Cities Grow Like Trees and Have the Rings to Prove It

Spring is well underway in most places in the US, now.  I am absolutely loving the weather in the Charlotte area in April.  It’s been rather dry here, with almost no rain for quite some time.  Average morning temperatures are now in the 50s and 60s and afternoon temps in the 70s and 80s.  It’s making for fantastic riding, and I am taking every excuse I can get to be on the bike.  Usually, a few nights per week my wife needs me to meet her somewhere in the farther suburbs of south Charlotte, and I am happy to get a few extra miles on the bike.  Unfortunately, the grid neighborhoods and wonderful secondary streets in Charlotte give way to col-du-sac neighborhoods as you travel beyond about 7.5 miles from the center of Charlotte.  In a way it’s almost like examining tree growth.

The Rings of a Tree

You can tell a cities age and when it came to maturity by examining the rings of growth.  The innermost neighborhoods in Charlotte are very healthy , tree-lined, grid streets.  On secondary streets, cyclists and motorists travel at very near the same speed making for a safe and wonderful bicycling, walking, and driving experience.  As you travel out of the center city, beyond about 5-7 miles,  you come to a point where your surroundings change, the rings become less healthy, and the streets less livable.  Col-du-sac neighborhoods and retail malls prevent you from bicycling on secondary streets and all traffic is forced onto main arterials.  There simply is no secondary street connectivity.  Traffic and city planners either knowingly or unconsciously made a decision that secondary street connectivity was simply no longer necessary.  Automobiles on arterials, urban highways, and urban interstate highways were the preferred way to transport most individuals around the city of Charlotte.  In Charlotte this happened gradually over the  last 30 years. I have been bicycling both for recreation and transportation for ten years, and I still am not comfortable traveling on a road where the flow of motorized traffic is going more than 10, or worse, 20 miles an hour faster than I am. Bicycle lanes can seemingly mitigate the risk and raise the comfort level, but in the back of mind I am thinking about how many of these rush-hour traffic driver’s minds are still at the office with their eyes on their blackberries and not on the road.  When you get farther out of the city, the arterials become increasingly more dangerous for bicycle traffic.  In Charlotte, areas that developed after the 1990s or 2000s are extremely in-hospitable to bicyclists.  Living CarFree would be a huge challenge in these neighborhoods.

These traffic conditions are not going away, but at least road planners can make the roads better for non-motorized traffic by installing better bike/pedestrian-centric facilities.  Signs, bike lanes, sharrows, and separate paths can make the ride more bearable on the roadways in the outer rings of the tree.