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You can check road projects, county by county, on the NCDOT website. NCDOT: Home
Thanks for the link. I am excited to see that the project for adding more lanes and interchanges at 74 & Idlewild and 74 & Sharon Amity has been funded. When completed that should save me some time in the morning. Now, if they could only do something about Idlewild & Piney Grove Road...
What city could handle a million more inhabitants without any upgrades to infrastructure and services?
Probably only an extremely large one like LA or NYC. But even there I think life would be pretty bad till the infrastructure caught up with the population.
What city could handle a million more inhabitants without any upgrades to infrastructure and services?
I was thinking the same exact thing. Finishing 485 finally will be nice, however it will also need to be widened (I think that planning is already under way). For Charlotte though, further expansion of mass transit is a must. The first line of LYNX was a great start. However, we need the other lines to be built out (and not just the BLE extension up to the University area). I've read in several places that the Charlotte metro area will be about 2.5 million people by around 2025. That's about a 700k increase over the next 15 years. So, that 1 million people isn't that far away.
IMHO seems to want to punish Charlotte for its growth! ....
There is no emotion like this at play. The state government is made up of legislators from 100 counties who all want as much DOT money in their county. I can't imagine that any of them would actively seek and gain election to the legislature for the purpose of causing harm to Charlotte.
What IS happening is that DOT money is doled out by politics and in that regard, Charlotte has little power in the legislature. This would not seem to make sense given the population, but Charlotte always splits the vote amongst party lines. So we send close to an equal amount of democrats and republicans to Raleigh, and because party politics are more important, they promptly cancel each other out. Most of the counties with the most clout, are single party counties. Cities with large numbers of transplants are especially at a disadvantage because they have not figured out that a NC Democrat in terms of voting for the state, is not the same thing as a national Democrat.
Furthermore, DOT money is not doled out to cities. It's given out by division and all counties in that division are in competition for that pool of money. Charlotte is in Division 10 (I believe) and that is actually head quartered in Albemarle. Blame the local Mecklenburg politicians to the NC General Assembly for failing to do what is needed. I would also add the Mayor (especially McCrory) and the city council for doing what it can over the years to **** off the rest of state at almost every opportunity. It's not the fault of the rest of the counties.
Finally I find the comparison to Atlanta as being pretty silly. Atlanta is the poster child for bad and horrible urban development. The city population has not changed in decades, in fact it has declined, while the metro area has sprawled out over 10,000 sq miles. They need the humongous highways there because it's so poorly planned. This is something that Charlotte should not try to copy or match.
First Atlanta the city limits hasn't declined it gained 122,000 residents in a 9 year period.. Making it around 540,000 thousand people the most it's ever been Atlanta is currently working on densifying it's core.. The beltline is the largest urban development in thr USA.. It's definitely going to change the way Atlanta grows in The future..
QUOTE=lumbollo;15873214]There is no emotion like this at play. The state government is made up of legislators from 100 counties who all want as much DOT money in their county. I can't imagine that any of them would actively seek and gain election to the legislature for the purpose of causing harm to Charlotte.
What IS happening is that DOT money is doled out by politics and in that regard, Charlotte has little power in the legislature. This would not seem to make sense given the population, but Charlotte always splits the vote amongst party lines. So we send close to an equal amount of democrats and republicans to Raleigh, and because party politics are more important, they promptly cancel each other out. Most of the counties with the most clout, are single party counties. Cities with large numbers of transplants are especially at a disadvantage because they have not figured out that a NC Democrat in terms of voting for the state, is not the same thing as a national Democrat.
Furthermore, DOT money is not doled out to cities. It's given out by division and all counties in that division are in competition for that pool of money. Charlotte is in Division 10 (I believe) and that is actually head quartered in Albemarle. Blame the local Mecklenburg politicians to the NC General Assembly for failing to do what is needed. I would also add the Mayor (especially McCrory) and the city council for doing what it can over the years to **** off the rest of state at almost every opportunity. It's not the fault of the rest of the counties.
Finally I find the comparison to Atlanta as being pretty silly. Atlanta is the poster child for bad and horrible urban development. The city population has not changed in decades, in fact it has declined, while the metro area has sprawled out over 10,000 sq miles. They need the humongous highways there because it's so poorly planned. This is something that Charlotte should not try to copy or match.[/quote]
I wanted to find this post the other day, but somehow I couldn't find it, I'm glad it's still going so here goes! The problem is that for whatever reason, our state gov't IMHO seems to want to punish Charlotte for its growth! We have a bunch of bureaucrats from down east who want to funnel a lot of porkbarrel projects to a lot of non-growth, rural areas in the eastern part of the state while everything west of Alamance County goes to pot! I rode out to ECU with a friend of mine to drop her son off to campus and that stretch of road, I believe it was Hwy 264, was nice and well-maintained, and the roads around the Raleigh-Durham area are pretty nice as well! Pretty much, most of I-85/40 is nice until you get near Greensboro, and that's when you start to see where everything start going downhill with the potholes and what have you!
Over 2 million people live east of I-95, and Fayetteville/Cumberland county has over 500,000 residents who are deserving of a loop.
NC builds highways as tools to bring economic growth to poor regions of the state. The Triad has more highways than any other metro area. US 64 and US 70 are critical links to the coast's resources.
This thread came to mind while I was sitting in traffic this morning just after 9AM on highway 51 heading towards Monroe Rd. The traffic was stop and go from just before Providence High School all the way up to Monroe Rd. I never dealt with slowdowns all the way back to Providence HS before. I know during the heart of the rush hour the closer you get to Monroe Rd the heavier the traffic tends to be but stop and go from all the way back to Providence HS this morning?
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