Gauging Charlotte’s Greenways
To my Charlotte residents, imagine you’re cruising around Freedom Park (the biggest park in the city for the non Charlotteans) on your bike or your scooter or you’re even just taking a walk on a Saturday afternoon with all the time in the world, and you decide to branch out. You know the greenway extends from Freedom Park both north and south, and it can make for a long ride, but since it’s one of those beautiful Charlotte fall days, you make the trek.
The first thing you notice is that there are a lot of people on the greenway. Some people use it as a path to get from their south Charlotte home to the CPCC campus or Uptown (I used it to ride my bike to Trader Joe’s for groceries and to get to Target for the essentials every week when I lived in that part of town). Others clearly had the same idea as you — it’s a beautiful day outside, so why not go for a ride?
You’re going for quite a while and it eventually ends. You see signs explaining that it will pick back up in this place, but you’re confused as to why such a useful aspect of the city’s efforts to make Charlotte more walkable seems to just peter out at the end.
To investigate a little more, you head over to University City to test out their greenway. It’s the longest one in the city, but to your disappointment, it peters out too after not too long. You think, these paths are beautiful and Charlotte residents clearly use them, not just for leisure, but they’re even starting to gain traction as a way to encourage people to use their bodies instead of their cars to get around. But they’re just missing the connections.
So, What’s Next?
The city of Charlotte is well aware of this: the overall project to develop the Greenway system has been in place since 2008. Right now there are 22 active projects, which are in the process of expanding the greenway by 31.62 miles (a lot).
You can see, for example, in the map below that the city has designed that there are a significant number of projects that have already began.
Black lines represent existing greenways, red ones are already funded and under construction, orange ones are funded and in design and purple and turquoise have already been approved for funding but are not yet an active project.
The green highlighted dotted lines are where the city hopes to put greenways in the future and the turquoise dotted lines are overland connections. Overland connections are bike lanes or roads with some kind of indication that bikes can transit there. In general (though not always), these areas are easy and safe to ride your bike on, so they’re not a priority for a greenway.
The Good News and the Bad News
As you can see in the map, the city is prioritizing connecting and expanding existing greenways. This is positive because it makes those greenways more useful for residents — the farther you can reach without leaving the greenway or a connection path, the more easy to transit it is (and the more people will use the greenway).
The downside is that many of the greenways were built in wealthier areas of the city. Those tend to be the more gentrified areas and are areas where people already have other means of transportation.
Although this is undeniably excellent progress toward making the city more walkable, the walkability is still primarily (though not entirely, to be fair) benefiting wealthier residents. Future projects will hopefully expand beyond these areas, but for the time being, progress still might feel far off for those living next to a green highlighted, black dotted lines (the hoped for greenways).
