Charlotte summit puts CNU on leading edge of transportation reform

Since street network connectivity affects all new urbanist projects (and too many good projects are held back by a lack of traditional urban street grids beyond their borders), both individual urbanists and the overall movement will benefit from CNU’s annual Transportation Summit, November 6-8, 2008, in Charlotte, NC — a working meeting designed to craft a set of new urbanist principles for sustainable transportation networks.
The need for such networks is easy to spot from an airplane, says Thomas Kronemeyer, a senior associate with Community Design + Architecture, in Oakland, CA.  You see disconnected suburban street networks and recognize the difficulty pedestrians and cyclists have within a system where cars are the default travel mode, even for short, local trips. We’re basically seeing the paradigm of the arterial-collector-local fail under this heavy load of vehicle miles traveled,” Kronemeyer says, noting the miles Americans drive has grown three times faster than population growth since 1990. “Because gas was so cheap for so long, people could ignore … how we were building our road networks and the places around them. And now it’s becoming much more a focus of public debate.”

a network to sustainability
Within CNU, a hot topic has become how the network brings about more sustainable projects, creating greater interest in better defining CNU’s position on the network. With working groups beginning pre-summit preparations this summer, members have an opportunity to get in early on what could be a paradigm shift similar to  the one enabled by the context-sensitive thoroughfares manual CNU produced with the Institute of Transportation Engineers, says Heather Smith, CNU’s planning director. “The CNU/ITE manual started at a transportation summit. It wasn’t from a boardroom. It was member driven,” she says. “We hope for something similar here.”
Charlotte was chosen as an ideal place to study the network, since its Transportation Action Plan measures projects against connectivity standards, rather than the capacity of each road individually. The Queen City offers outstanding source material for network study, says host Danny Pleasant, interim director of Charlotte’s Department of Transportation. Like other Sun-belt cities that received a large share of their growth during the suburban sprawl era, it has compact areas where the pre-1950s block network continues to perform efficiently while the larger suburban network “has become more apt to become more congested over time.” Summit attendees can also see how Charlotte is stitching the network back together, and how the 8-month-old Lynx light rail line has joined that network.

Event background
CNU members began discussing the network at the Nashville Transportation Summit in 2003, where they began crafting outlines of what became the manual for context-sensitive thoroughfares. At the Boulder Transportation Summit in 2006, members agreed there was enough momentum to focus an entire summit on the network. In 2007, Kronemeyer and Phil Erickson, President of Community Design + Architecture, took the lead in marshalling several subgroups to study discrete aspects of network planning in preparation for the summit.
The five sub-groups are focusing on:
• Defining and sustaining networks — How is a sustainable network different from conventional networks built in the last 40 years?
• Networks and places (hubs, corridors, etc.) — How do networks contribute to forming places new urbanists like?
• Networks and modes — What characteristics of the network facilitate all modes (pedestrians, vehicles, and transit) and their interactions, since all modes have to co-exist?
• Network direction, policy and financing — What attitudinal, bureaucratic, and physical barriers to implementing sustainable networks exist in the real world?
• Network knowledge base — A compilation of data and research to help give summit participants a leg up on the conversation before November. Another sub-group was recently added to study the network and emergency responders.
The summit’s first day includes a “Networks 101” session with a presentation by Andres Duany. Days two and three feature more in-depth discussions and work sessions on the network and its elements. Kronemeyer says the summit will end not with conclusions but with participants identifying publications or resources to produce and feeling that they have helped CNU advance in defining another key piece of the built environment.
“I want people to feel like something more will be coming that will be useful to them in their work, and that CNU will be supporting them in implementing better networks in their communities,” Kronemeyer says.