I posted the concept plan for the Moore Square Redesign over at The Raleigh DLA site. This was the one that was used during the public workshops last week. Jump over and click the image for the full view.
Moore Square Concept Plan Released – Raleigh DLA
Did you hear about the Hopscotch Music Festival that took place in Raleigh this weekend? I was out each night for lots of club shows and overheard a few people that were out of the loop and could not get into places because they were not part of the event. Woops. Although I’m sure that happens everywhere.
Anyway, I want to thank Jake Seaton at the MyNC Music blog for letting me take photos during the event. See the links below for my photos and I’m sure this week, more and more will pop up on the various blogs and your other sources of triangle coverage.
Oh Snap: Hopscotch Night 1 — dtraleigh.com
Oh Snap: Hopscotch Night 2 — dtraleigh.com
Oh Snap: Hopscotch Night 3 — dtraleigh.com
So now that the fantastic event is over, here’s looking forward to it again next year.
Tetris of Hannover by dtraleigh, on Flickr
Tomorrow, September 9th, 2010, the city of Raleigh is hosting two workshops on the Moore Square Redesign. This workshop aims at getting your input for the draft master plan that is currently in the works. There are two sessions that you can attend:
The workshop will be at Cobblestone Hall, which is located on Wolfe Street, or inside the historic City Market building. Registration is not required so show up to get more details on the project, give your feedback, and gawk at the interior of the City Market building.
You can see some of the winning designs from Chris Counts Studio on Flickr but the current design is slightly different then what you see there. If you take a look at the picture above, that is the model of Moore Square that was shown to us at the Public Leadership Group, which I am a part of.
A new feature for Moore Square will be the large lawn around the center of the square. According to their research, the design firm claims that there is a lot of green space in Moore Square already but with so many paths and mulch, the green space is cut up and divided into small sections. One large, grassy lawn would be more flexible and can allow visitors to take part in more activities.
The design also incorporates some small hills and/or smooth rocks on one side of the lawn. In response to comments about making the square more play-friendly for children, Chris Counts decided to go with a natural playground of hills and, what I’ll call, “natural obstacles” rather then a traditional playground of plastic slides and a jungle gym.
These, as well as more ideas for the square, are still up in the air and public comments are needed to help mold the Moore Square master plan. Tomorrow’s workshop should be a good one.
Looking straight up the tall brick tower. The old Raleigh Water Tower is for sale.
I watched some of the city council meeting last night and train noise was a pretty hot issue, one of the bullets the Five Points residents were firing off as to why they were against the NC3 option. What I hope, very much hope, is that the good citizens in the Glenwood-Brooklyn neighborhood and the Five Points neighborhood are against the noise coming from a high-speed train and do not think it sounds the same as a freight train.
If you are not caught up on the high-speed rail corridor debate, hit the archives tagged SEHSR here.
I support the NC3 option, with the added removal of the Hargett Street bridge, and want to wait for more details about this new NC4 option before I even touch it. I think some more investigation with this noise issue is needed because Norfolk-Southern, who is against the NC3 option, has definitely helped organize the citizens in the previously mentioned neighborhoods against new trains going through here at all. They are obviously concerned about their interested, very little or not at all concerned about ours.
A comparison has to be made here; freight versus passenger trains. In my opinion, these higher capable speed trains WILL sound different then the freight trains that go through there. This comes from my experience riding and being around trains in Asia. The passenger trains are built better probably because people will be on board and not cargo. You don’t get the clatter and clacking noise from freight trains. Hopefully NCDOT can provide better data on noise because I thought they did a very poor job answering the council’s questions about train noise last night.
Here are some random videos that are relevant to this topic. You can make up your own mind.
Freight versus High Speed rail Noise Impact on the Frankfurt-Cologne line.
Diesel cross-country train going through Shawford Station
A very quiet electric locomotive leaving a station.
Bus shelter on Morgan Street taken with my camera phone.
A bus shelter has popped up on Morgan Street at the R-Line stop near the intersection with Dawson Street. Bus shelters were on the to-do list for Capital Area Transit so hopefully more are on the way, especially with the colder season just a few months away.
Fresh off this great read at the New York Times, I decided to push out this post about one of my favorite topics when discussing urban areas; parking. I’m not sure why it fascinates me but it’s so interesting to hear people complain about it when it is proven that our parking decks are around 30-40% vacant. Paid parking is also helping businesses in downtown and the newly installed meters are working, but there is always someone who wants to complain. Fascinating isn’t it?
Anyway, Tyler Cowen’s article in the New York Times suggests we should be raising the price of parking and that sometimes the value of the land is worth more then the car that sits in it. For Raleigh, if prices went up, then the mass transit system needs to be a worthy alternative for everyone. Better sidewalks and bike lanes could help too. All these alternatives would ease people’s worries about paying for parking. You know I love options.
I wrote up a post almost two years ago, listing off some surface parking lots in downtown Raleigh that would be great for new developments. Make sure to read that post for some background. So as a follow up to that one, here is a list of really expensive land in downtown Raleigh that is used for surface parking.
This information comes straight off Wake County’s website and I used their iMaps to find the real estate information. For each parcel, or group of parcels, I’ve listed the total assessed value. There are some parking lots that are in downtown but are part of a property that includes the building so I have not included those as we are only focusing on the parking lot and I can’t even start to think about making an accurate guess to its worth.
The two parking lots, shown in the map above, are to the east of the North Carolina Museum of History. These city block sized lots, minus the Haywood House in the southeast corner, have seen little development opportunity. In September of 2009, it was reported that the North Carolina State Bar would build a new headquarters at the corner of Blount and Edenton Streets. This hasn’t happened yet and cars continue to park on these lots. Looking at the image above,
The eastern block’s assesed total value = $7,910,085 (5 parcels)
The western block’s assessed total value = $8,191,190 (1 parcel)
109 East North Street is the address of the parking lot at the corner of Wilmington and North street, across the street from the government district around Halifax Mall. The lots here were part of the Blount Street Commons project which has stalled recently and while new townhouses are sprouting up near Krispy Kreme, no mixed use buildings are on the radar for Wilmington Street.
The parking lot at this corner has an assessed total value = $7,190,603
The empty lots around the Lincoln Theatre on Cabarrus street and the Pope House on Wilmington Street, shown above, are cut and carved into about 17 different parcels. There actually is a middle street dissecting the block but paid parking lots are all that is there.
All the parcels combined have an assessed total value = $4,502,200
Sites 2 and 3, shown above, are referred to as the lots in front of the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts and they are mainly used as parking for events at the center looking down Fayetteville Street. Plans for this block have never materialized and I haven’t seen anything that had a chance in the last 5 years or so. Parking it will remain for now.
Lot’s total assessed value = $4,810,110
Those are the five most expensive that I found. Here’s are the next ten.
The last lot I want to point out is the six, yes only six, space lot at the corner of Hargett and Wilmington Streets having a value of $255,390, shown in the top photo at the beginning of this post. This is a perfect example where the space is worth more than most of the cars that sit in them, around $42,000 per space!
The question to take from this; are we using our land to its most benefit? I see evidence to prove that we are not.