asthasr

I put the probability at approximately 0%. Shelby/Cleveland County is very bad at aesthetics.

It is easier and quicker, no doubt about it, for the people parking in the deck. My opinion is just that this ease and quickness comes at a price: first, it is a concession to the developer. "Take the easy route and do not make your streetscape inviting." Second, it allows the people using the deck to see themselves as "apart" from the city. Yes, of course, people can choose to go out to the street and get a coffee if they actively decide to do so; but they aren't doing it on a daily basis. There is friction there, particularly since they aren't acclimatized to the idea to begin with. If you walk a given path every day, you come to view the path you take as part of your world, and it can affect your decision-making. Maybe you see a new vendor set up across the street and you decide to try their sandwiches at lunch; or a new bakery opens; and so on. If you aren't actively using the street, though, you just treat the parking deck and the office as a "node." You drive from home to the deck. Perhaps you sit in your car and post a Tweet about how terrible I-77 South is. You get out. You walk (in the deck) to the elevator, which you take down to floor 3. You walk across the bridge. You swipe your badge and go into the office. Compare this to even a short walk outside. You drive to the deck, go down to ground level, walk out under the sky, smell coffee from the cafe, decide to get something, instagram your croissant, go across the road, swipe your card in the lobby, and go in. Although in actual fact there is very little different, there is still a point of "humanistic friction," a time and place where ad hoc human interaction and interest can occur. This serendipity is part of the life of good urban spaces and helps to make the city better.

Yes, I believe Bras Basah is tolled--and that does help, of course--but I think that even with heavier traffic the pedestrian and transit infrastructure would still function well.

Also, I wanted to link to an "exemplar intersection," one of the types of streetscapes that I think could be Charlotte's model. This one is in Singapore at the intersection of Bencoolen St. and Bras Basah Rd. It's not a tourist area; it's full of ugly, non-historic modern buildings; it doesn't have many of the types of things that would make it "cool." However, it does have excellent transit accesss, bus lanes, bike lanes, protected pedestrian crossings, shade trees, and so on, despite being part of a relatively high-volume street. Here is a street view.

This is the only point on which you and I have a disconnect, I think. Fundamentally I think that the bridges do have an impact. Not necessarily on volume of pedestrians directly; after all, these bridges and tunnels are mostly pretty low-use because they're not visible. Instead, I view it as opportunity cost. When we allow a developer to build a bridge, that's acknowledging "this street is unpleasant to cross, but we're not going to fix it." With these massive development projects, to me it seems like it'd make much more sense to say: "No, guys, look. You are completely reconfiguring everything about this space. You control the pedestrian environment. Make it safe and easy for people to cross the street from the garage to the office so that a pedestrian bridge isn't needed." This won't just take the people who would walk across the bridge and put them on the street, 1:1, but will instead make it more likely that people in general use the space--people who aren't just parking in the garage. If the developer puts in some street trees, a pedestrian crossing island, brick pavement, good signals, maybe a corner cafe, then people can traverse the space easily and it becomes a place where people might want to be. If they put in a pedestrian bridge then the people who park in the garage can cross easily.

There is a good series of articles on Cobb County at Strong Towns: "Cobb County: Addicted to Growth." It's five parts and goes into the insanity of Cobb County's entire project. Another one that might be of interest in light of the "cars > people" discussion on the Legacy Union thread is "The True Costs of Driving" from the Atlantic.

A few points. Why does nobody live in uptown? Part of it is that there isn't enough housing built there. The for-sale options are ridiculously small and/or overpriced, and rentals are too expensive. The way that this will be fixed is to build more housing. Wheelchair-bound people should be served by transit as much as anyone else; more, in fact, because special point to point services should be provided where necessary. You can look at modern cities like Singapore and Seoul for examples of accessible transit. Cars represent a massive expense. Owning, maintaining, insuring, and fueling a car are, in effect, regressive costs. (They are far worse for lower income people than middle and upper income people.) Offering effective ways to avoid needing a car would actually make our city more useful for more people. This is not over a single pedestrian bridge. It's an entire urban design philosophy. In essence, those of us who are in favor of improving the pedestrian/biking experience believe that we can increase the return on investment and value of our downtown core by focusing on those people who are intense users of the downtown core. That can include commuters, but it should not include commuters to the exclusion of all others. I live in a suburb; I expect to be able to use the downtown area, but I don't expect Stonewall or Tryon to allow me to travel 45 miles per hour through downtown.

They will benefit pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users. People who might live a stop or five away on the light rail and commute into uptown and walk from the station to their $40k/year job at BoA, or who might live in lower-cost apartments in "North End" and ride their bike to work. Half a kilometer is not a long walk, and yet people are completely unwilling to walk it here in Charlotte. Why? And why does one mode of transportation -- the least efficient mode that serves the least people with the most investment -- deserve more consideration than all others?

Uptown is tiny. The entirety of the I-277 loop is 1 square mile. The "area of interest," which is to say -- the commercial district from Mint to Davidson and Stonewall to 8th -- is only a square kilometer. You could make the entire area pedestrian only and, if our city was even a quarter as good for pedestrians as many major world cities, the entire Uptown commercial district would be walkable from a peripheral car park. Half a kilometer is considered the "gold standard" for TOD around a station. That means that, frankly, just the CTC/Arena station should serve the entire uptown commercial district. When we talk about "increasing vehicular mobility" versus "improving the pedestrian experience," it must be understood in this context: we have a tiny commercial district which is so pedestrian unfriendly that people are already unwilling to walk through it. Within this space we should be calming traffic, making cars less attractive, making walking more attractive, and so on. Gluing brick to the outside of massive parking garages and putting in expensive pedestrian bridges is not the way to improve this situation.

This is more of a national/regional scale than just urbanism, but it's an interesting video nevertheless.

What, you also decided you didn't want to be thirty-seventh junior assistant architect for lighting placement at Pelli Clarke Pelli for your entire career?

I'm just an interested amateur, but glad to help! It's a fascinating subject... but I decided not to go to arch school after researching the career prospects if you're not well-connected.

Yesterday I used an architectural term which, as far as I know, is unique to me: "modernistic humanism." This is how I think of it: Human-scaled detailing. This means that windows are a good size but are not, generally, glass curtains. If they are, they are very transparent and the floor divisions are obvious. This is the most important point. Textured, less "artificial" claddings. Often very dark trim. There are often similarities to the "Structural Expressionist" style of architecture, but with more naturalistic textures and trim and human scaling of the structure. Examples that I group into this style: Small-paned windows, textured finish, obvious floor divisions. Dark trim. More info. Small, distinct windows. Obvious, humanistic floor divisions. Textured (brick) finish. Dark trim. More info. Distinct windows, obvious floor divisions, textured finished, dark trim. More info. And another at the tower scale, although this one has brutalist and more distinct modernist elements. Obvious floor divisions, dark trim, wood details. More info. By the way, I'd take any of these in Charlotte in a heartbeat. I really like this style! I hope that I'm right in my reading of the elevations of the new building... and I hope that they don't cheap out on the materials.

That is not brutalism. Too many windows; windows are broken into panes; apparent (indicated) textured finish. I'd say this looks like "high rise modernistic humanism," a term which nobody else in the world uses.

There is no demand to live there. There is, however, demand to live near the light rail. In twenty years, I think the area will be completely unrecognizable. I expect all the SFH between Seigle/Pinckney and the rail corridor to be redeveloped.

They went to Asia and learned the wrong lessons.

To be frank, the slowness doesn't surprise me at all. This is a tiny footprint. I'd guess that none of the available contractors have ever built anything like this in such a constrained space.

They will be replaced by modern rolling stock (e.g. more contemporary street cars), but the fundamental problems of shared traffic lanes, frequent stops, and limited speed will remain.

Although I'm a die-hard transit proponent, streetcars, to me, are a joke. More of a tourist amenity than a genuine transit option.

Southend, NODA and Optimist Park can handle a lot more, because they are on the light rail. Our light rail stations are astoundingly underutilized, so essentially any node along them could be massively intensified and provide amenities sufficient for tens of thousands more people to live comfortably along the length of the line. There is, in essence, a tipping point: there will be a period of pain as the city grows because owning a car is still a necessity. The streets cannot and can never handle a massive influx of new traffic; but at some point, that becomes moot, because owning a car will become unnecessary in order to live there. Plaza-Midwood and Elizabeth, on the other hand, are not within comfortable use radius of the light rail and thus other serious transit must be considered before they are heavily intensified.

It's not as if we individually voted for nine positions, so chastising people for a 9-0 council is a bit weird. Field better candidates! I would've voted for Ridenhour over his opponent, but that's not my district... and in my district I was thrilled to vote against Bill James.

At least it's different. And appears to have texture. The name is ridiculous, though...

YOU SUCK but no, actually I forgot that UNC has "Urban Planning" and not Arch. Oops!

I really appreciate what it does as a piece of development. The utility of a full size grocery store, apartments right on transit, and activation of a pitiful part of town... all are really positive! It'd just be nice if it had design. Or texture. Or shape. Or... you know, paint. I don't want Crescent to die, but it wouldn't hurt them to go to Chapel Hill and wave some money at some of the talented grad students in the architecture school. (And then let them actually architect.)

As always, that's a valid criticism of looking at other, successful urban places; but it's still a chicken-and-egg problem. We are growing, and we can look at places like this to see what they have that we don't. Thus the takeaways: make the areas around our TODs as dense as possible. Make sure commercial spaces can be subdivided and small spaces can be effectively used. Allow a variety of sidewalk uses. Save money, if necessary, on decoration. Just make sure the fabric is viable.