asthasr

Why do people besides car drivers feel that they deserve a piece of the street? The street is just for moving cars and trucks as quickly as possible. Anything else is communism.

It's inevitable, when the lower level teams are treated as simple feeders for the major league team. What baseball needs is promotion/relegation. It'd actually help all of our major leagues (except the NFL) in terms of quality and probably fan involvement -- but you'll never see it because we'd rather have legally protected monopolies.

I'd love to be able to spend some significant time there. I think there's a lot that can be learned from their patterns that hasn't really been studied yet; for example, their urban farms in the "suburbs," their extremely narrow streets in residential areas, their "good enough" infrastructure that saves on maintenance costs, and their ad hoc urban green space.

I had the "opportunity" to witness a Charlotte special: someone running a red light and ramming into someone trying to turn left. Just fantastic. Sure am glad nobody in our fair city stops for red lights!

This is an interesting project in Singapore, the "Tree House."

The vast majority of "Silicon Valley" is suburbia taken to its logical extreme. If you haven't been there, I posted somewhere in this thread about it. Most of the area is cheek-to-jowl single family homes and single use zoning, of course with no meaningful transit, punctuated by a large-scale grid of four to six lane "arterial" roads that connect, in turn, to controlled access freeways: Checking Zillow quickly, most of the estimated home prices in this area seem to be around $2 million. One is for rent: This palatial 4 BR, 1500 sq. ft. house is listed as renting for $4300 a month.

I do too. However, given our population growth, this is the better option in my opinion. Warehouses and other businesses that require external mobility should be on the edge of the city, that's their function. The areas closer to the dense core (and I'm not that familiar with Statesville but I note that it's within 2.5 miles of Trade & Tryon as far up as Atando) should encourage people to live within it. That way they can live in townhouses, duplexes, condos, or apartments and use something other than a car to get to their jobs. To me, this seems more like "traditional" development than the sprawl that we've built to this point. On the contrary, I think that unbounded accommodation of traffic backfires. For one thing, maintenance comes due, and we have some vast amount of infrastructural maintenance that will never be funded. Development sprawls out infinitely, until a tipping point occurs where traffic is so bad that even temporary band-aids are no longer available, and the city starts to choke on it. (Look at Los Angeles and Atlanta.) Transportation is a hard problem: there is no solution that is going to make it possible for everyone to be happy. But there's value in recognizing that a simple status quo approach simply cannot work (once again, LA and Atlanta), so new approaches need to be investigated and tried.

As a software developer, when I get a recruiter calling or emailing me I always ask: Is this company located in the Bay Area? (if yes) Is the company open to remote work? (if yes) Is there a location-based salary adjustment? (if yes) What is it? The number of times that recruiters have practically begged me to consider relocation is... probably surprising to people outside the industry. Google recruiters email me once a year to ask if I still won't move (apparently there's a note in my file). People see "high" salaries and they simply don't understand the amazingly high cost of living in the Bay Area, and many Bay Area denizens don't understand the relatively low quality of life that cost of living buys them. There's a lot of propaganda (self-directed, more than organized) about California weather and the California lifestyle that, frankly, is pretty damn irrelevant when you're paying $2800 for a 2BR apartment and still have a 90-minute commute sitting in the dust and smog on 680.

So here you've hit upon a chicken and egg problem. Development is driven by infrastructure. You can see that in the development of South End around the light rail stations or in the far-flung exurbs along our interstates. In our case, we have a situation where almost all of our infrastructure favors cars and low density development, and it would be a good idea to change that for various reasons (public health, environmental concerns, economic concerns, etc.). Things like road diets, even of major arteries, are part of that equation. Undoubtedly it's painful, but what should happen is that bicycle trips become more frequent as people begin to "price" the traffic into their travel plans and as people and businesses make their decisions based on the infrastructure. Honestly, these types of "arteries" are, in my opinion, the worst roads in our built environment, because they try to be all things to all people. South Boulevard, 51, Park Road, and so on--all of them are combinations of street and road and serve neither function well. I expect that we will see further road diets on some of them, or else the gradual control of access to them (similar to independence), depending on how important they are. There's an awful neologism for them that Strong Towns came up with, "stroad." They have an article and video here.

Found this gallery of before/after changes in street view, where road diets and other pedestrianization projects have been enacted. It's really amazing how hideous places can become beautiful places...

The heck is up with Charlotte Yelp? It seems like reviews are completely disconnected from actual quality. This wasn't the case a few years ago...

I haven't. However safe a city might overall might be, liminal spaces under highways... well, I just think they provide opportunity.

I really dislike this project, frankly, and think it'll probably be crime-ridden. That said, it's interesting as an illustration of how much usable space these sorts of elevated expressways really eat up: The Bentway, Toronto.

Frankly, I love this building. Simple and practical, but attractive. Not much opportunity for SouthParking it.

Agreed. I am really skeptical of their ability to control loss with this though. NFC on a phone is really janky right now, and it's hard to see how this will be able to work at scale without serious improvements in the technology.

Fair comments. I am familiar with the "Asian style" "convenience store," which doesn't have any of those negative connotations attached to them. They focus on prepared foods, fresh necessities, and so on. Here's a representative video.

You're right, many NIMBYs are never going to accept anything new. So, what, do we just hang it up and say that 1950s-2000s urbanism is the best it's going to get? I think that's silly. Plan the thing as an amenity in a new neighborhoods and advertise it as such. Close it at a reasonable hour. Limit exterior lighting. Don't build parking, so people outside the neighborhood don't drive to it.

I believe so (to both). Convenience is underrated/misunderstood in our current scheme of centralized distribution; the difference between a "convenient" trip to a large grocery store (which typically takes 45 minutes to an hour) and a five minute walk to and from a neighborhood convenience store is huge. Stock basic necessities (bread, milk, cereal, juice, beer) and some prepared foods in the style of an Asian 7-11, in a neighborhood setting, and I think that store would be very popular. Furthermore, even if it's not profitable on its own merits, it might be worth a developer's or property manager's while to subsidize it simply because of its status as an amenity for the building or neighborhood.

These "new urbanist" suburbs are nice and all, but I hope that we'll eventually start seeing some that are actually formatted for other developers to "hook onto" the street and sidewalk grids. Most of them are still inward-facing and connected to an arterial. That might look nice with smaller setbacks and narrower lots (it does look nice, in fact), but the urban fabric is what really makes a neighborhood walkable, in my opinion. I think the city could require that and get reasonable results. Another thing is that we need smaller grocery stores. We have very few "convenience stores" that aren't attached to gas stations. I think a lot of these neighborhoods could actually support one in the middle of the neighborhood. It's bizarre to have all the commercial along the outside edge; the innermost houses could be a half mile from the "walkable" commercial strip!

Here's a lovely little small-footprint infill building in Philadelphia. It has a project page on ArchDaily and a more narrative description on TreeHugger. The location is in Brewerytown, which is along the western edge of North Philly, the current frontier of gentrification, adjacent to the Fairmount/Art Museum neighborhood. I don't know the exact location of this project, but a representative street view shows just how narrow some of these plots are and how badly the area needs revitalization. Of course, Charlotte doesn't have much of this type of development (what we have, we've torn down), but I must say that I find the project really impressive for the US. It's very much a modern Asian style of construction and treatment of space. One thing that I'm skeptical about is the fire safety, unfortunately. I don't believe that wall-to-wall lumber and cladding houses like this are a good idea. Philadelphia's row houses are historically concrete and masonry, with pretty strong individual walls between them. The same is true in many other places that build narrow-footprint "mini-towers" like this. It's hard to see how you'd achieve genuine fire safety in a neighborhood constructed of fifty copies of this tower.

Normal people who grew up in the era of automobile romanticism aren't conditioned to think about it like this. Driving to work is an inevitability. Driving on errands is an inevitability. They see a household as an inevitable traffic source and usually don't think about offices as sources of traffic even though they "collect" trips from many household nodes.

Awesome! Anyone else think it'd look great for Hearst to have lights on the 'hooks' at the bottom setback? pointing upward, of course.

The wife and I went to see what Hawkers looked like last night, but the wait for two people was over two hours. That's absurd, so we kept walking and went to Bang Bang Burgers Southend. We love the Elizabeth location (it's our go to burger), but we both agreed that the South End location was not as good, sadly.

I found a good, short article on the subject: "9 Elements of Successful Small Parks and Plazas." There's a quote in there that I think sums up the issue: "Places thrive when users have a range of reasons to be there." That's something that I think Charlotte really struggles with in its open space. Recently I served on a jury. There's a lovely plaza in front of the government building and, for the entire week that I was on the jury, I walked through it every day. The shame of it is that if there were other office buildings, lunch spots, and so on around that plaza, it'd likely do very well, but despite having a nice environment and even some food trucks for the office workers and the like, it was dead. You'd see five or six people in the entire space, half of them wearing the "Don't talk to me!" JUROR badges, and the other half harried-looking lawyers walking quickly from one office to another.

I thought I'd post something over here about what I think makes Plazas work. Of course there are a lot of more technical articles and even books on this subject--even a documentary, which I believe was posted earlier in this thread--but fundamentally I believe there are two primary ingredients for a good plaza: innate beauty and functionality. The most beautiful plazas in the world can stand on their own as attractions. Think of the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca: or the Piazza Navona in Rome: Of course these places are successful. People would be attracted to them purely because of their inherent beauty. There are, however, less inherently beautiful places that I also consider successful plazas. One is the relatively new Nguyễn Huệ walking street in Ho Chi Minh City: another is the even more pedestrian (ha!) plaza in front of Central World in Bangkok (pictured here with a festival in progress and then without): These are not particularly "beautiful" inherently. They have fountains and other amenities, but they're not destinations. Still, they provide functionality and they serve as places that people want to be and that can be used for fun events and festivals. The keys are that they're visually and physically separated from cars driving around; they're big enough to feel like a "place" in themselves, but small enough to feel distinct and enclosed. In Charlotte, for whatever reason, all of our "Plazas" seem to be rump space bumping up against a road. They're not insulated from traffic, they don't feel like places on their own, they don't have enough inherent beauty to attract people to them, and they don't offer enough space to have real events centered around them. This really feels like something that major developers are going to need to manage and coordinate between themselves; someone could fill a huge empty niche in our cityscape.