If you're like me you often find comfort in familiar places or songs. I drive around Charlotte and find nothing is familiar and that the rudeness of Charlotte's transplant drivers is appalling.
I'm asked often what do I think about all the growth in Charlotte? My answer is always the same "I cry a lot."
Yes, I'm that rare Charlotte Native, American by Birth and Southern by the Grace of God.
So yeah I'm old and I'm jaded and have "The Low Spark" by Traffic is on my spotify. It runs 11:42 which is how long it used to take me to get to my parent's farm in Waxhaw. It now takes me nearly forty minutes (See Closer to Home Grand Funk Railroad 44:27)
But it's not the small town feel of a Southern City that I miss or the lack of familaty of a street I've traveled a thousand times that makes me weep. It is the utterly insane lack of planning our Charlotte City Council has put upon our citizens with absolutely zero understanding of our traffic in South Charlotte.
It is not just Charlotte City Council, blame belongs to Developers, CDOT and NCDOT as well, for they are masters of mediocrity.
Now consider this, there are 15 development projects either approved and under construction or rezoning petitions up for approval that will generate at minimum 65,381 Vehicle Trips Per Day in South Charlotte alone!
We could discuss the method of calculating VTD (Vehicle Trips Daily) and point out the single family homes account for 10 while apartments only account for 4.2 but let's use their formula and save the argument that a condo owner age 30 is more likely to make multiple outings daily than a retired couple who live at their beach house half the year. But there's no point. Let's just say the numbers are crazy low and far from any real life numbers.
Charlotte traffic is a mess. Roads that should have been improved years ago are still decades away from from even consideration of improvement. Most of Charlotte's roads are state controlled and Raleigh hates Charlotte. So for some reason Charlotte City Council creates problems that they can't even fix.
Here are the traffic study numbers in the 28277 zip code for projects under construction or up for consideration. If they are all completed and approved your Charlotte City Council will dump another 65,381 cars on South Charlotte streets within the next 18-24 months.
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The largest of these projects is the Northwood "redevelopment" of Ballantyne the former Bissell property and golf course which will add 41,618 cars daily to the already jammed Johnston Road / Lancaster Highway spilling east along Endhaven to Elm Lane and north towards Highway 51. Ed Driggs actually supported this and invited Northwood to a "coffee" where the poor guy was booed and needed a police escort to leave St. Matthews Church.
If you needed any example of why new and improved is not necessarily better look at Ballantyne Commons Parkway and Johnston Road, where Northwood eliminated the steel traffic signal poles and replaced them with wires.
You might also notice cuts in the landscaping maintenance along Johnston Road and 485 or the entire length of Ballantyne Commons Parkway. They no longer even mow the grass at 485 like Bissel did for two decades.
The second largest is Cato Farms Childress Klein which will plop nearly a 1,000 apartments into the middle of a single family detached development. This project will push 1/2 of their 6000 plus cars out onto Tom Short Road to find their way up Rea Road avoiding nightmarish Providence.
Then there's the Rea Road Gillespie Property surrounded by wetlands and FEMA Floodplain on three sides. This magical oasis of natural forest is targeted to be wiped out and in it's place a 53 acre apartment complex and 4,000 cars dumped into the traffic along Rea Road and narrow Elm Lane.
7 comments:
I hope the proposal goes through and we finally see traffic improvements to help relieve congestion. It sounds like the environment wins with the proposal saving trees, and the pond revitalization. What's the big deal with apartments behind a wide buffer of trees? We will not even notice anything changed except that traffic has improved.
Vote YES to save more trees!
Got to love a developer who has to post complete fabrications to save his project that is in a death spiral.
The only tree save is in the FEMA Flood Zone and a narrow 50 foot buffer on the south end of the property. Not one of the traffic "improvements" will fix anything and at least two of the proposals will make traffic more hazardous to pedestrian traffic. Many of the improvements are required of even a single family detached development.
The best way to save more trees is to VOTE NO.
Pond Revitalization? You mean turn the pond into a retention pond to avoid having to build several around the property.
I think the February 16th poster has the mental acuity of a rodent. There are zero buffers and there are zero beneficial traffic improvements planned. Ed Driggs slid the Ballantyne Reimagined rezoning request in during covid lock down and we are going to pay with an additional 60,000 cars clogging our streets. Good luck Charlotte.
Traffic is just going to get worse. We already have the highest population per acre in the state I think it is insane to try and pack more people into Charlotte. What's the point?
So we should stop all growth? Not happening, Charlotte is going to grow, so we need to deal with that as much as it sucks. I moved to south Charlotte to get out of the City and it is time to move again soon. The developer made it very clear in the meeting and after the meeting that the property is going to get developed. Ed made it clear that we need to negotiate to get something so I support 30% tree save versus the 12% required by our genius City staff. They also said and their engineer said that they will not have to do the traffic improvements at 51 if they do by-right, saving a ton of money. They are also not going to rebuild the Gillespie pond dam if they lose, as that was expensive, meaning no more pond. I am all for a fight, but what does losing mean? I have seen the plan with the tree save on it, obviously many of you have not. Ask to see it as Piper Leadership has it. There was a huge buffer on Rea and the pond was preserved. They were vague as to what the fall back plan was, but it was clear they were going to go forward with it if they lose. My guess is it will look like the development on Endhaven-graded flat from one side to the other. Why are we only hearing about this from a blog and not neighborhood leadership or Driggs?
Well for one Driggs is not a leader if you haven't noticed yet. He's a bureaucrat.
They might have said but they are wrong. The still have to do a traffic study and two years later it will be worse.
There is no tree save along Elm or Rea only the FEMA Flood area and 50 ft buffer on the sound side.
They need the pond for stormwater.
They still have to do traffic improvements.
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