Charlotte (squints) has to focus on roads so it doesn’t turn into (checks notes) Atlanta?
Building new roads and widening others almost always makes traffic worse. Ask, um, Atlanta.
I’m a little bit late to this, but here’s a quote from North Carolina’s outgoing Speaker of the House about his desire to use state transportation money in Charlotte to build bigger, wider roads:
"We do not want to be Atlanta with the traffic mess," [Tim] Moore told Axios after the event. "We have to stay on top of it. You know, Atlanta put a lot of money into ... the rapid transit that they have. It still has super low ridership."
He also joked about riding to the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance event on a mountain bike. Moore said he’s familiar with Charlotte’s traffic problems because he’s there almost every day, and that he’s proud that the state’s going to redo what he called the “absolute goat rodeo of an intersection that is 85 and 485.”
As for the Atlanta thing, the mayor’s spokesperson responded by asking: “Who is Tim Moore again?”
But, yes, okay, sure, Charlotte’s traffic is bad, because a lot of people are moving there. Plus, the people who work there but can’t afford to live there (or just want to live further out for tax/school/bigger house/pygmy goat reasons) now have to drive in from further away. You can’t just bulldoze your way through neighborhoods to build new roads because the last time people did that, it ruined big chunks of cities for generations.
Like, Atlanta! They built big new interstates there in the 1950s, one of which was deliberately laid down to create a border between Black and White neighborhoods. Historian Kevin Kruse took a deep look at Atlanta’s segregation and traffic issues. His New York Times story is worth reading in full, but here’s the gist: In the 1950s, people wanted bigger, faster roads, so Atlanta built them. But those roads were poorly laid out, and then caused White people to move to the northern suburbs, which caused traffic jams on those new roads. So then the roads had to get wider, which led people to think that the wider roads would make a suburban commute easier, which clogged those new wide roads even more. The solution was to build MARTA, a mass transit rail line, but since the actual city of Atlanta has a small footprint, it needed mostly White suburbs to buy in to make it effective. They did not buy in! They thought, in effect, that poor people would use it, so they blocked it. So MARTA today is a bit of a punchline, because it isn’t big enough to really give people a better alternative to sitting in traffic.
For what it’s worth, the Downtown Connector through midtown Atlanta now has 14 lanes of traffic, and regularly sees traffic backups of three miles or more.
But Charlotte’s built different, you say (It wasn’t, but okay, let’s just say that it was). There is some truth to the fact that today’s Charlotte isn’t set up like Atlanta, as evidenced by this deep dive from Ari Meier of Insight22 Analytics. For one thing, Charlotte has annexed a lot of land over the years, so its city limits make it 175 square miles larger than Atlanta (which could annex all of the unincorporated parts of its neighbor, Cobb County, and still be smaller than Charlotte). The bigger footprint also makes its population nearly twice that of Atlanta’s, although Charlotte is less dense and its metro area is less than half the size. (It’s also unfair to say MARTA has “super low” ridership since, controlling for those variables, it’s more popular than the Charlotte Area Transit System).
Because the City of Charlotte is bigger, it doesn’t have to rely on a Balkanized network of small suburbs to play ball to handle problems like, say, closing schools and salting roads before a snowstorm. Ten years ago, two inches of snow effectively paralyzed Atlanta, caused thousands of schoolkids to have to stay the night separated from their parents, and left some people trapped in their cars for 20 hours. Waffle Houses, like they do, stayed open. A week later, Charlotte got eight inches of snow, shut things down early, and largely avoided the worst effects. I took a more nuanced look at this back then for Charlotte magazine, noting the role that sprawl, timing, commuting patterns and cautiousness played.
Side note: That same snowstorm also gave us this legendary picture from Raleigh:
Anyhow! Charlotte has a light rail system and has long talked about building a commuter line up north toward Mooresville, and the railroad company that owns the tracks might be willing to play ball (at last). There are some other alternatives in place. But, it’s common knowledge that building more roads alone doesn’t reduce traffic. It often makes things worse. In 2015, when the last leg of Charlotte’s outerbelt opened on the north side of town, I referred to the concept of induced demand while noting that widening projects on 485 did not actually cut a dent into traffic:
More roads or wider highways cause people to drive more and further than they had before. You wouldn't have taken 485 before, but now that it's wider, traffic has to be better right? You and hundreds, or even thousands of drivers are having that exact thought. And now your cars are stuck in traffic too.
My schtick was to call 485 the Anakin Skywalker of Highways, which I still think is true. People have tried for years to upgrade that road to Jedi status, and it inevitably turns to the Dark Side anyway. Put another way: People were gonna love that new northern stretch of 485 before it got clogged, and then they were gonna hate it. That was nine years ago, and since it opened, parts of that road now get more than 100,000 cars on it per day, making it one of the busier highways in Charlotte. (By comparison, I-77 between Uptown and I-85 has had 183,000 cars/day on it in years past.) You could say that it got busy because there was obviously a need for it. You could also say that a new road drove development in that area, which made problems worse. Those two straw men I just conjured up could argue about this all day.
Now, look. I’m not an urban planner. If these problems were easy to solve, people would have solved them by now! But it’s pretty obvious that you can’t fix traffic problems simply by building or widening roads. It’s also disingenuous to say that an alternative just won’t work while you refuse to give it the resources necessary to allow it to work. That would be like complaining that your car engine seized up while ignoring the fact that you refused to pay to put motor oil in it.
It would seem to me that at some point, traffic is going to get worse no matter what you do, and that you’re going to wish, someday, that you’d had the forethought to create other options. Sure, Washington, D.C. congestion is godawful, but at least it created a regional Metro system to give you another way to get around. Tim Moore is probably going to be in Congress next year. He might want to check it out.
I lived in Pineville when they began 485. We used to go fly kites up on the graded areas on weekends. We noted that it looked as though it was only being built four lanes wide and thought whoever made that decision must be the dumbest group of planners Charlotte could have possibly found. And I was right! It was too crowded from the first day it opened.
Great article and all true. I was an urban planner for a short time and can absolutely tell you the ONLY way to improve mobility is to invest in public transportation and build dense, multi-modal developments around the stations.