The Bull in Full

Alston Ave., housing inspections, and a sad interlude between

Normally when I get "come to council to support _____" e-mails, they're for Monday night full council meetings, not for the Thursday afternoon work sessions.  So in a way, it was doubly odd that I got the "come support" e-mail from two different groups.  The first came from Aidil Collins at Uplift East Durham, who asked us to come support, as she termed it, a "Friendly Alston Ave.".  Now, this wasn't a hard issue for me to support, considering Gary Kueber and I wrote an op-ed for the Herald-Sun about the same issue over a year ago.  Aidil deserves all the credit in the world for doing the hard legwork of rallying people, shaping the message, and meeting with some local groups that had previously expressed support for the project, to form a set of compromise concerns.   All that legwork meant that Aidil could step to the mic yesterday and truthfully say that her proposal represented the consensus of every community group with any standing.  Given the acrimony over the project early, that's quite an accomplishment.

No vote took place, however, and what exactly will happen when a vote does come before the council was the subject of much discussion between Mark Ahrendsen (who also deserves enormous credit for his work here) and the council.  Yours truly added to the confusion when he stepped to the mic to ask for clarification on what I thought was the status of the law at this point -- that unless the council acted, NCDOT's plan would move forward.  I was immediately corrected by several members of council, and only got a full explanation after the meeting from Ahrendsen.  Aside from the fact that one should get ones facts straight before stepping up to speak at a council work session, here's what I learned from all of the discussion:

The Council doesn't have any real direct authority over NCDOT's projects.  The power they do have comes from the Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO), in this case, the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro MPO (DCHCMPO), which consists of members from the three town councils and the two county boards of commissioners, which do have some approval power over the projects.  And, as Ahrendsen noted yesterday, the other MPO members will generally defer to the council in whose jurisdiction the project falls.  However, the process isn't even that simple (is it ever?).  Also, note that I've already been significantly wrong on the facts here once, so take what follows with a grain of salt.

Like the council, most of the MPO's actual power comes in more of an advisory role.  Between our local DOT Board rep (Ken Spaulding) and the MPO, the community gets a very strong voice in what happens inside DOT and what projects are put forward on each three year Transportation Improvement Plan.  However, the only real actual voting power the MPO has is to accept or reject the entire TIP, which boils down to veto power for every state-funded road project in the two counties over the next three years.  As Ahrendsen phrased it to reject it at that point is a bit like holding a gun to your own head and threatening to shoot yourself.  Sure, it's a potent threat in the worst of situations, but it's not one you really want to ever have to use.

Still, here's the good news: the community consensus that Aidil has forged has pushed the Mayor to become an advocate for the design changes.  In this way, she has managed to turn the Mayor from one of the more problematic obstacles to actual progress on Alston to a valuable (if not terribly enthusiastic) ally.  To digress for a moment, I'm not sure I've ever seen an issue highlight the Mayor's strengths and weaknesses more fully.  His apparent selective hearing, lack of imagination when it comes to alternatives to suburban-style development, unwillingness to appear out of step with the dominant power structure, and a generalized aloofness were all on full display as we tried to get anything at all to change with regards to the NCDOT design.  At the same time, once the community came to consensus, it wasn't inhis nature to blow against the wind.  And at that point, there's not many other city leaders I'd rather have stepping into a room full of NCDOT staffers to say, "come on, just do the right thing," and getting the right deal out of it.  At this point, moreso than at any point previously, I have some hope that we'll get something less than a disaster on Alston.

- - -

The other e-mail I received about Thursday's work session came from the Durham CAN housing team, which I'd sort of met with once, and if I weren't so bogged down with other community and job related stuff, I'd probably be making more of an effort to attend.  CAN was calling for support for their proposal to allow city inspectors to inspect any house without complaint, and to shorten the time period the city must wait before taking action from a year to six months.

When I saw this come across the the wire, it caused me a good bit of consternation.  I've in the past spent a fair bit of electronic ink on the PAC2 list supporting a rental registration program in Durham.  In theory, I'm firmly behind the CAN proposal -- a city government ought to take the action needed to enforce its minimum housing code. 

However, as I pointed out in an e-mail to Durham CAN staff, this isn't a generic city government we're working with.  Gary has spent the past two years repeatedly documenting cases where the actions of the city's Neighborhood Improvement Services department have repeatedly not only contributed to the demolition of some beautiful historic properties that were nowhere near beyond repair, but have also had a demonstratively negative impact on efforts to maintain or revitalize many of Durham's older neighborhoods.  The staff responded by noting that Durham's Latino residents who live in substandard housing are particularly vulnerable to predatory landlords, and that better action from the city is needed to address the problem.

Because CAN is fundamentally about working together, coming to consensus, and supporting each others aims for social change, I showed up in support of the proposal.  Still, if we're going to keep this action from becoming an authorization for NIS to knock down buildings whenever its heart desires, there's a lot of work to be done. 

And sadly, we didn't have to wait long for an example of just what can happen under the current NIS administration. 

No sooner had Council passed the CAN-backed resolution, than an elderly retired nurse wheeled herself to the microphone to read a statement.  I won't get all the details right, but essentially, here's the story:

She owned three houses in the Southside area which she had long rented out as rental properties.  NIS had cited her for $32,000 in code violations which she claimed she could not pay.  Her plea to council was that she wanted to sell her properties to the city for rehabilitation, or for help in selling the building to someone who would preserve it.  Now, I read Endangered Durham enough to know that this can be a stalling tactic, but there were moments when the owner was pleading to not have one of her houses in particular demolished, by whatever way could be managed, even if she didn't profit from it (other than to remove the civil penalties). 

Oddly enough, what she was proposing wasn't all that out of line with some of the alternatives to just the "repair or demolish" orders that Gary has talked about so much.  Unfortunately, the city's attorney had to step in and point out that in the mediation of code disputes, the council had delegated its authority to the city housing appeals board, so in essence, short of passing substantial new law, the  council's hands were tied.

But this is hardly an excuse.  Last year, we were promised a demolition and code enforcement "summit," that would open the lines of communication between the city and neighbors, so that we could all work towards a better solution.  Unfortunately, with NIS running it, the entire affair turned into little more than a series of stern lectures from various staff members on how enlightened the process was, and how any quibble with it must be due to a failure by community members to understand it.  Afterwards, we were all given time to "comment," in the usual two-minute, haphazard format, with no responses and no discussion.  It was, quite simply, both ridiculous and insulting. 

Patrick Baker then promised a continuing dialog with the community, but unless there have been discussions I haven't heard about, the issue has effectively died.  (I suspect the impending city elections may have had something to do with this, but I don't know that for certain.)  Still, outside that particular process, the continual response from the leadership at NIS has been one of zero interest in alternative solutions, with what appears to be an underlying assumption that all community members expressing concern must be troublemakers who are best locked out.

This, combined with the general stammering of NIS's top staff members at the meeting Thursday left me with the indelible perception of a rudderless department more interested in territoriality and insularity than in actually trying to, you know, help improve neighborhoods.  My first impulses are always to give people the benefit of the doubt, particularly with the number of exceptional staff members I've met inside Durham city government over the years.  However, when a departments policies are both poorly implemented in their current form and badly limited by outdated ordinances, yet the department's top staff members show little to no interest in either improving services or drafting better code, it's time to start looking at that favorite buzzword of all city critics -- accountability.
 

Transit in the Triangle: Together, or apart?

To touch on a topic I keep trying to get to, it seems that the future of public transportation in the Triangle has come very quietly to a critical turning point.  It appears that most of what's going to be said in public has been said, and the talk made its way from the pages of the newspapers to the back rooms, where I can only speculate that haggling over the process seems to be still going on.  Given the amount of time and effort put into the STAC, I can't imagine that the process has already fallen dead.  At least I certainly hope not.

To recap, following the final collapse of the originally proposed Raleigh-to-Durham high frequency rail service, the state government appointed a Special Transit Advisory Commission (a.k.a, the STAC), to be hosted out of the Triangle J Council of Governments.  The purpose, ultimately, was to revisit every step in the decision-making process, to go back over all the options, and to see if out of the ashes of the original TTA plan, something could be made to work politically and financially.  It consists of all sorts of movers and shakers from across the Triangle, from business folks, former elected officials, university leaders, and activists.  The STAC met monthly for the past year or so, working with staff  members from the various local governments as well as the state.  In February, the STAC unveiled a draft report of its recommendations, which showed an ambitious $2 billion comprehensive plan for transit in the Triangle, to be funded through some sort of local tax, similar to Charlotte's .5% sales tax.  One of the Indy's blogs captured it nicely in a post last month, wherein the stresses in the agreement started to show.  Not surprisingly, the fault lines fell along much the same lines as before.  There's all sorts of ways to describe that rift, but ultimately it boils down to the Durham-Wake county line.

Speeding, broken windows, panhandling, and all that

Busy day today, but I can't let this topic go without commenting.  Kevin today tag-teams off of one of Barry's posts earlier this week about the hesitancy of the Durham Police Department in going after speeders.  I meant to get to Barry's post earlier, but I can't let yet another one on this topic go by without commenting on it.

My master's thesis was on crime in Durham and various location-based strategies for addressing crime, and what their results are.  In the process, I did a pretty extensive review on the criminology literature surrounding order maintenance policing, better known as the "broken windows" theory, based on an article of the same name that James Q. Wilson and William Kelling wrote in the Atlantic in 1980.  Back in early '06, when I was in the thick of finishing the thing, we got into quite the conversation on the PAC2 mailing list about the panhandling ban, and whether it represented an effective "broken windows"-style approach to crime prevention.  I thought it was not, and put forward, oddly enough, residential speeding as something that the police should crack down on instead.

This message came in the middle of a conversation, so it refers to e-mails written by Chris Sevick and Ken Gasch previously.  I think it's still pretty apparent what's going on, and this post laid out my case for how broken windows applies to Durham better than I think I could write now.  And since I don't have a whole lot of time, I'll just quote the thing in its entirety below the fold, edited slightly for formatting:

STAC releases transit plan

I've been sitting on the idea for a blog post for a couple of months now that I've never gotten a chance to write, because I never feel like I have the whole story.  But Bruce Siceloff at the N&O just broke the story of the Special Transportation Advisory Committee for Durham, Wake, and Orange counties releasing its recommendations for how to go forward with transit in the Triangle, and based on one article, it looks like a home run.

The original TTA plan centered around the plans and developments under the Clinton administration, under which cities around the country got seed money to plan new public transportation infrastructure, with the understanding that any reasonably good proposal would have a good shot at funding.  These funds emphasized getting the first lines built, which always cost the most, so that future lines could grow off of those.  Like in so many cases, however, the Bush administration had other ideas, and gutted funds for the plans, and made up for the loss by increasing the bar on the projected operating efficiency from day one.  That moved the bar from where TTA had been aiming to a level it couldn't reach, particularly with all sorts of idiotic nonsense from Norfolk-Southern and the North Carolina Railroad about right of way uses, as well as intransigence from senior officials at Duke wanting to protect the bucolic charm of the Erwin-Fulton intersection.  The result, of course, was that TTA had to give up on federal funds.

The new plan takes a much different tack.  It still looks for federal funds, but instead of counting on them for over 60% of the cost, the way TTA originally did, it calls for local funding sources, in the form of a half cent special sales tax increase and a $10 increase in the car registration fee (the latter of which is sure to make heads explode at the John Locke Foundation).  This would pay half the cost of a massive $2 billion plan, with the remainder coming in the form of 25% from the state and 25% from the feds. 

And for that matter, the plan looks much better to begin with.

Alston Ave: We can wait

Just to continue the theme of Alston Ave. Day on the Durham political blogosphere -- Gary, Kevin, and Barry have already weighed in -- I only have a little to add to what they've already said.

Alston Ave. is not in good shape, but NCDOT's remedy is the last thing we need.  The excellent Durham city Transportation Manager, Mark Ahrendsen, has noticed this as well, and given NCDOT's refusal to make modifications to their plans, he has advised the city to walk away and direct the funds elsewhere.  Right on, except that as Ray Gronberg points out in his article (now gone down the memory hole thanks to the Herald's idiot web policy), Mayor Bell is objecting to his plan to divert the funds out of Northeast-Central Durham.

The Mayor has a point -- one of the biggest problems that blighted urban areas have faced lies in "disinvestment," or the combination of the public and private sector neglecting to put any sort of investment into those areas.  As a result, the infrastructure and economy suffer heavily.  However, in the case of east Durham, it bears mentioning that bad investment has been as much of a problem as lack of investment.  I don't know how many millions have been spent in east Durham on urban renewal, NC-147, the rerouting of Fayetteville St., the overwidening of Elizabeth St., and other similarly counter-productive problems, but it's likely quite substantial (although still less, I imagine, than has been spent on infrastructure in newer, suburban areas).  With Alston Ave., it's time to draw a line -- no more bad projects.

But then, whither Alston Ave.?  Is Durham perpetually going to be stuck with the choice of a suburbanized arterial on one hand and the overloaded, neglected three-lane corridor there now?  I think not.  There are several changes blowing in the wind, which combined, I think point towards a definite advantage in waiting this one out.  Firstly, I think the most recent shakeout at NC-DOT will result in yet another slow lurch towards more reasonable standards, and, just maybe, more responsiveness to communities and context.  Secondly, for every quarter increase in the cost of gas, making arguments for pedestrian, bicycle, and transit-friendly design becomes an easier sell.

But perhaps most importantly, there's the change I noted last week, that county governments are no longer forbidden from entering the road building process.  Alston Ave. is exactly the kind of road that, in another state, would be owned and maintained by the county.  It's an important regional connector, but not critical to the infrastructure of the state.  As political pressure keeps gas taxes down, and the economic divide between the urban and rural areas continues to spread, there's going to be natural pressure for the state to turn over some of its control and responsibilities to counties.  Now, counties don't yet have a good way to pay for these improvements, but I don't think that's far off either.  (I could see a local option gas tax dedicated to transportation getting passed as early as 2009.) 

There's a good chance, then, from multiple directions, in getting either a more responsive NCDOT, or better yet, an NCDOT that's removed from the process, in the not too distant future.  In the meantime, it's far better to keep the only supermarket in northeast-central Durham and live with the limited Alston Ave. we have now, than to blaze a path of scorched earth through the very heart of the neighborhood, for fear of losing transportation funds. 

A change is coming.  We can wait for it.

The "Complete Streets" movement

A link to this article from the Post Writers Group (which appears to be somehow connected-but-separate from the Washington Post) came across the Durham Bike-Ped list recently, and touches on the "complete streets" movement, which is really just a repackaging of a lot of very good ideas into an easy to remember name. 

WASHINGTON -- The cause has simmered for years -- and we've all felt some of it: frustration with fast traffic that turns streets through our neighborhoods into corridors of fear. There is a resentment about narrow, rough or nonexistent sidewalks, a reluctance to have children cross high-speed roadways walking to school. Bicyclists take their lives in their hands when venturing onto major roads.

Now, finally, there's an organized nationwide movement to fight the good fight for saner streets. It's a coalition mounting a nationwide campaign for city and town roadways that include safe, quality space for pedestrians and cyclists and public transit users, accommodating their wishes just as seriously as those of car and truck drivers.

It's called, fittingly, the Complete the Streets movement (www.completestreets.org). Its members cover an amazing gamut -- from America Bikes and AARP, Smart Growth America and the American Society of Landscape Architects to Paralyzed Veterans of America. The Institute of Transportation Engineers is even on board, amazing for a profession long known as the "throughput crowd" for its pushing of maximum numbers of vehicles at maximum feasible speed through cities and villages alike.

Ed Harrison, Chapel Hill town councilman and avid biker, responds on the list (quoted with permission):

. . . you should take a look at this very recent clipping from our hometown of Spartanburg, SC, where the County board has passed a Complete Streets policy and is poised to contest SC DOT  widening designs for a major state highway.

http://www.goupstate.com/article/20071125/NEWS/711250324/1051/NEWS01%20

The City Council for Charlotte, a much larger city (circa 650,000) passed such a policy on October 22.

Immediately next door to Durham, the Active Living By Design Committee of Chapel Hill (which will exist at least until a 5-year grant expires in 2008) is proposing a Complete Streets Policy with accompanying ordinance (very preliminary) for all town operations. The committee hopes to be joined by the Chapel Hill Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board in the coming months in bringing this forth to Town Council.

I have to say, I really like this development.  Ideally, one really *shouldn't* have to put a label on these notions in order to get them implemented, but in reality, when trying to advocate policies such as these to overloaded elected officials or skeptical transportation staff, having a name to put on what you're trying to do, and showing how other cities have done it, can go a long way. 

That said, one list participant pointed out that the miraculous transition shown on the front page of completestreets.org includes a bike line directly next to parallel parking, a design guaranteed to get a biker "doored."  So maybe there's still some work to be done on best practices for complete streets yet...

Update: Ed writes in to point out that the person he's addressing is also from Spartanburg originally, in case the first sentence of his quote sounds a little strange or dogmatic.

Two-Way Love, Part IV: Lost Liberty

The highly infrequent series continues.  Parts one, two, and three precede this one.

I'm not sure you'll believe me, but I've been trying to get TWL posts out for a while now.  The issue that I've been running into is that my next scheduled stops were the north-south pairs of Duke-Gregson/Vickers and Roxboro-Mangum.  There's theree reasons these have been delayed.  First, I no longer have ArcGIS on my computer at work, so at times like the present, when I'm lingering after work to type out blog posts, I can't futz around with maps until I get something that I think is worth sharing.  It requires me going into the geography labs and being actively productive, which happens much more rarely.  Secondly, I've found that telling the stories of those streets just isn't as easy with GIS as some of the others were, and to really get at it, I need to get out with my digital camera to some spots where taking pictures isn't terribly easy, such as the Duke/Gregson overpass at I-85, and that just hasn't happened.  But mostly, both pairs are a lot harder to solve than they look.  Duke-Gregson/Vickers because of various complex intersections and the way traffic gets redirected, and Mangum-Roxboro for the simple fact that in any scenario I draw up, Roxboro ends up taking the lion's share of traffic and looks to become seriously congested, as well as the problematic rail underpass mentioned earlier.

But setting that aside, in the past couple of weeks my attention has been redirected towards some other places in need of the two-way love.  For a later post, there's the Ramseur portion of the Loop which I've never felt had a good solution, but which some interesting conversation has come up around from multiple sectors in the past couple of weeks.  For today, though, there's the low hanging fruit of Liberty St., where Gary has already done a lot of the GIS heavy lifting for me.

Buses, again

A pair of depressing articles in this morning's Herald-Sun, both involving problems with DATA keeping its fleet up to standard.  The first one covers how the city is currently looking for some used buses to put into service, with the second one covering general problems with maintenance and late or missed routes.  The latter one ends with this maddening quote:

Other riders say they accept the situation.    

"I've tried to be as understanding as I possibly could," said Derrick Flowers, a student at Durham Technical Community College who's ridden with broken air conditioners a time or two.

"It's public transportation and these kinds of things are to be expected," he said. "I just grin and bear it."

AIEEEE!!! And people wonder why we can't get more commuters to ride public transportation.

Sometimes being a vocal activist is a mystifying thing.  There are some subjects where my comments seem to resonate and cause people to look at things a different way, where relatively brief written pieces, from the best I can tell, really did in fact change the course of important policy discussions in subtle but noticeable ways.  On the other hand, there are others where I can write dozens of different things, short, long, from lots of different angles, trying to stir a little action on an issue, and nobody seems to notice.  Public transportation, particularly improving the local bus system, is a drum I've been beating basically since I moved back to Durham in 1999.  There are few things involving local policy that I'm more convinced of than that if we want to see a more active downtown, with more pedestrian-friendly options, better development, less sprawl, a healthier population, and a strong tax base, we absolutely have to improve on Durham's minimalist bus system. 

I think part of the reason is that a lot of the public transit energy went into the failed TTA rail proposal, and it hasn't had a chance to recover yet.  That's really too bad, because whatever the merits or faults of the TTA trains, they  would have done almost nothing to help people move within the city of Durham itself.  On the initial opening, there would have been only two stops in the city (9th St. and downtown), two more planned (Alston Ave. and further off, Duke Hospital), and two in RTP.  If you think about your own daily trips around town, just how many of your trips would that have been useful for?

The maintenance problems the system is having are bad enough, but they're made that much worse by the fact that the system is incredibly sparse to begin with.  If buses ran every 10 minutes, and one broke down, it would be a minor but acceptable inconvenience.  With buses running every half-hour, though, a missed route can be catastrophic to your schedule.  Indeed, it seems that to ride the buses in Durham, you have to not mind so much if you lose an hour or more of your day to system inefficiencies.

There are, by all indications, a number of people moving to Durham, and many of us already here, who would really like to move away from auto-centric transportation.  I don't pretend it's going to be cheap -- to do anything meaningful would probably take the equivalent of a property tax increase of 3-4 cents per hundred dollar valuation.  But  I think such an investment would be well worth it -- the situation as it is now is a mess.

Two-Way Love, Part III: Untying the Loop

Part three in a series, after a long delay from parts one and two.  This edition focuses on how we can get rid of the Tarrant plan-imposed monstrosity of the downtown loop.  It's trickier than you might think...

Kevin's post today about Greenfire being interested in the SouthBank building reminded me yet again that I need to get moving on this series if I'm ever going to finish it.  (There should be at least two more parts after this.)  There are uglier buildings in downtown than SouthBank, but its location at the western entry to the historic commercial district makes it probably the single most problematic.  The resolute ugliness of the thing is offset not only by the mess of parking that surrounds it, but also by the giant asphalt moat around old downtown, above which it stands like some kind of defensive tower.  That moat is, of coarse, the Downtown Loop, created by the Tarrant plan for a new urban design in the '70s.  Kevin mentions that in the long range plans for the streetscape redesign, we continue to flirt with the idea of undoing the Loop (which he nicely refers to at the Durham Motor Speedway).

If there's a more popular transportation idea in Durham than tearing up the Loop, I think you'd be hard pressed to find it.  I think I can vaguely remember one or two people at one point telling me they thought getting rid of the Loop would be a mistake, but it sure doesn't happen very often.  Why, then, given the fact that nobody wants the damn thing is it still with us?  Several reasons -- first, there's money.  We just finally got down with Phase I of the downtown streetscape renovations, and that took plenty long on its own, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, went over budget.  Second, the Loop serves as Business US 70 as it passes from Holloway St. in the east to Main St. in the west, and anything that touches it has to get signed off on by NC DOT.  But third, trying to figure out how to undo the Loop, and leave in its place a functional urban grid is really tricky. 

For several years now, I've been talking with folks about this problem, and I've never come up with a perfect solution.  I don't think one exists.  But this post is an attempt to share a pretty good solution in design, striking out from various premises on how urban roads should work and going from there.

The geographic critique of RTP-style public investment and economic development

In the past couple of weeks, I got into a bit of an online spat with my neighbor Chris Sevick in the comments section of Kevin's blog, particularly following this post and this post.  I have to confess, this is not the first time Chris and I have crossed words in an online forum, and I should probably know better by now.  Anyway, Chris has the tendency to jump into online discussions, and try to challenge the dominant conversational paradigm by bringing what he terms "philosophical" objections.  My problem with this is that, while I think Chris is a rather clever guy in person, I frequently find these objections (which I would term more theoretical than philosophical) rather unchallenging and reductive. 

But rather than get even deeper into the weeds there, the whole affair reminded me of something i've been meaning to link to for about six months.  (I haven't before because I keep meaning to write a detailed response and it keeps not happening.  So I'm giving up and just writing a brief thing here.)  I found it linked from, of all places, Richard Florida's website.  Florida is the academic who coined the term "creative class," and who has subsequently dubbed RTP as one of the top places supporting a "creative economy."  On the other hand, I do not know much about Brian Holmes, other than that despite his rather anglican name he writes significantly in French, and that his articles clearly show some serious chops in radical and critical geography.  (Given that critical geography was not my focus at UNC, it's possible a good number of my colleagues would recognize him.)  I don't know if he's a professor or just one of those "pro bono philosophers," but I found his article called "Disconnecting the Dots of the Research Triangle" incredibly fascinating, enlightening, and rather disturbing, both from a practical, theoretical perspective, and from a more personal perspective.  A warning, though, for those about to click on it: it gets into some pretty hard core abstract theoretical geography.  Definitely not for the faint of heart.  (And for those reading further, I'm about to go off on some minor wonkery of my own...)