Charlotte, NC

On Friday night I did a bike/ped count at the Birdsong Brewery, which I’d been told was the place to see lots of bikes. The count turned out to be as just as fruitless as the others I’d done (a total of four bike riders in two hours), but the trip was fruitful. Even though I’d only been in town a few days, there were several people at the bar who I had already met. While I was there, a couple more people from the cycling community joined us, and we had some good conversations about cycling, Charlotte, and my impressions of my findings so far.

Birdsong Brewery

After a while, the group checked Strava to find their other cycling friends, who turned out to be at a different brewery. Most of the group went off to meet up with them there. Near the end of my count time, Pam rolled up, and we rode back to her place so I could drop off the bike she’d loaned me.

On our ride, Pam asked what I’d found so far, and I reflected on the idea that the cycling scene in Charlotte feels a little like it’s in a Golden Age. It is a tight-knit group of people bound together by a common interest which separates them from the mainstream culture of the place. They all know each other, spend time together, and work towards shared goals. They don’t always agree; the vehicular cycling vs. infrastructure advocacy divide is notable. But they identify as part of the same community in a way that is no longer as true in the Bay Area, or other places where utility cycling may be more mature. The community is marginalized, but that brings them closer together.

A Golden Age creates many opportunities to do great things. I’ll be interested to see how it progresses in Charlotte.

Another thing I’m doing in my travel is bike and pedestrian counts at selected parts of the city transportation network. The data that exists on cycling volumes in different cities is very spotty; the national American Community Survey data only covers work commute cycling and isn’t spatially located within the city. Some cities also collect count data, but there is no national standard, and different cities have very different count programs. The National Bike and Pedestrian Documentation project is an attempt to regularize the collection and storage of count information, and I’m using NBPD’s methods and forms to conduct counts in the cities I’m visiting.

Basically, that involves sitting somewhere for two hours and counting the bicyclists and pedestrians (broken down by gender) who pass by an imaginary line across the street and sidewalk. Count instances are divided into 15-minute periods. After completion, counts will be uploaded to the NBPD database, where they can contribute to comparisons within the city and between cities.

Example NBDP screenline count form

One shortcoming I’m motivated by is the relative lack of data on non-commute utility cycling. It feels to me like cycling to cafes, restaurants, grocery stores, and other short-range trips has increased significantly in the past 10 years in the Bay Area, and my hypothesis is that this increase is connected to the rise of bike culture in the U.S.

So in Charlotte, in addition to conducting counts downtown, I tried a hip restaurant/cafe district and a Bike Benefits brew pub which supports cycling events (and lights up on Strava’s heat maps).

Unfortunately, the location didn’t seem to matter much; in none of the places I conducted a count in Charlotte did I see more than 5 bikes in a 2-hour period. This was consistent with my experience on the road. I rode over 100km around the city, and seeing another cyclist was a rare event in my surveys. ACS has Charlotte’s mode share at 0.4%, and I didn’t find any evidence that there were secret pockets of utility cycling that ACS is missing.

Turn onto Little Sugar Creek Greenway

Charlotte is putting a lot of effort into developing greenways with multi-use paths. It seems like their political climate makes it easier to sell creek daylighting and greenway projects than bike-oriented road projects, but for utility cyclists, the creek paths are a mixed bag. One thing I immediately noticed in surveying them is that they’re poorly connected to the street grid. Leaving downtown on Third Street, a designated bikeway, the bridge crosses over the greenway, but doesn’t interact with it. There’s no signage as you pass by, and to get onto it you have to do an awkward hairpin turn into a driveway and down a sidewalk.

This kind of disconnection continues as you use the greenway. I was heading to Target to buy a GoPro battery (those things drain faster than I expected, even shooting stills), and from the greenway, even though you’re passing right by the shopping center, there is no obvious connection to bike up to the street–just several sets of stairs. Eventually I found a narrow sidewalk through a playground area that let me get to the shopping center without hauling the bike up stairs. The design almost seems intentionally keeping the greenway traffic separate from the street traffic.

Debris pile on greenway

There were also discontinuities on the path itself. A pile of construction rocks blocked half of the path at one point; mud from an earlier flood filled the path underneath one of the bridges. (Pam said that portions of the pathway are often closed for flooding).

The impression I get is that the idea of a greenway is more politically palatable than the idea of a utility bikeway, and that the languaging and design of the greenway is oriented towards recreational cyclists. Utility cyclists may use portions of the greenway where they are effective, but in general, utility cyclists want their routes to be reliable. If these facilities are going to be identified as part of the transportation network, they need to be treated as any other transportation facility would be; that would require enforcement of obstruction codes, for example.

Mud under bridge on greenway

The flooding problem is more fundamental. The creek is an attractive route because waterways tend to connect interesting places, and creek daylighting projects can be marketed based on being green/sustainable/resilient. But the creek is crossed by multiple arterials, and at each one the pathway has to go either over, under, or through. Over is too expensive, through (at-grade crossings) create difficult and unpleasant intersections, so often the design settles for going under. The problem with that is the road bed height is set based on the creek flood stage, so a pathway 10 feed below the road bed will be underwater a lot.

After the breakfast meetup on Friday, I rode in to the government center with Matt Magnasco, one of the designers for Charlotte’s Department of Transportation. There, I met with Matt and his colleague Ben Miller, also a cyclist. Matt and Ben do most of the design on bike-related projects in Charlotte.

Charlotte does not have a funded bike infrastructure program. They have a bicycle and pedestrian coordinator position, but it isn’t allocated specific staffing or funding. (The person in that role was retiring the same week I was there, so unfortunately I missed being able to meet with him). Lacking dedicated funding, bike infrastructure projects have been approached on an opportunistic basis; as road paving or development projects come up, they’ll try to put in a bike lane stripe or other accommodation, but there isn’t a coherent plan for facilitating utility cycling. This may be partly because Pam, the most influential member of the cycling community, advocates for education over infrastructure, but it’s also because of city politics.

The Charlotte city council adopted a Complete Streets policy some years ago, but clearly hasn’t provided funding for it. It has affected building codes but not really city practices. Matt took me on a ride after our meeting, and one of the streets we took was Park Road, a 6-lane “high cycling stress” arterial south of downtown. I mentioned that on this stretch, you could probably narrow the grass verge to carve out a decent space for bikes; Matt’s response was that developers (which are going up all over Charlotte–new buildings and cranes everywhere) are required by the Complete Streets policy to have a grass verge to provide an “environment for pedestrians.”

Grass verge on Park Road. “Complete Street”?

Now, while an extra six feet of building setback is better for pedestrians than having the building right up against the street, this little bit of greenish-brown grass and a token tree isn’t really providing an environment for pedestrians; it’s still going to be an unpleasant place to walk. A real Complete Street project on this stretch would look at reducing the traffic lanes (the road is legitimately busy but still probably overbuilt), and providing dedicated, separated space for non-motorized users.NACTO guidelines can tell you where to put curbs and lane stripes, but they can’t navigate the politics for you. Right now the bike and pedestrian volumes are quite low (more on counts later), which makes it hard to justify a project which would surely be controversial. (Pam speculates that CDOT avoids doing bike counts because they’re worried the low numbers would cause problems for future projects).

I felt like Matt and Ben were both guys who understand the issues and want to do the right thing, but Charlotte hasn’t committed to a real investment in utility cycling, so they’re pretty limited in what they can affect. Perhaps a new bike and pedestrian coordinator will find a way to exert more influence.

There are two reasons I’m visiting cities to ride the infrastructure. One is that I want to get a better sense of the subjective experience of the place; I feel like I can’t really understand a city unless I’ve ridden through it. The other is that I want to identify specific issues with the infrastructure. Bikeway mileage is a poor measure for a number of reasons, and one of those is that poor bikeway design can create more problems than it solves. Some paths and lanes provide a great user experience and improve safety, some are more or less neutral, and others are actively dangerous. But no matter how good or bad the facility is, it’s counted in the bikeway mileage. I’d like to get to a measure like “value over replacement facility” which counts mileage only for clearly bike-oriented improvements, and discounts those facilities which include hazardous conditions.

So, I’m riding the bikeways with a GPS tracker (phone-based, PixTrack) and a GoPro shooting time-lapse photos. Here’s the routes I rode in Charlotte, with a few segments missing due to glitches of one sort or another. It came out to just under 100km:

I use those tracks to geo-tag the time lapse photos, add date, filename, and geotag labels to them, and turn them into a time-lapse video. I wound up with almost 30,000 images from this trip, which at one per second is about 500 minutes of riding, just over 8 hours. That’s a lot of images, and the GUI tools were having some difficulty digesting that fat wad of data, so I dug into my bag of Unix command-line tricks and wrote a hacky Perl script using exiftool and ImageMagick to do the tagging and labeling.

The idea is to be able to use the video to go back and look through the videos to identify problematic areas; pinch points, poor intersections, discontinuous facilities. This will at some point get pulled into GIS, with the facility map overlain with identified problems. That will be connected with some sort of measure of neighborhood change, probably a combination of median income, land value, ethnic makeup, and educational attainment.

The issue is that lots of cities have lots of bikeway mileage that doesn’t provide value. (I’d say that includes most bikeway mileage in most U.S. cities). When trying to dig into causal relationships between bikeways and neighborhood change, it would be useful to be able to identify the areas where value-added facilities exist, and discount the places where there’s just a white stripe in the gutter of a busy arterial.

Here’s the video from Charlotte. It’s not really designed for human consumption but you can see where I’m going with this.

I didn’t happen to be in town on Tuesday, so I couldn’t do the big PMTNR, but the Spokes People have encouraged numerous social rides, one of which was Thursday Night Lights, which I rolled by to participate in (on a bike borrowed from Pam).

There’s not quite an equivalent of these social rides in the Bay Area. We have lycra club rides, and Bike Party, but not an exact analogue to these no-drop, baggy pant (mostly), casual get-together rides. Perhaps it’s because our bike culture is more mature, and people do casual rides with their friends instead of as a specific event. Or else that our event rides get too big (like East Bay Bike Party) to really be social.

Thursday Night Lights ride

We wound up having about 25 riders, ranging from weekend road warriors, to a mother and daughter on department store bikes. It was clear that most people knew each other from previous rides. We rolled out at slow pace, with the leaders modeling Cycling Savvy “control and release” road behaviors. The group stopped to deal with a couple mechanicals (a flat tire and a loose handlebar). Midpoint of the ride was at a brew pub (a bit overwhelmed with 25 people dropping in), after which we rolled back to the bike store. Most had driven there; most of the people I conversed with during the evening expressed fear of riding alone on Charlotte’s roads.

The next day I met up with the Friday morning breakfast group. This was a tradition started by Dianna Ward, executive director of Charlotte’s B-Cycle (bike share) program. As a strategy to normalize utility cycling, B-Cycle provided free breakfast for bike commuters for several months. The sponsorship ran out, but a group of folks decided to keep the tradition alive, and I joined them for bagels and coffee at the Common Market on the south side of downtown. The Common Market itself is about to become a victim of Charlotte’s rapid growth; it’s going to be torn down for a new 8-story office building with ground-floor retail.

We had lots of good conversations about neighborhood change and riding in the city. This was again clearly a tight-knit community. At the end of breakfast, I was gifted a “bullet”; a 30-oz plastic beer container from Unknown Brewing Company, an award typically given for lap primes and other minor achievements at local races and bike events. Unknown sponsors a number of local bike events in Charlotte; beer culture and bike culture are strongly intertwined in the city. (More on that later).

Little Sugar Creek (green) parallelling natural bikeway (yellow). From the Charlotte Cycling Guide.

One of the things I noticed while riding around Charlotte was that certain streets, or collections of streets, are what I would call “natural” bikeways. These are relatively flat roads which carry relatively low traffic volumes for their width, and which allow you to ride for significant distances with limited major intersections and limited stops. Some of these natural bikeways are officially signed routes, but they really don’t need to be; if they connect interesting places, utility cyclists will use them whether or not they are signed. Way-finding, which can be an issue with off-street pathways, is much less of a problem on roads.

For example, in south Charlotte there is a series of roads (Wesfield, Irby, Jameston, Sterling) which parallels the Little Sugar Creek Greenway for about two  miles near Freedom Park. The greenway provides traffic protection to these roads; there is very little cross-traffic. Most auto traffic uses the arterial on the other side of the creek (Park Road). This route for bikes is easy to find, fairly direct, and relatively pleasant.

The concept of the natural bikeway has several implications for my research. One is that as a group, these routes are under-counted; some cities like Portland have miles and miles of natural bikeways, while most Southern cities (or anything built post-WWII in the U.S.) are limited in natural bikeway mileage. This is one of the reasons why Portland’s models for utility cycling (not to mention Amsterdam’s) don’t automatically fit into other U.S. cities. Natural bikeway mileage must be accounted for when comparing the facilities available in different cities.

And while natural bikeways are under-counted as a group, specific routes which become officially designated as bike routes can double-count bikeway mileage in terms of utility. The Little Sugar Creek Greenway is a designated off-street recreational pathway which parallels this natural bikeway. Both routes are identified on the Charlotte cycling map, and both connect the same places. In the data this counts as four miles of cycling facility, whereas in reality there is only two miles, with different options for different types of riders (street or greenway). The greenway path is narrow and twisty, involving several 90-degree turns onto narrow bridges and pathways; appropriate for low-speed recreational riding, especially for young children, but utility cyclists (I hypothesize) will tend to prefer the on-street route. In any case, this overlap of facilities should be considered duplicative for the purposes of utility cycling.

Pam Murray, Charlotte Spokes People

The first person who responded to me about meeting up while I was in Charlotte was Pam Murray, co-founder of the Charlotte Spokes People. Pam turned out to be incredibly helpful and enthusiastic about cycling. Her philosophy is that education should be the primary tool to get people riding; she runs a “Cycling Savvy” class to teach vehicular cycling methods, and she organizes a number of social rides, most notably the Plaza Midwood Tuesday Night Ride (PMTNR), which can get over 100 people when the weather is good.

Social rides are an important part of cycling culture in Charlotte (and in Austin, it turns out). These are low-speed rides focused on building community, generally starting or ending at “Bike Benefits” businesses. Bike Benefits is another program of the Charlotte Spokes People; businesses volunteer to give discounts to people who come in with their bike helmets, and the Spokes People help encourage cyclists to frequent those businesses.

Because Pam is focused on education rather than infrastructure, she doesn’t generally advocate for new facilities. As we rode around town, she regularly pointed out that Charlotte’s roads were “just fine” once you knew how to ride them safely. As a long-time vehicular-style cyclist myself, I appreciate her points, and while in Charlotte I met a number of individuals who had been through CyclingSavvy and felt it had made a huge difference in their confidence on the road. However, I’m personally not sure that education can ever move the needle on cycling rates on its own; by the time someone has committed to a 10-hour class, they already must be disposed towards cycling.

Pam was a great person to meet to start this work, because the tension between separate-infrastructure advocates and vehicular cyclists has characterized bike advocacy in the U.S. for decades, and clearly it’s still something that cities struggle with.