Downtown Carrboro
Parking, like traffic, is a recurring theme in local conversation about growth and development. We often hear from some community members that there is nowhere to park in downtown Chapel Hill/Carrboro, that a lack of parking is hurting local businesses, and that the parking minimums required for the Ephesus-Fordham renewal district are insufficient.
But the facts simply don’t support these claims. The reality is that providing more parking – especially surface parking – is fundamentally incompatible with urban land uses.*
Numerous urban planning scholars have researched parking, and their research has consistently confirmed that more parking is not desirable on any metric – unless, that is, you want more people to drive and create more traffic.
Whenever there’s a new development proposal pending before a local governing board, the center of the conversation always seems to gravitate toward traffic. Given this tendency, I think it’s important we understand historic traffic changes in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
The North Carolina Department of Transportation maintains historic traffic counts for urban areas around the state, including Chapel Hill. These traffic counts date back to 1997, with the most recent data being from 2013. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the average annual daily traffic in some major areas around town:
|
Area
|
1997
|
2004
|
2013
|
Change, 2013 vs. 1997
|
|
W Franklin St (just west of Columbia St)
|
17,400
|
18,000
|
12,000 |
Back in November, I posted about the large development CVS is proposing to build catty-corner from the Century Center. (see here). Since that post things have been moving along quietly.
Here is a quick recap of whats going on...
CVS is in the process of buying up properties in downtown Carrboro across from Weaver Street Market to potentially build a 2 story building that would house a retail tenant (presumably CVS) on the 1st floor and office space and/or apartments on the second floor.
Ruby talked a little bit about the new development on the corner of Greensboro and Weaver Street in a previous post. To recap: Weaver Street Market needed money to help pay for debt they have incurred the passed few years and they sold 3 downtown properties to CVS. (See Map) They sold the property on the corner of N. Greensboro and Weaver Street (where WCOM and Community Realty used to be), the parking lot next to that building and 104 Center Street. The house on 104 Center Street is an historic Mill House built around 1910. This house will most likely be torn down in the near future. The developer working for CVS is close to purchasing 203 N Greensboro St (Debra Seaton’s Dental practice) and the hair shop on the corner of Short and Center Street. This would mean CVS will own all but one the property on the block.
Part of the latest Weaver Street Market newsletter states that Weaver Street Market has sold their property at the corner of Greensboro and Main Streets to Mark Pantlin of Raleigh. (This was the former location of WCOM and Community Realty.) Apparently they had high hopes for this high-profile property in the center of Carrboro, but finally resigned themselves to just taking the money and avoiding the hassle of a new venture and new development. I keep hearing the word "Walgreens" come up in discussions of this corner, so this makes me nervous.
A friend and I did a little research to see if we could find out more about this developer. Pantlin lives in Cary, and on a LinkedIn profile he says he is President of Pantlin Development. (But he only has one connection on LinkedIn, and the NC Dept of State says Pantlin Development was dissolved in 2009.) I found him on this neat CorporationWiki network map (at left), which also lists some other companies to which he may be related. It also looks like he donated to the Republican National Committee in 2001 and to George Bush in 1999.
Of more concern is the possibility of a national chain not just locating, but developing a lot (or multiple lots, probably) in the heart of Carrboro. Since it would be right across the street from an existing chain drug store, you can't even really argue that it's meeting some community need.
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