Charlotte Traffic: 5 Secrets of the Anti-Grid – Charlotte Magazine

Historian Tom Hanchett answers some FAQs about Charlotte’s entropic street system

Charlotte’s street system is utter chaos with yellow lines and green signs. Roads meander all over creation. They either change names every few hundred yards or carry some variant of the name “Sharon,” or both. Any newcomer, and many natives, can attest to an infuriating non-pattern of winding asphalt ribbons and GPS-defeating hard turns that deposit drivers into a vehicular version of Class VI rapids. Upon arrival, you consider yourself lucky to have emerged in one piece.

Five years ago, Geoff Boeing, a public policy professor at the University of Southern California and an expert in urban street networks, published a study of those networks in 100 cities around the world. Boeing analyzed mapping data to determine which cities conform most to logical, easy-to-navigate grid patterns. The cities at the bottom of the list had the highest level of “orientation entropy”—in short, disorder.

He found that three American cities are the most orderly: Chicago, Miami, and Minneapolis. The most disorderly, not just in the United States but the world—more chaotic and confusing than even the notorious labyrinth of Rome—is … Guess who? “Charlotte’s and São Paulo’s street orientations,” Boeing noted with what had to have been a wry smile, “are nearly perfectly disordered.”

How and why did we end up with this? We can answer some of the most commonly asked questions about our city’s absurdist street system with the help of local historian Tom Hanchett, author of Sorting Out the New South City, the definitive chronicle of Charlotte’s development.

1. Who the heck was Sharon, anyway?

It’s not a who but a where: “And Sharon shall be a fold of flocks, and the valley of Achor a place for the herds to lie down in, for my people that have sought me,” according to Isaiah 65:10. That was the O.G. Sharon. A latter-day Sharon is in south Charlotte. It’s where Sharon and Sharon Amity roads intersect, the site of Sharon Presbyterian Church, established in 1831. That explanation is the key that unlocks the mystery of what Hanchett refers to as Charlotte’s “Presbyterian streets.”

“This is an area that doesn’t have a big river, a bay, hills, mountains—nothing in the landscape to name a road after,” he says. “So the early European settlers, a lot of whom were Scots-Irish Presbyterians, when they established a church, that became the destination for roads.

“So the road that went from Charlotte to Providence Presbyterian Church was called Providence Road, and the one that went from Charlotte to Sharon Presbyterian Church was called Sharon Road, and the one that went from Sharon Presbyterian Church to Amity Presbyterian Church—yes, there was one, and still is—was called Sharon Amity. Same thing with lots of other names: Sardis, Carmel, a bunch of different Presbyterian streets.” A couple of others: Steele Creek and Sugar (the church uses the alternate spelling “Sugaw”) Creek.

2. Why do so many streets change names as you drive them?

The most egregious example: Tyvola Road, which branches off from West Boulevard in the Reid Park neighborhood. It winds south, then east, until Park Road, where it becomes Fairview Road. Beyond Providence Road, it turns into Sardis Road, which veers south at Providence Day School. But if you stay straight, you’re on Rama Road, which, once it crosses Monroe Road, turns into Idlewild Road. What florid madness is this?

“One piece of the answer is that much of Charlotte’s road pattern was built out in the 20th century, when many cities and planners and urban developers thought that the grid was passé,” Hanchett says. “So neighborhoods tended to be pretty much self-contained street systems. As you hook up new suburbs to each other in construction, the streets have not been thought about in relation to each other.

“And it doesn’t help that people like their neighborhood names and their neighborhood street names. So they don’t want to give up being on Woodlawn, say, as opposed to being on Wendover and Eastway. So it’s partly this 20th-century fanaticism about exclusive neighborhoods—street systems that literally exclude other people.”

In the case of Tyvola-Fairview-Sardis-Rama-Idlewild, we have a couple of answers. Tyvola comes from the name of a dog-training and skeet-shooting retreat called Tyvola Farms. A man named D.K. Sing established it just after World War II. (Sing co-owned a funeral parlor with Ben Douglas, Charlotte’s mayor from 1935 to 1941.) Sardis is a Presbyterian street. Rama was the name of a farming community founded in the late 19th century.

Some other streets, like the aforementioned Wendover Road, began as small residential lanes that became thoroughfares only as Charlotte grew. Hanchett refers to a 1960 city plan to widen and connect farm roads and create a more efficient network of multilane roads through the east side. The roads were connected but kept their original names: Woodlawn Road, Runnymede and Sharon lanes, Wendover Road, and Eastway Drive.

A few others Hanchett can’t explain. If you take Park Road south, it eventually takes a sharp right turn and ends at Carolina Place Mall in Pineville. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll suddenly find yourself on Johnston Road. An even weirder phenomenon is the conjoined-V configuration of Providence and Queens roads in Myers Park, where Providence veers southeast and, at the same intersection, Queens turns southwest. Put another way: Queens becomes Providence, and Providence becomes Queens. This defies explanation. Hanchett refers to this intersection as “Providence-Providence-Queens-Queens.”

3. Why, especially in the south Charlotte “wedge,” do roads curve and wind so much?

That’s a surprisingly easy question to answer, and Hanchett defers to the work of Mary Newsom, an ex-Charlotte Observer editor and former urban policy director at UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute. In 2015, the institute published “Up the Creeks,” Newsom’s close examination of the 3,000 miles of creeks that wind through Mecklenburg County.

In short, roads—along with housing developments, parking lots, and other features of the urban landscape—follow the serpentine tracks of the creek beds. Even uptown, the only area of Charlotte laid out on a grid, conforms to a pair of creeks, Little Sugar and Irwin, that orient the city center on an eccentric southwest-to-northeast axis.

4. Why does the city’s development, including its street system, seem so haphazard and make-it-up-as-we-go?

“It’s not a good answer, but it’s the only answer I have,” Hanchett says. “So much of this putting together of the street system was done after the fact using subdivisions that were developed in the 20th century. The cities that I come from—places like Syracuse, New York; Youngstown, Ohio; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—have their share of confusing streets. But you can make out a grid arrangement if you squint. It’s hard to see that here.

“The oldest streets here can be envisioned as spokes on a wagon wheel, and that kind of works. But the farther you get from Trade and Tryon, which is the hub of that spoke system, the more confusing it gets when you get down to Berewick (Town Center) and the new suburbs outside of I-485. They barely conform even to that wagon-wheel pattern.”

5. Is there another possible explanation?

“It’s apocryphal, but it’s fun to say, which is that the whole thing was a plot by the Chamber of Commerce,” he says. “Because you get on Sharon Road, you can’t get off, and you buy a house, and you settle down, and that’s why Charlotte’s growing so fast.” Finally, something that makes a lick of sense.