Across North Carolina, communities are increasingly anxious to foster walkable mixed-use development at urban-level densities. This is partly because older suburban land uses adjacent to many NCDOT highways are languishing and communities see Complete Streets and Form-Based Codes as a means of rejuvenating economic development and creating the “great places” that they feel like they lack. It’s not just “languishing suburban” aiming for walkable, urban densities – many greenfield locations are aiming for “urban town centers” right from the beginning, and still other locations already are fully urban, and need traffic management solutions that respect and enhance their multimodal appeal.
NCDOT has a new Complete Streets policy, but the department is better-known for “Stroads” than for delivering projects that are viewed by stakeholders as walkable and livable, and thereby helping catalyze
the “suburban to urban” transformation communities are seeking. This is not a critique of NCDOT – it is the common reality all over America, and it is born out of the conundrum of highways pulling doubleduty, serving local economic access needs and attempting to manage high traffic levels over relatively long distances at the same time. If anything, NCDOT is to be commended for national leadership in aiming to discover how to deliver a different product to existing and aspiring urban activity centers.
This continuation effort from NCDOT RP 2021-22 aims to update visuals to be used in presentations for NCDOT when making cases for alternative designs in urban and suburban settings. It is well known that conveying these concepts to practitioners, municipal staff, or citizens is extremely challenging. Aerial and “street level” scenes of various alternative designs help convey the benefits to other modalities by freeing up right-of-way. In addition, other benefits such as revitalization can be more easily discussed
once the scene is better understood.
