Before you head off on your Biketoberfest presented by The Charlotte Knights urban adventure on October 13th, make sure you have the route map on your phone!  This customized Google Map will give you turn by turn directions in case you get lost along the way. You can download the map for offline use, too! 

Thousands of people filled the streets on Sunday, September 30th for Open Streets 704!  We hope you had a chance to participate in this fun people-powered event that closed 4 miles of streets from Charlotte’s South End to West End.  If you missed it, Open Streets 704 happens bi-annually, once in the spring and once in the fall, so you’ll get another chance.

On Friday, September 21st, Sustain Charlotte partnered with LS3P to participate in PARK(ing) day, an annual, global event where participants temporarily transform parking spaces into pop-up parks. The mission of PARK(ing) Day is to call attention to the need for more urban open space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of our urban human habitat. The project began in 2005 when Rebar, a San Francisco art and design studio, converted a single metered parking space into a temporary public park in downtown San Francisco. Since 2005, PARK(ing) Day has evolved into a global movement, with organizations and individuals creating new forms of temporary public space in urban contexts around the world.

The Charlotte City Council's Transportation and Planning Committee met for their September meeting, where they discussed the City's new visioning process to develop a Comprehensive Plan, improvements to make streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and the e-scooter program.

Many senior adults in Charlotte struggle to maintain their mobility as they age, often resulting in social isolation and inability to meet daily needs. The gaps in Charlotte’s transportation network and barriers to mobility for seniors, particularly for those seniors who rarely leave their homes, are not fully understood.

Thanks to the generous support of Southminster, Sustain Charlotte partnered with residents in four neighborhoods to evaluate a wide variety of factors that may limit senior mobility including health, safety, infrastructure, personal finances, knowledge of transportation options, comfort level using various transportation modes, and desire to maintain personal mobility. The goal was to not only identify specific mobility challenges that prevent Charlotte seniors from traveling to their desired daily destinations, but to also envision how the mobility needs of senior residents could be addressed. In this way, this is both a research and an action project with the project’s approach and outcomes being replicable in other Charlotte neighborhoods in the future.

Sustain Charlotte worked with residents in Lincoln Heights, Hidden Valley, Washington Heights, University Park, and the West Blvd corridor, hosting workshops and conducting door-to-door surveying to identify specific senior mobility challenges.

Charlotte City Council’s Transportation and Planning Committee resumed their usual schedule of monthly meetings on Monday, August 27th.  The committee received updates on the Comprehensive Plan and the Transit Oriented Development Districts.

Planning Director Taiwo Jaiyeoba introduced Garet Johnson, Planning Department, as the project manager for the Comprehensive Plan.

Thanks to you, we had the biggest turn out to date for a Shifting Gears workshop! On Thursday, August 23rd, close to 70 people come out to Birdsong Brewing for an evening of bikes and fun!

The goal for every Shifting Gears public action workshop is for each attendee to leave with one action that they can undertake to help advance biking in Charlotte and one community contact to help them along the way.  These actions can be anything from biking to work regularly, trying dockless bikeshare for the first time, or volunteering. Whether interested in biking but haven’t yet started, a weekend warrior, or a daily bike commuter -- everyone has a part to play in helping realize our City’s new vision for bicycling in Charlotte.

Most people who ride transit for daily transportation reach their stops by walking. But how safe is that walk (or bike ride) to and from transit? And how many people who might want to ride transit choose not to because they can't reach stops safely? In this latest blog post on transit equity, we explore how Charlotte is using a Vision Zero approach to work towards eliminating traffic-related deaths and severe injuries.

Pedestrians and cyclists are the most vulnerable users of streets. (image: CDOT)

We’re all either seniors, or will be seniors one day.

An often overlooked facet of sustainability is how to make our communities accessible, open, and appreciative to all ages, including older residents. That’s why we started our Senior Mobility Project, and why we chose to make age-inclusive communities the theme of our August Grow Smart CLT. From millennials to boomers, 70 people gathered at The Barrel Room at Catawba Brewing Company to participate in a discussion about building age-friendly communities.

You've likely been hearing a lot about equity in the local news lately. There's been a lot of attention focused on how equity is affected by affordable housing, quality of schools, gentrification, and a host of other very real and pressing social issues. In today's blog post we examine how access, or lack of access, to high-quality public transit affects equity. 

TransitCenter's new Inclusive Transit: Advancing Equity Through Improved Access & Opportunity report sums it up well: "Allowing people to meet these [day-to-day transportation] needs creates long-term economic opportunities and helps people escape poverty. In addition to transit’s well documented environmental and economic benefits, public transportation can be a powerful tool to advance racial equity and social justice in American cities."