to take them home. The town should work with Chapel Hill Transit to explore how any contemplated night and weekend service improvements that may be coming in the next few years could make sure this employment market is served by any schedule adjustments.

Of course, extending the service span (the total extent of hours covered during the day and evening) of the buses would be used by some diners as well. However, the reason why getting the employees to shift from driving to another mode is so powerful is that employees leave a car parked downtown for 4 to 8 hours at a time, whereas a diner/shopper may park for 1-3 hours and then turn over a parking space to someone else.

Something that can be done even faster is promoting ridesharing to work in downtown Carrboro among downtown employees. The ShareTheRideNC website provides an easy-to-use portal to help workers who may have similar schedules, work near each other, and live near each other- figure out how they could coordinate commuting to work together.

Strategy #4: Consider the Power of Many Small Changes

Finally, I think the most important thing to recognize is that improving access to downtown Carrboro will be most successful with several strategies all helping a little. 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.

2014 should be an interesting year when it comes to this issue, and I look forward to seeing what happens next.

Quick Thoughts on Carrboro Music Festival 2013

Posted on September 30, 2013 by patrick

Another Carrboro Music Festival (CMF) is in the books, and generally speaking, it was a great afternoon. The timing of the event usually provides some of the best weather central North Carolina can offer, temperature/humidity-wise, and today delivered on that count in spades. I biked all over the place, taking advantage of our new bicycle facilities on Main Street and the elevator to the roof of the parking deck. (more on that later)

As usual, the music was tremendous- I caught several excellent performances spanning a slew of genres, mostly from people who live in town or nearby. The Tim Smith Band‘s reggae-influenced cover of “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison was my favorite surprise of the day- just flat out awesome, even in a set that pretty much killed for 40 minutes straight. Doug Largent‘s organ playing was a great joy to hear in person for the first time as well. DC and I closed out the night at Steel String listening to Wes Collins‘ riveting “Waiting,” and then packed up the stroller and headed for home.

Wes Collins (standing) & Danny Gotham at Steel String Brewery

Beyond enjoying the day, though, I spent a portion of my time wandering around thinking about what the CMF tells us about Carrboro for the other 364 days of the year.

Here are my take-aways. Unsurprisingly with me, they are public space and transport-centric:

Lots of cities talk about “managing/cultivating/some-action-verbing” their brand, and I have previously heard that a good brand “delivers on a promise.” Carrboro has a brand and it lives it without much fuss- the town is informal, fun, musical, artistic, accepting, and comfortable with a certain amount of chaos in service of those things. The CMF is not the town putting on a persona for a day; it’s just Carrboro being Carrboro, only more than usual. That’s a good thing.
It’s great to see buses running in Carrboro on Sundays. We need our transit network to be a seven-day-a-week service. I asked Chapel Hill Transit staff and they said that a total of 679 passengers rode the two buses that provided Shuttle service on Sunday.
Even on the day of the year when the most visitors the town receives at once are there, traffic just isn’t that bad. And maybe the alternatives to get downtown help a lot with that, but still.
The parking deck was open, but not from the side that most people were likely to get the chance to take advantage of it. Even so, Levels 1-2 and a small part of 3 in the deck were filled. The roof, 4, and 5 were mostly empty even after going past all the spaces reserved for the hotel. Check it out:
3rd Level Parking Deck During Late Afternoon CMF
The sidewalks on our major streets need to be wider. Walking in Carrboro can sometimes feel tenuous under usual conditions, but the CMF crowds exacerbate this by pointing out how deteriorated some of our sidewalks are in our most heavily-trafficked areas. I’m thinking particularly of the sidewalks just east of the railroad tracks on both sides of Main St. Hopefully we can plan for some improvements here for the pieces that 300 East Main’s redevelopment will not address.
Closing Weaver Street between the intersection with Main/Roberson and the Weaver/Greensboro intersection yields a pretty minimal impact to the overall traffic conditions but provides a fantastic livability dividend to everyone who gets to enjoy the street. We’ve had a long-term closure of this space for the Weaver Street re-construction and multiple events like CMF and Carrboro Open Streets show us that the town can not only survive, but THRIVE- without that roadway capacity. We should think about what an opportunity that is for Carrboro to create a public space unlike any other in a town our size. More on that in a future post.

Did you have any observations you’d like to share from CMF 2013? Please add them in the comments!

Carrboro’s Summer of Bike-Ped Infrastructure, Part 2

Posted on August 14, 2013 by patrick

Earlier in the month I covered some improvements to the local pedestrian grid on Davie Rd and at the intersection of James St and Hillsborough Rd. However, the most high-profile change to the Carrboro street grid this summer is undoubtedly the Main St Road Diet.

Definition: Road Diet

First, what’s a “Road Diet?” Simply put, it’s the reconfiguration of a roadway to remove excess space for cars, and the reassigning of that space for the use of cyclists and/or pedestrians, and in some cases, transit vehicles. Carrboro’s road diet on Main St involved taking a 4-lane road section with no bike lanes down to a 2-lane road with a center turn lane, and bicycle lanes in both directions.

Sample Cross-Sections

Recently I’ve been working as a beta tester for some programmers developing a terrific tool called StreetMix that allows non-engineers to propose street cross-sections for their communities. Here’s the basic before vs after comparison in graphic format. Where you see “Bus Lane” please simply interpret that to be a drive lane in this case. I was just trying to pick different vehicles in the StreetMix program and missed the label.

And here’s what the AFTER configuration is:

Benefits of the West Main Street Road Diet

There are several immediate benefits that this project creates for the community:

Shortens the maximum number of moving vehicle lanes that a pedestrian must traverse to cross Main St. Instead of 44 feet of cars, the pedestrian only needs to cover 33 feet where they need to be on their maximum guard for their safety. This is of particular benefit to children, senior citizens, those with mobility impairments who walk slower than average, and parents pushing strollers.
Fulfills a recommendation of the Carrboro Safe Routes to School action plan and provides safety benefits in a school zone.
Completes a major gap in the bicycle infrastructure network.

I want to place major emphasis on the final point in the list above. For many years, Carrboro has been working slowly and steadily to expand its bike lane and greenway network, with most major street segments in town represented.

The map below shows how effectively Carrboro has been at placing bike lanes on its streets. Green lines represent greenways and off-road bicycle facilities. Orange lines represent wide outside shoulders. Purple lines represent on-street bike lanes. Notice the big gap in the purple network starting at the intersection of West Main and Hillsborough Rd, which then extends south from there past Poplar, Fidelity, and Weaver St, all the way to Jones Ferry Rd.

The road diet turns that grey section to purple and completes several linkages among SIX other roads with existing bike lanes!

Pre-Road-Diet: West Main St Bike Network Gap. Map produced by Town of Chapel Hill

The reason is this is so important is that some of the best research on the propensity of Americans to bicycle for transportation, even in super-bike-friendly cities like Portland, Oregon, indicates that the largest proportion of the populace falls into what Portland refers to as “Interested But Concerned” potential bike riders. These folks would LIKE to bicycle more, but have concerns about personal safety, and generally prefer to bicycle in a space that is clearly identified as being for cyclists first and motorists second. A bike lane meets that criteria for many people, and this road diet fills in a major gap in a network of facilities that address a perceived safety issue for many potential riders.

While I would still like to see us figure out ways to build even more separated bike-only facilities both on and off streets, this is a most welcome improvement to the Carrboro cycling infrastructure.

Congratulations to the town and NCDOT for working together to make this happen! Look below for some photos of the implemented Road Diet.

Pre-Road Diet

Post-Road Diet

Carrboro’s Summer of Bike-Ped Infrastructure, Part 1

Posted on August 7, 2013 by patrick

Summer is construction season, and as we approach the middle of August, there are several projects nearing completion in Carrboro that will make life better for pedestrians and bicyclists, and a few others that have made significant progress. If you haven’t spotted some of this work going on around town, here’s a quick review of two of the notable projects. I will cover others in a subsequent post.

James St / Hillsborough St Intersection Improvements

James St / Hillsborough St Improvements

Perhaps the smallest project, though still very worthwhile, is the curb expansion and installation of an island at the intersection of James St and Hillsborough St. This intersection is a critical location for middle school students walking to McDougle Middle School. Quail Roost Drive is the final segment of many walks to the school since it provides the most direct path to the building via the gate at the end of Quail Roost that opens onto the school’s running track. The new island, expanded curb, and improved crosswalks will calm traffic and reduce turning speeds at this intersection.

In the photo to the right from Google Earth, you can see the cones (representing a potential curb enlargement) that NCDOT put out for most of the last year to gauge motorist, pedestrian, and cyclist behavior prior to the permanent installation. The NCDOT Board awarded the town a Small Construction Funds stipend of $40,000 to complete this improvement, which is part of the town of Carrboro’s Safe Routes to School Action Plan.

I’m really impressed with the way the town and NCDOT worked together on this with the trial of the various configurations of cones to represent the island and curb extension. I hope that Carrboro Planning and Public Works will find a new problem intersection to tackle next.

Davie Rd Sidewalk

Davie Rd Sidewalk In Progress

Another great project that is providing an important missing link to the pedestrian network is the sidewalk presently being built along Davie Rd from Jones Ferry Rd to Fidelity Street. This will be a 5-foot wide sidewalk on the east side of Davie Rd with a storm sewer as part of the design.

According to the American Community Survey 2005 – 2009 five year estimates, the Census Tract in which this sidewalk sits has one of the highest walk-to-work shares of any Census Tract in Orange County, at almost 5%. Another 19% use public transportation to get to work, which means that almost a quarter of the working adults in this area start their journey to work on foot.

Hopefully this piece of sidewalk will be completed along the full length of Davie from Fidelity to Main St in the future. There are a few other projects underway in town that I will cover in Part 2 of this topic.

When Your Craft Brewery Turns Parking Into Space for People, Thank Them

Posted on June 24, 2013 by patrick

Steel String Raises a Tent

I had the pleasure of drinking my first Steel String Brewery beer several weeks back, outside on a small sliver of sidewalk between the front door of the taproom and the parking row just off the street. I believe I had the Rubber Room Session Ale and it was terrific.

The Steel String Brewery Insta-Patio

I caught up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a few months, enjoyed a good beer and appreciated the light breeze in the afternoon shade of the building. It was almost perfect, the lone negative being a few cars pulling in and out right in front of us while we enjoyed our beverages.

A few weeks later, low and behold, Steel String has solved this issue and made a short stretch of South Greensboro Street more civilized, SAFER, and pedestrian friendly in the process. In short, they’ve filled in the two parking spaces that abut the Wendy’s drive-thru exit with tables and chairs, and at certain times, a tent.

Why has this small change made such a big difference? Let’s take a look. First, below is a Google Street View orientation to Steel String’s location, which is in a storefront that used to be occupied by the Trading Post used furniture store. Use the mouse to pan left and right in the image below, and you’ll see that the pedestrian conditions deteriorate pretty quickly once you walk from the corner of Main St and S. Greensboro to the first of the two driveway access points in and out of Wendy’s.

After that, while there is a sidewalk between the two Wendy’s driveways, the space in front of Steel String and restaurant Glass Half Full is a continuous row of parking. Any parked car could pull out at any time, directly back into a pedestrian, and anyone trying to park could pull in off the street at the same time. This is a pretty unsafe situation for a pedestrian who needs to constantly be looking in multiple directions to avoid getting hit on this stretch of pseudo-sidewalk.

View Larger Map
By turning these parking spaces into seating for their patrons, the restaurant has effectively removed the hazard to the pedestrians described above in both directions. No cars are backing out of those spaces anymore, and no cars are turning in off of South Greensboro Street. As for two parking spaces being out of commission, well, the town just bought several dozen spaces across the street and…it’s a bar! Do we really need to encourage people to drive to bars by requiring free parking right in front of the bar?

This type of local, small-scale, but meaningful transformation is in keeping with some of the best ideas springing up from a movement called tactical urbanism, which seeks to make quick changes to streets and neighborhoods to make them more people-friendly. The most well-publicized of these activities is PARKing Day, in which people all over the world convert metered parking spaces to mini-parks, such as in this public radio story from Colorado.

My key point here is this- Steel String has done something to delight their customers and the neighborhood, and inadvertently struck a positive blow for pedestrian safety. Good for them and good for us. If this wasn’t pre-cleared with the Town, let’s hope the official reaction is in keeping with the best Carrboro traditions of simply not freaking out when an informal market asserts itself, or in this case, informal awesome streetside public space asserting itself.

If we want to double down on a good idea, let’s ask Glass Half Full if they want to convert some or all of the next ten spaces to sidewalk dining!

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.

Informal Urbanism Indicator #2: Fliers

Posted on February 20, 2013 by patrick

Fliers in Carrboro

If you’re trying to determine where the hotspots of the urban fabric begin and end in a neighborhood, you would be hard pressed to find a better indicator than fliers on telephone poles, walls, and other surfaces. Fliers are great indicators for the following reasons:

1. They’re usually time-limited. The constant refreshing of flier locations re-validates that these locations are important to pedestrians.

2. They can be layered on top of each other. Some flier locations develop a 2-to-5 flier thick coat of promotional verbiage and graphics. Like the rings on a tree stump where more rings equals more years, more fliers stapled on top of each other indicates a stronger advertising location.

With the second quality of flier placement, we can actually gather data on flier density in addition to flier locations. I’ve started using a smartphone app called Fulcrum to gather data on fliers, including flier density, and although it will take a while to get a data set like the one for the Super Strudel post, I do intend to map it and try some analytical techniques on the data if it makes sense.

The key point that is great about fliers, however, is that whenever you see repeated postings of new fliers from different people and organizations at the same place, you’re looking at a place that is important across MANY people’s mental maps of their community, and most likely within the heart of the walkable urban fabric.

#informalurbanindicators

Informal Urbanism Indicator #1: Graffiti. Where Does The Urban Fabric Begin and End? Ask Super Strudel

Posted on February 19, 2013 by patrick

If a visitor asks a random Carrboro resident where downtown is, they’ll be almost certain to get directions to where the railroad tracks cross Main Street right by The Station bar.

This is the undisputed center of Carrboro’s urban fabric, a.k.a. the place where the most people are walking around. But if this is the center of the action, where is the edge of the action? Where does it dissipate? When you are in downtown Carrboro or any other downtown, do you ever wonder how far the people you see walking walked to get there?

As someone who does a lot of walking around town, I’ve started thinking about all the little and big modifications that happen to an urban streetscape because one person or institution tries to capitalize on the presence of a significant number of walkers to sell a product, promote a show, or share an idea. For lack of a better term, I will call these modifications “Informal Urbanism Indicators.” Another way to think of them might be as “Hints from Residents.” In this case, the “hint” is data about where people walk.

For the remainder of the post, I’d like to introduce you to our urban graffiti guide, Super Strudel. To be fair to the artist who created him, I must acknowledge that perhaps the “SS” stands for something else, and that it is possible that “Super Strudel” was added by another person walking by with a sharpie. I had seen Super Strudel in a few places and started taking pictures before I finally got his name down from this display by Fitch Lumber.

Super Strudel at Fitch Lumber

Whatever type of rodent he is, this guy gets out on the town pretty regularly. He showed up over on the dumpster at Carrburritos:

Super Strudel on Carrburritos’ Dumpster

Over by the White Oak Condominiums on Fidelity Street:

Super Strudel at White Oak

On the edge of the UNC Campus across from the Carolina Inn:

Super Strudel Visits Campus

When he arrived at Back Alley Bikes and Tar Heel Tattoo, he went large format:

Super Strudel Seeks Bikes, Tattoos

While this final shot on the back of Kinetix does not convey the size well, this one was also 4 or 5 feet tall, I think:

Super Strudel at Kinetix

The interesting thing about these photos as a group is that if we map them, we get a visual that depicts (probably in part) the mental map of one person of what constitutes the walkable urban fabric of downtown Carrboro and Chapel Hill. Click on the minus button in the map to zoom out one level, and you’ll see all 6 photo locations above mapped.

View Super Strudel Art Locations in a larger map

But this is just one map of one person’s urban fabric, using one variable. If we layer together data created by MULTIPLE people, that represent jointly made decisions or separately made decisions that reinforce each other, we get more “Hints From Residents.” As the title of the post suggests, I’m going to do several of these posts on Informal Urban Indicators. The post on Indicator #2 shows up tomorrow- feel free to guess what’s coming in the comments. Meanwhile, let me know if I missed any Super Strudel locations! I wouldn’t be surprised if I did.

#informalurbanindicators

At Its Core, the Word “Urban” Is About Life on Foot

Posted on February 18, 2013 by patrick

On this blog, I’ll be discussing a variety of topics regarding questions of town-building for Carrboro, North Carolina and other places. But one I’ll probably come back to again and again is the word “urban.” Knowing that, I want to be as clear as possible about what I mean when I use this term.

In growth debates, this tends to mean a lot of things to a lot of people. More than a few people hear “urban” and immediately think “Manhattan” or “New York.” Interestingly enough, I think that when people say New York, they actually do mean “Manhattan,” and not Brooklyn, Queens, or any of the other boroughs. They are thinking of super-tall buildings first and foremost, and Manhattan has the highest concentration of skyscrapers in one place in the USA.

Others think more broadly of large cities with very large populations, places that generally have over one million inhabitants in a single municipality. This definition can encompass neighborhoods and communities of very different physical character. It may include skyscraper districts, mid-rise districts, and low-density neighborhoods often found 3 to 10 miles from an American city center.

However, I think the definition of urban can be made very simple, and most accurate, by tying it to one function: walking. Here is the simplest definition I can offer:

If you live, work or visit somewhere that numerous people regularly walk from one place to another for a variety of reasons other than recreation or exercise, then you are living in, working in, or visiting an urban place.

Christopher Columbus Park, Boston – a Place for Walking

This is really the key to figuring out if a place is urban or not. Fundamentally, I believe that once we have stopped talking about agricultural landscapes and communities where farming is a principal activity, we are better off organizing our communities around urban principles instead of not doing so. This blog will be about explaining why I think this is true, and how we can build cities and towns full of beautiful urban neighborhoods.

With that in mind, what are some of the primary reasons why we should build urban places?

1. Health of Individuals. Getting around on foot rather than in a car provides significant health benefits. Most doctors will tell you that walking is close to “the perfect exercise” – low impact, able to be participated in for most of one’s life, and requiring little special equipment or money to participate. A community that makes it safe, easy and pleasant for people to walk for non-recreational purposes is one that is investing in the long-term health of its population.

2. Health of Shared Common Resources. Initiatives that convert auto trips to transit trips and particularly bicycle and walking trips lower a community’s per-trip air pollution and per-trip carbon footprint. Developing in a more compact growth pattern, by putting more uses and residents within walking distance of each other- reduces development pressure on farmland and on land around water resources.

3. Reduced Lifecycle Costs for Infrastructure. If we build 150 homes on 450 acres (1 home per 3-acre lot) then attaching those homes to a local sewer system such as OWASA will require a network of publicly maintained pipes that provides drainage across 70 percent of one square mile. Building those same homes at 15 dwelling units to the acre means that any expanded sewer network will need to cover 1.6 percent of one square mile. Joe Minicozzi of Asheville has probably done a better job than anyone documenting this issue.

4. A Healthy, Innovative Local Business Ecosystem A compact, reasonably dense neighborhood can support its own district of small businesses. Finer grain block sizes in city streets inherently lead you away from big-box retail owned by large corporations and international investors, and towards smaller format stores with a greater likelihood of a local owner running the business. Greater population densities create opportunity for greater variety in dining choices and for agglomeration benefits in many industries.

5. Vibrant Public Spaces By building compactly and in an urban pattern, one of the best outcomes is the ability to create special places that people cherish because they function as social centers as well as perhaps cultural or artistic centers. Locally, the Weaver Street Market Lawn is the best example of such a place.

A Latin Dance Band gets the crowd moving on the Weaver Street Market Lawn at the 2012 Carrboro Music Festival.

Whether you’re a local elected official, a developer, or a citizen, if we’re going to build better urban places, it’s always good to ask – “is this proposed change going to help or hinder Life On Foot in the neighborhood and the town?”

CityBeautiful21

Urban Planning for the 21st Century

Category Archives: Walking