[Charlotte Off Topic]

Super G is open in Pineville, although its hours are limited this week (11 AM - 5 PM).

[Northlake Mall]

Welp, there's been another shooting at Northlake. Not what the mall needed...

[Legacy Union (former Charlotte Observer redevelopment)]

Regarding supertalls... although we're well off-topic, I will share a personal photo I took from our apartment in Ho Chi Minh City immediately prior to COVID. The HCMC supertall (Landmark 81) is visible in this photo, but which is more important to the urban fabric in this photo? The supertall, the high-rise residential (15-25 stories) buildings, or the block after uninterrupted block of 5-6 story "low-rise" houses?

Edit: why did my photo get eaten?... here, just have a link.

[Legacy Union (former Charlotte Observer redevelopment)]

I would prefer not to see a really large building in this spot, because it will leave the skyline permanently unbalanced (due to the stadium and 485 canyon). I think the DEC was ugly when it was the only building in the area, because it made the skyline unbalanced -- I definitely hope they don't do the same thing just when DEC's district has been built out with a number of mid-height buildings that make it look reasonable!

If we're going to get a really tall residential building, I'd love for it to go on the site of the datacenter or one of the parking decks in the "parking district" at 4th & Church.

[Good New Restaurants]

On 11/2/2022 at 11:22 AM, Madison Parkitect said:

That looks cool! Sort of like a personal hot pot? Might have to go try that.

Sort of! They use stone bowls that hold heat for a long time, but without an active heat source at the table. The noodles use a good bit of the residual heat to warm up, so after you've put in all of the "toppings" and noodles, it's at a comfortable temperature to eat.

[Misc. Uptown Projects/News]

On 11/4/2022 at 6:11 PM, j-man said:

This is coming along nicely. Would love some actual screening along with the paint though.

We seriously need developers willing to convert a few parking spots to very small retail spots as street facing components for the parking garages.

[South Blvd area -- South of Woodlawn (SoLoSo)]

[Good New Restaurants]

I'm going to put in a good word for Ten Seconds, which is a new restaurant that has opened in Toringdon. I originally tried their location in Atlanta and found out that they were planning to open a location here just a week later -- although it took them several months to actually open. They serve a Chinese rice-noodle soup called "crossing-the-bridge" noodles. This is better than any pho place I've found here in town...

[Charlotte's Light Rail: Lynx Blue Line]

When I rode, there were at least a half-dozen trains sitting idle at the railyard. Since I missed my train by seconds, twice, I spent a total of around 40 minutes just... waiting. During off-hours (very late evening, very early morning), that's defensible, but during the day this is enough to seriously hurt ridership. If I could rely on Singapore-like frequencies (7-8 minutes at most times, 3-4 minutes during peak hours), it wouldn't even be a consideration; I could take a two hour lunch and go uptown, relying on my ability to catch the train within a few minutes to make the total travel time predictable. As it stands, that can't happen. I'm sure there are a lot of other people who don't use the train for similar reasons.

[Learning from Other Places]

Because I'm an enormous nerd, I have taught myself to make isochrone maps in QGIS.

This is a map of 500m walking areas around all stations in Sendai, Japan:

This can be compared with Charlotte:

[Learning from Other Places]

street view of a station

9 hours ago, JeanClt said:

Japan has a limited amount of space and so they treat land for what it’s value is there. They maximize the use of space.

This is somewhat true in the larger sense -- we will never have a national (or even state) "primate city" on the scale of Tokyo -- but they actually have more space in the vital walksheds around transit stops, simply because their transit is so much more developed and comprehensive. In our case, we shouldn't think "we have so much land!" because we don't. We have a single line of fixed transit and the land around that should be maximally utilized to justify further investment in transit.

To illustrate, this is the radius around Bland St. Station that I'm talking about:

To choose a more directly comparable area of a Japanese city, here's street view of a station in Sendai (pop. 1m), which features a much higher intensity around the station than Bland with a mixture of large developments, "zakkyo buildings," and lower-intensity municipal uses (e.g. a park and ride lot). The comparable map:

The "bones" in the Charlotte map aren't bad. The street grid is too coarse, but that will eventually change. The biggest (and more difficult-to-fix) aspect is the granularity of development and property ownership.

 

8 hours ago, elrodvt said:

While that is true another important aspect is their concept of entertainment districts. I worked in Nagasaki a lot and it's fairly rural not that far from city center. But all the business want to be in the entertainment district. Cultural or zoning or... I have no idea but the result is super nice. Most of the entertainment district there looks to have been built after the great flood of '82. I imagine it was somewhat of a green field at that point or certainly post the bomb and somehow it just clustered. My favorite bars and restaurants seated maybe 15 making it possible for the small guy to succeed as said. Great transportation via street cars, busses and ubiquitous taxis at any time feeds into it. 

Clustering of businesses is somewhat cultural in the modern era -- if you look at any Asian city, there are "districts" where you go for any given thing -- but it's also historically universal. Think about NYC's "garment district," for a Western example. Even Montford Dr. could be construed as this kind of organic clustering.

[Learning from Other Places]

I’m back again, with another weird and aspirational analysis of a foreign city! This time, it’s Tokyo, inspired by my recent acquisition of the book Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City. One of the topics covered in this book is the phenomenon of the “Zakkyo building” (“multi-tenant,” in the most prosaic translation). You probably don’t know the term, but it’s likely that these buildings form a core part of your mental image of “Tokyo.” The intro scene of Lost in Translation features them:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSsNbFwePAE

 

More practically, this is a typical streetscape full of Zakkyo buildings:

 

 

You can also drop a pin along any street near a metro station on Google Maps and likely find something similar:

 

The distinguishing feature of these buildings is that they are narrow, deep, and feature small businesses. They typically also advertise via prominent outside signage (hence the neon or LED signs that characterize the most famous Tokyo streetscapes). Perhaps more interesting for cities that are trying to densify, though, they’re also tiny. This means that their development can be (relatively) small investments when compared to massive modern developments.

 

 

Let’s look at a particular example. I chose this at random, but serendipitously these three buildings happen to measure 22m across (about 7.3m each) and 20m deep. They are, of course, separate property parcels and independent buildings (although two of them share a wall).

 

 

Interestingly(?), this is easily compared to a piece of real estate in our fair city: the parking lot of “Design Within Reach,” immediately adjacent to the DFA building. The parking lot is actually slightly larger than this block of buildings.

 

 

Comparing this to the nearby DFA, you can see the potential scale of this type of density:

 

 

You could easily fit ten of these blocks into a development the size of DFA.

 

Why would you want to, though? First, as noted above, these are separate parcels. That means that the buildings can grow (or not grow) over time, as demand requires. Some could be one-floor steel frame buildings, others could be a couple of floors, others could begin to push the envelope (literally – vertically).

 

Second, the buildings are sublet to individual businesses. Conservatively, these buildings appear to contain at least fifteen businesses. This scale is similar to stacking a suburban strip mall into a 4,500 square foot footprint. The level of “cooperative competition” that can be achieved is incredible – can you imagine if Montford Drive was vertical? All of its restaurants would fit into five of these buildings comfortably.

 

This subletting also allows the district to be more robust in times of turmoil. Unlike office buildings, where a single tenant’s departure can leave tens of thousands of feet vacant and unlikely to be filled, a single departure in one of these buildings isn’t a surprise. It can be replaced quickly by another tenant of any type.

 

This is even a benefit for public safety: with five tenants in a small footprint, a building’s tenants can pool their resources to hire security guards during peak hours, and the effect of their presence will spill over to the streets – because the independence of these buildings means that they don’t lose their engagement with the street despite their verticality.

 

The primary drawback, from an urban planner’s perspective, is that they are hard to permit and administer. After all, if you have ten building owners in the space previously occupied by one, and five tenants within each building, that represents fifty stakeholders with a vote. From an economist’s perspective, on the other hand, the fact that the buildings are independent is “inefficient.” Each building needs an elevator if it’s more than one floor, each has its own plumbing, and so on.

 

I think that these drawbacks are easily outweighed by the potential benefits of resiliency, though, and the attractiveness of a district of this type. Can you imagine if Charlotte had just ten of these buildings along the rail trail?

[CATS Long Term Transit Plan - Silver, Red Lines]

1 hour ago, kayman said:

I believe your confusing light rail with street car. Those are two different modes. Light rail to function as a useful service in this region should be grade separated with its own right-of-way. 

Sorry to randomly interject, but "light rail" is an amorphous term. It usually does mean what we might call "street cars," or "trams" with both ROW and street-running services. The Blue Line serves as a "metro"-style line, which would more traditionally be "heavy rail," but was implemented with LRT hardware here because "light rail" was a fad during the '00s.

[Unified Development Ordinance]

On 10/7/2022 at 6:14 PM, nicholas said:

I don't really have any way to substantiate this, but I feel like leadership is lacking in Charlotte in all areas.

Isn't this broader than Charlotte? I think that it's a product of late-20th and 21st century rootlessness. A lot of boosters are home grown. It's natural to want the place you feel a connection to to be as good as it can be; if you look at Charlotte as a stepping stone to "something bigger," then you're not going to pour everything you have into it. (Of course, if you get to the "something bigger," you're still not going to feel rooted there.)

[Charlotte's Light Rail: Lynx Blue Line]

16 minutes ago, jthomas said:

You had lunch with your wife for the first time in years?

Honestly, it was the first time I've gone to meet her for lunch while she was working outside the house in years. She recently changed jobs and ended up "hybrid," and I have a couple of days off -- a rare opportunity!

19 minutes ago, tozmervo said:

get ye the CATS Pass app and never touch a kiosk again. 

Good point, I'll definitely use it next time I'm going uptown.

[Charlotte's Light Rail: Lynx Blue Line]

Took the blue line from I-485 to Uptown today to have lunch with my lovely wife, for the first time in years. A few observations:

1. The cheap LCD marquees at platforms are terrible. It'd be nice to have indicator maps showing where the trains are, but that's very fancy. Having them not broken, and showing the time for the next arrival, would be acceptable.
2. I missed my train at I-485 because the ticket kiosk took over a minute to charge my credit card. I was literally standing there watching asterisks pop up, one by one. I've never seen a POS do that!
3. The rails (or train suspension?) felt very rough on the northbound train. The return trip wasn't nearly as bad.
4. There's noticeably much more infill development along the line than there used to be. Many of the large gaps are gone.
5. My tickets were checked, and there was security on the train on both rides.
6. The stations felt less secure than the trains. There were a fair number of people loitering around 3rd St. Station and one person sitting behind a pole periodically yelling profanity.

I appreciate the positive changes, and ridership was healthy for the "off hours" I chose to travel, but I hope that some of the technical issues can be addressed and that the perception of safety at stations is given some priority as well.

[Good New Restaurants]

On 5/21/2022 at 2:05 AM, elrodvt said:

I vehemently disagree. Given our pop the choices are surprisingly low. The grocery stores are especially terrible. The "international" section is comprised mainly of hard taco shells and rice. ;-)

Off topic, but I used to be really impressed by the micro brew selection at Publix and HT. In the past year or so though I'd swear micro shelf space is down 50% replaced by crap like Miller light with mango and a huge selection of hard seltzer.  I'm hoping it's driven by the economy ($12 six packs are tough to take) and not a permanent change in user preference?

The new Super G should help, but my secret hope is that it reveals pent-up demand and a bigger player like H-Mart or 99 Ranch decides they should expand here.

[Learning from Other Places]

On 8/20/2019 at 12:34 AM, mpretori said:

LMAO wind tunnel fears!!??

Why does England have so many problems with their high rises? I've never heard of a "deadly down-draft" anywhere else.

[Learning from Other Places]

"Why is Japanese zoning more liberal than U.S. zoning?" is an excellent piece that elaborates on an older blog post that I believe I've previously posted here.

[Learning from Other Places]

I recently had a significant layover in O'Hare after a trip to Southeast Asia and was reminded, once more, of how terrible American airports are at food. Our dining options in the concourse for our flight back home were Chili's Too, McDonald's, a sports bar, takeaway (Chicago-style) pizza, and a bunch of convenience store-type places. This is pretty typical of American airports, I think. Now, compare that to Changi, Incheon, or Hong Kong. Part of this is that those airports are either newer or have been significantly renovated so that their layouts are more sensible than the older American airports; but wouldn't it be fantastic if Charlotte-Douglas could make a name for itself by delivering a dining experience that could compete with those international airports?

[Charlotte's Light Rail: Lynx Blue Line]

58 minutes ago, Windsurfer said:

Like Eastland? ;-)

Not an unfair comparison, but Carolina Place isn't dead yet, might get a light rail stop before it is, and is (frankly) in a much better location with easy access to 485 and 77.

[Charlotte-Douglas Airport (CLT) Expansion]

1 hour ago, TCLT said:

AA or an AA partner (namely JAL) would probably be the only realistic possibility for a passenger flight to East Asia because of the opportunity to connect to destinations beyond CLT.

JAL already has a nearby flight, IAD-NRT. I'll actually be on that Wednesday. That's why I said non-alliance would be the only chance; those top tier, partnered Asian airlines all already have name brand cities (IAD, JFK, ORD) as destinations.

All in all it was a roundabout way to say that I don't think it will happen.

[Charlotte-Douglas Airport (CLT) Expansion]

On 5/17/2019 at 10:45 AM, allthingsplanes said:

They route all of that traffic through JFK or Chicago.  Other traffic goes through LAX.  Dallas has it just from volume of flights they have.

To be frank I'm not sure that we can really expect anything else, unless a non-alliance Asian airline wanted to open an east coast route and found Charlotte cost effective. I can't even imagine who that would be, though. ANA, Air China, and Singapore Airlines are in Star with AA, Cathay and JAL are in oneworld, and China Airlines is in SkyTeam... come on VietJet, I guess?

[Charlotte's Light Rail: Lynx Blue Line]

Downtown Pineville is basically nothing, anyway. It'd be great to see it incorporated in a genuine urban district, but ultimately it's about twenty small downtown buildings that cover a footprint equivalent to two moderately sized modern "megablock" buildings. Carolina Place has more potential as a development parcel and may even be a walkable urban node in the future.

[Charlotte trying to be more bike friendly]

Saw this on Twitter and couldn't resist sharing it here.