Kyle Piira

Tag: transportation

  • I had to take an Uber to cross the street in Charlotte

    I was recently heading out to dinner with my girlfriend at a restaurant in one of Charlotte’s suburbs. Before I left, I checked the transit options and noticed there was an express bus that went straight from Uptown, near my apartment, to a stop only about half a mile from the restaurant. Perfect.

    The timing lined up almost exactly with our reservation. The bus would get me there about fifteen minutes early, which seemed like plenty of time to walk the short distance to the restaurant. It was only half a mile away, which should take no more than ten minutes on foot.

    At least, that’s what I thought.

    When I got off the bus, I opened the map and had a sudden realization: there was no way to cross the street. The “street,” as it turned out, was an eight-lane arterial road with traffic moving around fifty miles per hour. In other words, a classic American stroad.

    Looking at the map more closely, I saw that the nearest crosswalk was about one and a half miles away. So to reach the restaurant legally, I would have had to walk a mile and a half to that crosswalk, then another mile and a half back on the other side. And as if that weren’t absurd enough, the entire route lacked sidewalks.

    In total, that would have been a three-mile trip to cover what was, in a straight line, about two-hundred feet. Apple Maps estimated it would take an hour and seven minutes.

    This was not what I expected, and I definitely didn’t have an hour to spare. So I had two choices: jaywalk across an eight-lane stroad, or hail a ride.

    Jaywalking wasn’t an option. Between the speed of the cars and the lack of any safe refuge in the median, I would’ve been taking my life into my own hands. So I pulled up the app and ordered a car.

    Ten minutes later, a Lyft picked me up and drove me across the street. The ride cost five dollars.

    What should have been a five-minute walk became a fifteen-minute ordeal that cost money and produced emissions. And by forcing me to summon a car to do something as simple as crossing the street, the design of the area made traffic worse for everyone else too. For the Lyft driver to reach me, he had to drive along the same congested, rush-hour road, adding one more car to an already overloaded system. After picking me up, he drove me across the street, dropped me off, and then merged back into that same stream of traffic, slowing down all the other drivers just a little more because there was no safe way to walk.

    This isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s an example of how poor street design isolates transit riders and pedestrians while making traffic worse for motorists. The city provided a bus that went right to where people might want to go, but the surrounding infrastructure made it functionally useless.

    If Charlotte wants to be a city where people can move around without a car, it needs to do more than run buses. It needs to connect those buses to sidewalks, crosswalks, and safe, human-scaled streets.

    Because no one should ever have to pay five dollars and wait ten minutes just to cross the street.

    My Lyft crossing the street

  • Death by Poor Urban Planning

    Every time we hear about a tragic car crash, the story is usually framed around individual blame. Someone made a mistake, someone wasn’t paying attention, or someone was reckless. But beneath these headlines lies a harder truth. Our urban design itself creates the conditions for these deaths. Poor urban planning is not just an inconvenience or an aesthetic misstep. It is a public health crisis that costs lives every day.

    In too many American cities, Charlotte included, roads are engineered like highways. They are wide, fast, and hostile to anything but cars. Corridors such as Independence Boulevard prioritize vehicle flow over human life, encouraging high speeds and leaving pedestrians and cyclists exposed. In this environment, even a brief lapse of focus, just a few seconds, can turn a mistake into a tragedy.

    Accident on Independence Boulevard, Charlotte NC injuring 6 people

    Just a few hours ago, as I write this post, there was an accident on Independence Boulevard that sent six people to the hospital, one with severe life-threatening injuries. It is tempting to place all of the blame on a driver going too fast. The harder truth is that the driver was simply responding to incentives created by reckless city planning, such as wide lanes, high speed limits, and a lack of safe transit alternatives. If the road had been designed to slow speeds and protect people, it is likely this crash would not have been so devastating or have happened at all.

    And incidents like this are far from rare. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department website listed seven similar traffic events in just the past three hours alone.

    To err is human. Every driver will make mistakes behind the wheel, such as misjudging a turn, glancing at a phone, or reacting a second too late. A safe transportation system recognizes this reality and builds in forgiveness. Narrower lanes, slower speeds, and protective infrastructure can ensure that a mistake does not automatically mean death. But our current design does the opposite. It demands flawless driving from every user, every second. That is not just unrealistic. It is negligent.

    There is another layer to the problem. Many people simply should not be behind the wheel of heavy machinery. Teenagers, seniors, those with medical conditions, or people who are poor drivers are still forced to drive because cities have left them with no alternatives. By designing systems where car travel is the only viable option, we compel people into dangerous situations that put their lives and the lives of others at risk.

    The spread-out, car-dependent development pattern of low-density housing, long commutes, and seas of parking creates endless demand for driving at higher speeds. Strong Towns and other urbanist voices have long warned that this model is both financially unsustainable and physically dangerous. More driving leads to more crashes, and higher speeds lead to more fatalities. The math is simple, and it is killing us.

    If we want fewer deaths, we must stop pretending this is about individual failure. Real safety comes from systemic change.

    • Slower streets with narrower lanes, traffic calming, and enforced lower speed limits.
    • Safe alternatives such as protected bike lanes, sidewalks, and reliable public transit.
    • Walkable, mixed-use communities where housing and jobs are close together, reducing the need to drive.
    • Equitable design that prioritizes vulnerable road users and invests in underserved communities.

    We call crashes “accidents” as if they were unavoidable acts of fate. They are not. They are predictable outcomes of policy choices, zoning codes, and street designs. Every fatal crash reflects a system that refuses to put people’s lives above the convenience of cars.

    Poor urban planning kills. With better choices and people-first design, we can build cities where human mistakes no longer cost human lives.