Today I thought it would be a good idea to take a walk from my house to the
Rivanna Trail, a pathway that circles the City of Charlottesville. I am on my seventh day of not driving, an experiment in challenging myself to not use my car. I live in an urban area that's just under 40 square miles, and I want to see if it's possible to get around in a meaningful way without a car.
For much of this month, I've tweeted my commuting patterns as a way of trying to take notes for research I am doing into how we as a community can work toward building a place where people can have alternatives to getting in their car. I believe it is important in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but I also want to build a better place.
To do that, sometimes I need to stock of what's around.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I have this memory that there is a plan to put a pathway along this route above an easement the
Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has. I think that might be somewhat expensive, and I have no idea where that ranks as a priority. I wonder if this sits in a plan at all, or of it's just one of those things I remember without command of knowledge.
Still, I tweet these threads because I want other people to think about how the landscape in which they live. I believe that most of us don't think about these issues. We don't think about the natural world that interacts with our built environment.
Somehow I've been at this for a long time. At one point I was a reporter who covered land use issues, but before that I was just a person who lived in Charlottesville, and in the Fry's Spring neighborhood.
A quick check of my Gmail brings up this message from the president of the Fry's Spring Neighborhood Association dated February 6, 2007, two months before I would begin work at Charlottesville Tomorrow. The author is
John Santoski, who will go on to serve on the Planning Commission shortly afterward.
"During the past two years the issues confronting the Fry's Spring neighborhood have escalated in number and intensity (as you all know from our well attended neighborhood meetings) but thanks to your determination and perseverance we have seen results such as the initiation of traffic calming on Robertson/Highland, the removal of the "thumb" at Cherry/Cleveland/Willard (CCW), the drainage and safety needs being addressed on OLR and the reconsideration of the width of the JPA bridge."
It's strange to live here, and to have this blog, which now covers so much of my adult life. And to remember things like this, things that most of us have now forgotten. When I began this blog, I wanted to use the power of blogging and what would become social media to find a way to get people to talk about local issues.
Soon after that email from John Santoski, Charlottesville Tomorrow recorded a meeting of the
Planning and Coordination Council, which is the forum in which UVa officials talk with their counterparts in Albemarle County and Charlottesville. Many residents of Fry's Spring were concerned about the proliferation of apartment complexes across the line in Albemarle County. Many felt that this was causing traffic issues, and for a while, this rose up the ranks.
At the time, I did not work for Charlottesville Tomorrow. I was married and trying to figure out how to make podcasting work to boost my career. I was a freelance general assignment reporter, and land use was just one of the many things I thought I could write stories about. Brian, though, saw the organization as a way to help transform how people in our community talked to each other about the impacts of growth and development.
He was hiring in February 2007, and so I helped boost the signal for the PACC meeting on my website. I wanted to be useful so
I cross-posted the audio on my Charlottesville Podcasting Network.
Anyway, back to the hear and now. I decided not to post several pictures to Twitter, pictures I thought were interesting to me.
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| Sunset Avenue in the city, a very narrow road with no sidewalks and not too much room to build any more. |
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| The Huntley neighborhood caused a lot of concern for many like John Santoski, who did not trust that a zoning mechanism called Planned Unit Development would address their concerns. |
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A small pathway allows people who live in Huntley to cut through two homes to get to the pathway to Moores Creek.
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Speaking of Moores Creek, it took me a mile and a half from my house to get there. I documented it in this video, which I tweeted out to people.
Connectivity between Albemarle and Charlottesville has been an issue for a long time, and was very active 12 years ago when I began work at Charlottesville Tomorrow. There were many in the Fry's Spring Neighborhood who wanted to close Old Lynchburg Road to vehicular traffic. At some point, I believe Sunset Avenue carried vehicular traffic, but I believe that was restricted to cyclists and pedestrians. Some want to make this issue alive again.
On the walk today, I mostly wanted to get to the Rivanna Trail so I could go north. The idea had been to walk along the trail up to Barracks Road Shopping Center and beyond. But, unfortunately, I came across a waterblock.
At this point, I tried my best to find another place to cross the stream. There appeared to be a pathway, but it didn't exactly work so well. There were no signs telling me not to trespass, and there was a pathway for some of the journey. I'll just let the tweets tell the story.
Using GIS now, I know where I was. At the time, I wasn't consulting anything except geography. I could hear a highway in the distance, and I knew if I walked toward it, I'd likely come to something I'd recognize. For a bit it was so nice to be in the wilderness, and feel safe. Of course, someone did remind me to be careful.
Back to Sunset Avenue
I eventually found my way back to the crossing, and I walked back down the trail from where I had come, back to Sunset Avenue. For some reason, I got confused and thought I was on Old Lynchburg Road. I should have kept walking down a trail that I'll talk about in a little while. Today, I ended up walking up Sunset Avenue, thinking I was walking to Azalea Park.
But let's first go back to what Jerry Miller raised earlier. Sunset Avenue is a road that used to cross Moores' Creek at some point. I don't know when that happened, exactly, but if there was a street there now, it would end up hitting this street here.
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In person, this was much steeper and much more narrow. |
If there were to be serious consideration of a vehicular bridge that would reconnect Sunset Avenue Extended and Sunset Avenue, there would need to be a lot of serious consideration about how the city streets could take that additional traffic. The road you see above connects to JPA Extended, which could handle the traffic. But this passageway does not appear to be ready to handle the additional load.
Now is not the time to answer that question fully, but instead, to relay the journey I had going forward. After getting back to Sunset from my wilderness experience, I headed up the road. Note the error in my tweet.
As a driver, I have no reason at all to be on Sunset Avenue, but hundreds and hundreds of people live in the apartment complexes and subdivision for which the road is the major access point. Rather than try to convey the actual number, I'll just show this map from Albemarle's GIS service to give you a sense of scale. Albemarle has expected this level of development here for many years.
In the above map, you'll see a double line cutting through the center right of the image. That's Interstate 64. Toward the upper middle, you'll see there's a vertical line that leads has a number on it. That line is Sunset Avenue. The following tweets are some of my thoughts along the way.
Realizing I had made a mistake and was not on the way to Azalea Park, where I hoped to ford Moores Creek, I turned onto Country Green rather than walk all the way out to Fifth Street Extended. I didn't want to walk on a four lane highway. I wanted to get back to an urban trail.
Along the way, I saw for the first time a location of a new housing development called Brookdale, which will feature 96 units of affordable housing. I wrote about this in the past few years, and you can read all about it on cvillepedia. I'm still updating that site on a regular basis, and hope to add my pictures from there at some point. But for now, I note that I noted the pedestrian conditions here aren't optimal. I need to look up the plans to see what's happening here.
There is a neighborhood store that people could go to from all of these houses, but I suspect most people drive here.
The fun about communicating with people on Twitter while I'm out doing these hikes through the city is that they can communicate right back. Rory Stolzenberg, a member of the Charlottesville Planning Commission, pointed out that this store has changed in recent years.
I pressed on and got to Old Lynchburg Road and decided to walk back to Azalea Park. I really wanted to get back to some section of the Rivanna Trail. I was glad that there at least was some accommodation for pedestrians here, and I thought maybe the overall situation was better than I had expected.
There are discussions about how to get this link to work, and I look forward to talking to my colleague Peter Krebs at the Piedmont Environmental Council because he has worked on this issue. We're working to ensure that plans for these areas are turned into reality, and walks like this are a big part of that. I'm so fortunate that I have a job in 2019 that builds upon all of the work I've been doing for the community. I'm part of a team that's devoted to helping us build a better community.
After about two hours of trying, with a lot of false starts and covering a good deal of the hillier portions of the Granger property, I finally got to cross Moores Creek again.
I crossed over to Azalea Park, and thought back to all of the times I went there with my children when they were very young. At that time, all of the amenities were in different places than they are now. The playground is where the dog park was. The dog park is on a field where nothing was. The open space just moved around.
I spent so much time in Azalea Park when I had a dog, and when I had young children. These days, it's just a place I pass through when trying to get to one of my favorite parts of the Rivanna Trail - the crossing at the southeast corner of the park. For years, there has been a cable that helps guide people making the crossing over Moores Creek. It's not for everyone, and a bridge would be nice, but I've taken those steps so many times. Today, though, was a different experience.
I didn't know what to do, but I didn't want to stay in one place so I kept walking, and walked again past all of the allotments in Azalea Park. There were so many stories in there, and I had so many questions. There were only a handful of people spending time there, and I thought how amazing it would be to have my own space there, to grow things. Or, to be able to meet up with the people there and barter for vegetables.
Anyway, I walked up through the park, wistfully looking at the spot where the old playground used to be. Somewhere I have photographs of my children there. I went past the new dog park, and one of them ran up to the gate as I approached, hoping I brought someone new for them to play with. I hadn't, and I reflected how much I miss having a dog in my life.
If I had had a dog, though, I could not have executed the next phase of community mobility plan. Is it possible to use transit on a Sunday afternoon, in any meaningful capacity?
To get to that destination, I had to race, and so I briskly walked up towards Jefferson Park Avenue, passing along Jefferson Park Avenue Extended. I have so many old memories of that space, of a time that's long gone, but still with me. And I'm glad to see some of the changes that have happened. I remember when Fry's Spring Station was an actual service station.
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| I've only eaten here once because I don't live around here, but the one time I did eat there, I got there on the trolley-style bus. |
So, that was that. I got the bus, went and had a meal at Rapture, and came home and wrote this up.
I'll be adding and correcting this and those will be noted below this line:
