Charlotte's Light Rail: Lynx Blue Line

[kermit]

BLE Construction update: 

Cat wires have been strung up to 25th st station, only a few finishing touches to the wires in this section remain. The North storage yard is beginning to get fleshed out with tracks and I imagine the wiring crew will start work on the yard electrification before the end of the week. Overall things are really shaping up between 7th and 25th.  

Edit: oops, on my drive home I noticed that there are still no wires (or masts) from 11th to 16th street.

Major steel work on the bridge over Craighead / NCRR is complete -- the tracks follow a groovy looking S shape. (sorry no photo)

Further North, Old Concord rd has been fully reopened to Tryon (this was about a week ago). To my surprise you can now get a peek of the Old Concord Station canopies from the road. Sorry about the image quality. I believe the road cut in the foreground will be a station access road (not certain about this)

Edited February 29, 2016 by kermit

[SgtCampsalot]

^Nice. I've been eager to see the new road connection that will be made from Old Concord Rd to Eastway behind the shopping center.

[Spartan]

On 2/25/2016 at 9:22 AM, tozmervo said:

The project page shows that it was funded in a 2014 referendum, but I could have sworn it was to be funded in a bond package this year. Either way, it's considered an NECI project: http://charmeck.org/city/charlotte/epm/Projects/Transportation/Pages/25th-Street-Streetscape.aspx

Partially funded in 2014. The bond referendum was for a pot of money to start all of the NECI projects. The city will need future bonds to finish the project. NECI is such a large collection of projects that they needed to spread the funding out over several bond cycles.

On 2/25/2016 at 11:31 AM, tozmervo said:

A while back I was talking to someone in the know, and the timeline was a bit beyond the BLE opening, but not too far beyond. 

Yep. The timelines were messed up because the city didn't issue bonds on 2012 (a hold over from the recession) and therefore was not able to fund the needed design work during that time.

[KulBC]

Neat detail at the Old Concord Rd. Bridge

JW Clay Station makes this area feel less suburban in person. 

Not sure what this will be, but this was parked in the median across from the JW Clay garage. Maybe it's the bridge between the garage and stairs? 

Retail spots in the bottom of the JW Clay garage? 

The bridge over Harris and Tryon is very long in person. It has about three large sections (two pictured), all which have this slight arch unlike the other bridges throughout the project.  

Bridge over Craighead- The "S"curve is more apparent when you drive under it. Notice the positioning of the horizontal beams in relation to the columns. 

[nmundo]

13 hours ago, KulBC said:

Not sure what this will be, but this was parked in the median across from the JW Clay garage. Maybe it's the bridge between the garage and stairs? 

Those do seem to be the beams for the bridge between the station and the garage especially since their arrival time aligns with this:

Also got some photos of the tunnel under Tryon and the bridge to campus. It was late at night so the quality isn't great but I'm surprised at how massive the tunnel feels.

 

Edited March 1, 2016 by Hector Mundo
Fixed tweet

[nmundo]

Taken at around 9pm from Tryon @ Institute Circle

[kermit]

work on the rail trail has begun at 8th street!

[tozmervo]

CATS posted a time-lapse of the Harris Blvd girders going up for the BLE. Pretty cool! 

 

[kermit]

less cool, but also at night (seems to be a trend):

Crossing gates are now up at 8th street.

 

[videtur quam contuor]

Engineers, Represent!

[Desert Power]

On 2/29/2016 at 10:33 PM, dubone said:

25th Street Station is the opposite of odd.   The transit-oriented development potential is the highest around that location.   They're not planning to serve the transit needs of trailer container and truck parking lot businesses, they are looking at that whole zone as the primary redevelopment zone as the area transitions from industrial intermodal transportation businesses to urban mixed use.   This will clearly be the most comparable to south end density growth in NoDa, as the area around 36th is very limited in area.  (Hopefully NoDa will pull better aesthetic designs, though). 

Certainly less density potential when compared to 36th street.  Tons of space to be redeveloped towards Tryon on 36th and lots of infill underway towards Davidson.  Even if everything on Brevard flips to good TODs, the rail/Amtrak presence to the West and Matheson bridge will be limiting factors.

[SgtCampsalot]

Well the alternative would be no station from Parkwood (or even 16th St) to 36th St. Which doesn't make much sense.

[dubone]

Well, it is being built, and like all design decisions, not everyone will be happy.    But the designers here know the potential for the area west of Cordelia and Villa Heights, and the spacing of the stations are consistent with what is appropriate for light rail, so they put it in that section.   They studied the issue, held public feedback meetings on the issue, certified the design with city planning, ran computer models of ridership, got it funded, got construction bids, and started building it.   There is always a good time to complain on the internet, but the practical time would be 4 years ago in a public meeting.   

The rail yard will be a limiting factor no matter what, so they will not further limit the area by having a light rail go through and not stop.   It is already growing and new developments are planned around Amelies, so the station will have much more TOD than many other stations on the northeast extension.    Of course 36th being the heart of NoDa will have far more going for it, but it easily warranted a stop. 

[tozmervo]

A few snaps from a nice long walk today.

In order: the BLE along Brevard st, 25th st station in the distance

Another detail shot of the retaining walls

The Craighead bridge

And finally, Sugar Creek station and the construction for its accompanying parking deck. I'm standing in the middle of closed Sugar Creek to take this shot, you can also see the north side of the Craighead bridge coming back to grade

[nmundo]

The structure for the pedestrian bridge at University City Blvd station is going up. Also I saw a couple of the catenary poles are up near Tom Hunter along with there being rails lined up between there and the Old Concord bridge. The whole N Tryon section will probably be easily identifiable as a rail line soon as opposed to a trench down the middle of the street.

[Guest StuckInASuburb]

2 hours ago, nmundo said:

StuckInASuburb: I can confirm today that they had the station canopies  and the bridge over hwy 29

Edited March 9, 2016 by StuckInASuburb

[AP3]

I got a picture of the bridge/station the other day and meant to post. Also snapped a picture of the bridge over Harris.

[dcharlotte]

On 3/5/2016 at 4:52 PM, tozmervo said:

 

 

MORE POWER LINES PLEASE. 

[tozmervo]

^Don't worry, the cantenary lines will be installed very soon

[ChessieCat]

 

On 2/29/2016 at 10:33 PM, dubone said:

25th Street Station is the opposite of odd.   The transit-oriented development potential is the highest around that location.   They're not planning to serve the transit needs of trailer container and truck parking lot businesses, they are looking at that whole zone as the primary redevelopment zone as the area transitions from industrial intermodal transportation businesses to urban mixed use.   This will clearly be the most comparable to south end density growth in NoDa, as the area around 36th is very limited in area.  (Hopefully NoDa will pull better aesthetic designs, though). 

 

They originally had the station at 28th, but shifted it south a bit to be in the middle of this clear redevelopment zone.     Villa Heights will clearly also attract investment and this is their station.  25th will be bridged soon and with it turning into Everett Place, connections are far shorter into Villa Heights with the 25th street location.  

 

 

So has CATS exercised its option to buy the vacated NS intermodal yard next to Parkwood Ave? What are plans for the site?

Edited March 10, 2016 by ChessieCat
duplicate post

[SgtCampsalot]

17 minutes ago, ChessieCat said:

 

So has CATS exercised its option to buy the vacated NS intermodal yard next to Parkwood Ave? What are plans for the site?

A good chunk of the non-rail portions (where the semi trucks used to go) will be another LRT maintenance facility, like in South End. The rest will likely be a token amount for some kind of development (at least as of 2 years ago).

Edited March 10, 2016 by SgtCampsalot

[kermit]

^yep, they are already building tracks on it for the North Storage Yard which is part of the BLE.

some other parts of the yard will be used for a new NS bulk loading faciliy (dust!) and the planned passenger rail bypass tracks for the yard. There will be no TOD in the former yard area.

Edited March 10, 2016 by kermit

[kermit]

here is a chart I put together of household incomes within 1/2 mile of Blue Line and BLE stops using 2014 median HH income data from Popstats / Synergos.

Beware, 1/2 mile is a very small, in some cases there are relatively few households in these radaii. The other thing I discovered while collecting the data is that the distance seperating East/West and New Bern stations is, by far, the largest on the Blue Line. 

I am trying to find a historic data set that is compatible so I can show the change in incomes since 2007 -- maybe next week.

(format for graphic was blatantly cribbed from an LA Times story on transit last week).

Edited March 11, 2016 by kermit

[archiham04]

Awesome info...   

It would also be interesting to see data  from the following years (didn't research these dates by the way... just going from memory)
1994: 5 years prior to approval of sales tax

1999: year voters approved sales tax to build the line

2005: year construction started

I am interested to see what the effect of the future promise might have been

Edited March 14, 2016 by archiham04

[kermit]

OK, I found some median HH income data for 1999 from the Neighborhood Quality of Life folks and slapped together a graphic showing median HH income change 1999-2015. Again the data are for the 1/2 surrounding each station stop (I did not include the BLE on this graphic).

The 1999 NQL data does have a few flaws (so much so that I decided not to use their median home value data -- Brookside was listed as having $999,999 median priced homes!). For the income data the area of biggest concern is the omission of data from some NQAs within 277, I think the result of this is that 1999 incomes at 7th, CTC and 3rd are somewhat lower than (I think) they should be (so I suspect those change levels are slightly higher than reality would reflect). I am looking for a source of shapefiles with the census data from 2000 and will modify if I can easily get my hands on them.

I don't like this graphic as much as the straight income chart posted above, it suggests causality where I don't think its appropriate (the BLE was certainly not the only cause of increases incomes uptown and in Southend) and it just tells us what we already know. Lots of people with good jobs are flocking to the North end of the line and the South end has been seeing demographic decline, shrug.

I would bet dollars to doughnuts that we will see the same pattern on the BLE in 10 years.

[EDIT: hold the phone -- calculation errors. revised graphic is posted on the next page]

grodney (his message is on the next page) is right, I had some math mistakes (got this tangled up with my other project on income change). My source data are below, I'll remake the figure tomorrow.

Edited March 16, 2016 by kermit