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The Transit/Land Use Plan for Charlotte-Mecklenburg
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Uri Avin, FAICP, Dr. Robert Cervero and Boyd Cauble
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© & Author Info |
Culminating a ten-year planning process, an intensive six-month effort has resulted in a regional Transit/Land Use Plan for Charlotte-Mecklenburg through the year 2025. One unusual aspect of the planning effort was the attention paid by the City to land use. This plan proposes a rapid transit system as a means of supporting land use initiatives to attain the vision of the Centers and Corridors Plan. The fundamental goal of the Centers and Corridors Plan is to sustain economic growth while protecting citizens' quality of life. The Centers and Corridors plan, adopted by the Charlotte City Council and Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners in 1994, and reaffirmed through inclusion in the approved 2015 Plan, identified five major transportation and development corridors extending from the Center City of Charlotte to the County's border and beyond (Figure 1).
The development of this 2025 Transit/Land Use Plan incorporates technical analysis, public education, outreach and hands-on public involvement. The resulting recommendations assume continued improvement of the entire existing public transportation system and continued improvement of the regional roadway system. This Transit/Land Use Plan can accommodate connections to key development hubs within Charlotte-Mecklenburg outside these five corridors as well as future transit extensions into adjacent jurisdictions. The consultant team selected to excente the study included LDR International, Parsons Brinkerhoff, Quade & Douglas, McCormick Rankin International, Basile Baumann Prost Associates, Dr. Robert Cervero, Dr. Reid Ewing, Howard/Stein Hudson and Dr. Mary Hopper. The City's Planning Commission, Department of Transportation and Department of Corporation Communications all played a very active role in this effort.
Charlotte is the rapidly growing center of a booming metropolitan region now numbering approximately 1.2 million people. Ranked the second largest financial center in the US (after New York) Charlotte-Mecklenburg County's 600,000 people enjoy the relative benefits of this booming economy. They look, however, nervously to the southeast and see Atlanta with all of its advantages and disadvantages as their probable future unless they can proactively avoid the decanting of economic vitality from the center to the suburbs and minimize future gridlock.
The City of Charlotte occupies most of Mecklenburg County and fits roughly within its proposed, partly-constructed, outerbelt (see Figure 2). Six other towns are also dispersed within the county, none of significant size. The county is transected both north to south and east to west by expressways. These interstates are parallel to existing freight rail lines in these four corridors. They also parallel major arterials that preceded them in these same corridors. In addition, a fifth corridor has both a rail line and an arterial that is being converted to an expressway. This combination of several transportation facilities within each of these five corridors sets the stage for the analysis. The study sought to test the feasibility of the Centers and Corridors vision.
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Because of a strong banking/financial presence and lack of a completed outerbelt, Charlotte's CBD boasts just over 50% of the county's 20 million square feet of multi-tenant office space, an unusually high proportion by national standards. On the drawing board are another five million square feet. Adding the single-tenant financial headquarters buildings (BankAmerica, First Union, Wachovia Bank, etc.) and government buildings, we have a downtown approaching 20 million square feet of office space in the next five years. This total is within the minimum threshold necessary for a CBD to support a regional light rail system. Rail lines converge in the heart of downtown, adjacent to a bus terminal, setting a good stage for a public transit hub (Figure 3).
The corridors and centers vision, is being sorely tested by prevailing real estate trends. Charlotte, like most US southern cities, has relatively low densities. The core of the CBD and the southwestern and southeastern corridors have some concentrations of employment and housing, as does the University and its business parks in the northeast (Figure 4). |
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Outside of these nodes and corridors, however, employment and residential densities are low, averaging about 2 units per acre for residential and perhaps no more than 15 employees per acre for employment areas. Nevertheless, 60% of Charlotte's jobs fall within these five corridors (Figure 5). Multi-family, by design, has been dispersed throughout the city's neighborhoods. Planned Commercial developments, moreover, fall largely outside of these corridors; about 75% of "pipeline" development is outside the five corridors (defined as roughly a two-three mile wide band). Recent multi-family approvals have also been fairly widely dispersed.
Part of the study's challenge was to assess how much development can shift into the corridors to make the Corridors and Centers vision viable. The good news is that there is much future growth coming down the pike that can be shaped. Jobs are projected to grow about 50% over the next 30 years and population by 55%, preserving the current jobs/housing ratio of over two jobs per household. We next turn to the shaping of this future growth in various scenarios. |
Identifying and testing land use opportunities took several steps.
For each scenario, at least two representative alignments were developed, one for lanes dedicated solely to Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and one for Light Rail Transit (LRT). The scenarios referred to above totaled three in number: the first one was a trends or business-as-usual scenario, the second focused jobs in the corridors at station locations, and the third focused on both jobs and housing at these locations. The trends baseline scenario assumed a continuation of the land use patterns apparent in their early stages in Charlotte, but endemic throughout more mature metropolitan areas, namely: continued low-density development in the region, out-migration of jobs and residents from the core, declining attractiveness of the CBD partly because of congestion, declining land values in the inner suburbs, and a loss of overall economic vitality as the surrounding first-tier suburbs mature and edge cities take hold, particularly at beltway interchanges (which are on the boundaries of the adjacent counties).
Through sensitivity analyses, we projected that a Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) focused mainly on jobs would increase Year 2025 system-wide ridership by 15. 2 percent over trend forecasts. A mixed-use scenario involving both job and housing concentration would add another 1.4 percentage points to the trend forecasts. From these results, we recommended that the city and county favor commercial and office development around stations and let market forces largely determine the amount of residential development that occurs. The shift in growth deemed reasonable for this plan increased the Trends projection for multi-family units of 42% in the corridors to 54%. Likewise, office development went from 46% of future growth in Trends to 53%. Simultaneously, multi-family and office growth in the wedges declined. In the Plan, both multi-family and office growth in the Center City are boosted 3% to 9% for multi-family and 10% to 22% for future office.
In allocating residential densities, the Plan averaged 12 du's per acre (gross density) for station area residential development. This allocation was mindful of the relationship between reduction of Vehicle Miles Traveled and housing density which suggests that up to 20 units per acre there are major reductions in annual VMT (for example, dropping from 30,000 down to about 12,000 annual VMT per household). After that point there are diminishing returns (e.g., 12,000 down to 6,000 at 100 units per acre). For employment densities, station allocations were at about 35 employees per acre, at least twice times the current low density pattern in Charlotte today, but still allowing of three-story structures and surface parking at a FAR of about 0.3.
As the bar charts show (Figure 7), the increase in households and jobs within a half-mile of train stations (generated by a GIS buffer) varies by corridor and scenario. The difference in job growth with the mixed-use Plan is greater than Trends for both the rail and bus alternatives.
Figure 7
FIGURE 8 |
There is an obvious correlation between those corridors with high housing and job characteristics and the ridership projections (Figure 8). The increase in ridership because of the Plan's corridor land use recommendations averages around 17%, a significant contribution. |
| When ridership is broken out into bus or rail alternative's, BRT in all cases realizes slightly higher ridership for the alternatives tested than rail (Figure 9). | FIGURE 9 |
FIGURE 10: Estimated Effects of Increasing Density on Annual Ridership for the North Rail Corridor in the Year 2025
FIGURE 11: Estimated Effects of Increasing Density on Total Cost Per Rider for the North Rail Corridor in the Year 2025
This analysis shows clearly how significantly the effect of employment increases are on annual ridership and on reduction of costs per rider. The black dots in the graphs reflect the alternatives tested for the Plan, which are towards the conservative and politically more palatable end of the intensification spectrum. This testing provides the city with a good understanding of what the payoffs are in terms of ridership and reduced costs from increased densification. This modeling occurred in parallel with the conventional four-step model, and is described in detail in the paper Estimating Ridership and Economic Benefits of Coordinated Transit and Urban Development: A Heuristic Approach.
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The overall approach was to minimize investment risks and initially implement lower cost systems. As ridership builds, the next stage of improvement will be evaluated and more expensive improvements or technology may be implemented. Many of the corridors were "technology-neutral"; that is, they could absorb either Bus Rapid Transit or Light Rail within the same rights-of-way. Accordingly, most of the corridors are recommended for bus rapid transit one or two of them could mature into Light Rail corridors, the other three will likely remain bus rapid transit for at least the 25-year time horizon of the Plan. These BRT corridors have more diffuse land use patterns at somewhat low densities, and can benefit more from the inherent flexibility of Bus Rapid Transit.
Figure 13 shows an impressionistic summary of the evaluation criteria used and included in the summary report for elected officials and citizens. Numerous technical report appendices detail the hard numbers behind this evaluation. The implementation strategy provided for some level of transit service and improvement at all stages of implementation in each corridor. This was both an equity as well as a political consideration, since some of the corridors are more differentiated by income and race than others.
Figure 13:
The Plan report maps shows transit alignments against a clear backdrop of existing and future land use and indicate clearly where anticipated land use intervention is projected. The phasing plans and implementation tools (mainly incentives, but also some controls as shown in Table 1) are explicitly conditioned upon local jurisdictions making the necessary land use changes before additional transit investments would be supported.
Finally, care was taken to develop sketches of what future development at transit stations might look like under varying conditions so that the public had an idea of the visual and aesthetic impacts of the transit land use plan. (Figures 15 and 16) present some of these images.
In summary then, to support implementation of the Centers and Corridors vision, the 2025 Transit/Land Use Plan (Figure 2) proposes to:
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Figure 14:
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CostsCapital costs to build the rapid transit system total $760 million over 25 years (see table 1). This includes a 30 percent construction contingency to account for unanticipated expenses to implement the plan. |
Table 1: Corridor Capital Costs
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When capital costs are combined with costs for operations, maintenance and other expenditures for all the corridors and countywide transit improvements, the total is $1,085 million over 25 years (including the operations and maintenance cost for non-corridor improvements). This represents an annual average total cost of about $43 million (see table 2). Funding for this plan would come from a combination of local, state and federal funding, though not all elements will be funded by all sources. Mecklenburg County had received state legislature approval to call for a referendum in November for a half-cent sales tax dedicated to transit. This transit tax was approved with a 58% yes vote. This is one source of local funding that could help leverage additional state and federal funding. Benefits versus CostsBy making the Centers and Corridors Plan more viable, transit will benefit the entire community, not just those who ride the system. These community-wide benefits, some of which are quantifiable, include: |
Table 2: Total Costs
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The quantifiable benefits of the Plan are estimated at a total of $72 million in the year 2025. This produces a benefit-cost ratio of about 1.6, an acceptable level of return by national standards. The cost-benefit analysis is described in the next section.
Phased ImplementationNot all components of the plan can be implemented concurrently. Phased implementation allows for necessary land use changes and maximizes the potential ridership for this improved transit system. This phasing starts with initiatives to be implemented within the next five years, followed by those steps to be undertaken from years 6 to 10. Finally, phasing the plan identifies those elements to be implemented from years 11 to 25. |
Figure 15:
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The Charlotte-Mecklenburg community must make appropriate land use and transit decisions now and must implement these choices consistently over the next two decades and beyond. If not, the dispersal of jobs and households into areas outside the corridors will continue and Charlotte-Mecklenburg will confront the same difficulties as other regions struggling to sustain economic growth and faced with competition from other jurisdictions less burdened by congestion. Public transit is a vital part of the transportation investments needed to support the Centers and Corridors vision and to avoid the problems experienced in other cities.
Uri Avin, FAICP, LDR International
Dr.Robert Cervero, UC Berkeley
Boyd Cauble, Executive Assistant to City Manager, Charlotte
