The bike lanes are coming! The bike lanes are coming! To help with traffic congestion! Yippee!
Spend $4.5 million on the Woodlawn-South Blvd. chokepoint and you evidently get bike lanes and traffic islands out the ying-yang. The bike lanes are running east-west on Woodlawn because you are supposed to ride your bike to the train. South Blvd. northbound gets one more left turn lane, making for two left turns lanes onto Woodlawn in the direction of the train. Traffic islands are for all the pedestrian traffic the new “urban form” buildings are supposed to draw. Get the picture?
I would say to wait and see how businesses at the intersection like the new set-up, except that we know that existing businesses are not part of the grand plan for the corridor. Many will be knocked down as new access roads for the light rail station are built. In time the entire area ranging to I-77 and Yancey Rd. are to serve transit oriented development.
In sum, the Woodlawn-South redo is part of the $50 million effort quite apart from the $467 million being spent on the 9.6 mile train line to help remake Charlotte to serve light rail. Still the come: The development subsidies in order to get all the transit oriented development along South actually built to the central planners specs.
