Parking space too small for your vehicle? It’s not just your imagination.
Holiday shopping is right around the corner which means crowds, the stress of finding the perfect gift and parking in congested areas. Who among us hasn’t stalked shoppers who look like they’re walking back to their cars, idled in some parking deck with our blinker on just waiting to grab a space—any space—regardless of how well our vehicle fits in it?
On that point, CBS 17 news anchor and reporter Bill Young set out to determine whether all parking spots in Raleigh are created equal; turns out, they’re not.
Young took the City of Raleigh’s current parking codes and put 10 local parking lots, selected at random, to the test, measuring spaces to see if they met the code.
“The majority met it,” Young says of his findings. The interesting thing about the lots whose parking spaces didn’t meet the current code, he adds, that property owners skirt the rules to maintain compliance.
“Essentially, nobody is doing anything necessarily illegal,” Young says. “But that doesn’t mean that it is consistent with the current code. They can be grandfathered in. There are others that are wide enough to meet the standards for compact spaces, but aren’t necessarily marked as such. In a lot of instances, it’s a situation where they are in the process of redoing the striping and reworking the parking lots. So, while that’s not the case currently, it’s on the to-do list. It’s okay in this interim if it’s not currently marked as a compact spot.”
For his research, Young drove all over the city in a Nissan Altima, Wake County’s most registered vehicle, but tried to stay primarily in shopping areas since we’re heading into the holiday season. Of the 10 lots he tested, Young found three areas with some issues: Crabtree Valley Mall, the Pleasant Valley Promenade on Glenwood Avenue and the parking lot just outside of Marbles Kids Museum. At the Marbles lot, for instance, some spaces are clearly designated as compact while others are not; the way the spaces appear to be designated are inconsistent. (The lot is registered to a standalone LLC, with no listed phone number).
Young says he spoke to the real estate developer at Pleasant Valley Promenade and learned that the shopping center is undergoing major renovations.
“Because it was so outdated for so many years, their primary focus is bringing the parking lot up to ADA standards,” Young says. “You start getting into really big trouble if you do not meet those.” Young says that while the shopping center may not have the proper signage now, it shows good faith that its operators are working toward that goal.
Young notes that all of the parking lots he visited do in fact meet ADA standards, providing accessible parking spaces to those who need them, including people with disabilities.
As for Crabtree Valley Mall, Young went to city officials and asked them to pull codes for the parking lot. There are 3,600 permits for the parking spaces at the mall, essentially one permit per space.
“There was no way the city could reasonably go space by space and see which ones met requirements,” Young says. “There are plenty of spaces that I tested at Crabtree that meet current code. There were also some that were way under current code, even for compact.”
Young reached out to Crabtree for comment but at the time of publication the mall had not responded.
Of course, numerous factors contribute to how well a car will fit into a space, including the vehicle’s size and how well the driver is able to park. For most people who get a door ding in a parking lot, the person parked next to them is the culprit or, maybe, they’d complain to the business about the size of its spaces— especially if they can’t get back into their vehicle because someone parked too close.
No one, however, takes these grievances to city inspectors.
“It does take quite a few steps to make this an issue,” Young says. “Going back as far as the longest serving representative in city compliance, they’ve never had a complaint about a parking space not meeting code. My goal wasn’t to shake things up, but to put something out there and get people thinking. When they pull into a parking spot and it seems a little tight, it’s not their imagination, it’s not their parking skills, it’s not the person parking next to them. It might be that that parking space does not meet current code.”
When most of us think of fitness, we focus on the body. But the wellness of our minds and the strength of our relationships to our communities play a big role in our overall health. Nathan Williams and Brit Guerin will integrate all three components in Current Wellness, a center for physical and mental health in southeast Raleigh that’s set to open early next year.
“There is a lot of fitness that is concentrated on your body and there is a lot of pressure put on people to be fit,” Guerin says. “It’s also important to treat ourselves well mentally as well as physically.”
Current Wellness will offer a movement studio, a teaching kitchen for food education and a co-working space for counselors as well as other wellness practitioners.
“We’re calling it a movement studio intentionally,” Guerin says. “We don’t want to be like some of the things that mainstream fitness promotes. We won’t apply pressure to body image and body size. We’re not going to have mirrors. It’s about healing and being supportive to our bodies. It’s more similar to a yoga studio, but we’ll also offer functional fitness.”
Williams co-owns the company with his wife Brit, who has a background in fitness and mental health counseling. Together, they hope to establish a place for the community to come together and simply feel good.
“We live in southeast Raleigh and we really love the community, from newcomers to people who have lived in southeast Raleigh their whole lives,” Williams says. “We’re trying to make a business that’s inclusive for all of those people in that part of town, which is underserved for wellness services. Wellness is something that everybody needs and creates a connection between newcomers.”
Uplifting with Upfit
Brit and Nathan were able to bring their business to southeast Raleigh with the help of the city’s Building Upfit Grant, created to help small businesses and commercial property owners with improvements, renovations or additions to the interior of their commercial property. The program’s goal is to support a thriving and equitable economy through a strong small business ecosystem and investment in economic development priority areas.
Rafael Baptista, a strategic planning analyst for the city of Raleigh, says the grant is an important part of the city’s strategy for achieving long term, equitable economic development.
“Some of the desired outcomes of the grant include activating vacant properties in Raleigh, helping small businesses grow and expand and fostering small business investment in our economic development areas,” Baptista says. “The city is constantly assessing its small business support program to ensure that we are providing the appropriate incentives to small businesses.”
To date, 49 Raleigh businesses have received the Building Upfit Grant since its inception in 2016, representing a diverse set of industries and areas in the city.
Growing Community
For Williams and Guerin, they aren’t just opening a business—they’re joining a community.
“This is a vibrant community with really rich cultural history that has, at times, been overlooked,” Williams says. “Until recently, people haven’t treated southeast Raleigh as a destination. There have been people living here for years that know how great it is.”
While the brick and mortar component to Current Wellness isn’t yet complete, Brit and Nathan are already active nearby with pop-ups at Transfer Co. Food Hall, Dorothea Dix Park and Moore Square. They’ve held everything from a yoga and strength training class to demonstrations on how to cook healthy, local seafood from the Carolina coast.
“We want to engage with the community and collaborate with our neighbors,” Williams says. “We want to let people know what we’re about. From a bird’s eye view, people might not understand what we are, but we feel like we’re very different. As part of growth in an area that’s being gentrified, we’re being very conscious and we don’t want to be another business that pushes people out.”
This month, Raleigh Magazine launches a new series wherein writer Tracy Jones, a self-described “average athlete,” tries out three different versions of a workout and reports back to our readers on what to expect.
It’s often said that a workout is what you put into it. For HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), this couldn’t be truer. You choose the weight, you choose the speed and you choose how much you want to put into your workout.
I consider myself relatively fit. I run half-marathons almost yearly but I shy away from hardcore cardio, weights and anything that requires flexibility. So, of course, I was tasked with starting off with HIIT. Challenge accepted!
The classes I tried in three different Raleigh locations were similar in intensity but completely different in style. I found this fascinating; how often do we get the opportunity to try out several versions of the same workout in order to find the one that suits us best?
My first class was at Core Fitness Studio, a locally owned gym off of Capital Boulevard. Upon arrival, I was greeted by a very muscular, friendly trainer who immediately explained the proper way to get on and off of a moving treadmill. The first rule of the class is that the treadmills never stop, so I was grateful for the tutorial. The class itself was called D.I.G., which stands for determination, intensity, and guts—and I can see why.
The class, like the treadmills, never stopped, which is the backbone of HIIT. I started at the treadmill, slowly raising the incline as instructed, then moved to the floor for core work, the wall for weights and squats, then finished my circuit on the rower with a weighted rope added in for good measure. I cycled this three times throughout the hour, each time changing up the exercises a bit. When burpees were added at the end, I was done.
My second class looked a lot less intimidating. Because I’m a mom to a toddler, I thought I should try out the local FIT4MOMgroup. I realize this class isn’t available to everybody, but new moms can sometimes get intimidated about getting back into the gym so I thought this could be helpful to some readers.
This class consisted of five women on a rooftop and no fancy equipment. We had some weights, resistance bands, a ball and our own yoga mats. How bad could this be? Well, looks are deceiving. These friendly women who chatted about baby toys and growing families quickly kicked it into high gear. The class was similar to the D.I.G. class but with more variety between stations. I never knew what was coming and what was usually coming was painful. The highlight was pushups, a huge weakness for me, even with all of that heavy stroller lifting. We also endured sprints, planks, mountain climbers and a weight exercise in a stance that I’ve never tried before, all while watching the sunset and chatting about “mom stuff.” An hour of this kicked my butt, in a good way, and it was nice to end the class with a cool towel doused with aromatherapy oils and a pep talk on what good moms we are. It was a post-workout zen that made me forget how badly my thighs were burning from squats and lunge jumps.
While I both enjoyed and endured these two classes, I have to say that my third class was my favorite in terms of style. All three classes made my muscles burn and raised my heart rate, but F45 Training had something the other two did not—fancy television screens that told me exactly what to do and for how long to do it.
F45 Training has a rotation of classes but Saturday’s hour-long class is the most comparable to Core Fitness Studio and FIT4MOM. The room was divided into 27 stations with one person at each. After 45 seconds of an exercise, each person rotated to the next station. The instructional screens were hugely helpful when I either forgot what I was supposed to do at the station or when my stomach burned from crunches and I needed to know how much longer I had to keep going—I, personally, like a countdown clock. We rotated through all of the stations twice, with shorter bursts of 35 seconds on the second time around.
After completing all three HIIT classes, I’m happy to report that my butt feels tighter, my thighs are still burning and overall, I feel better. I would happily do any of these classes on a more frequent basis. The one consistency I noticed across all the classes was the attitude of the trainers. Each gym had helpful and friendly staff that encouraged but didn’t push. I had no shame for doing pushups on my knees, jump roping without a rope or refusing to run backwards on a treadmill, because, you know, that’s an accident waiting to happen. For anyone who wants a slight nudge toward overall fitness, I recommend HIIT.
Stay tuned for next month’s exercise class rotation. I really hope it isn’t yoga.
What links the mayor’s office downtown to Dorothea Dix Park? A fallen tree and the imagination of park crusader Gregory Poole.
A new conference table in the mayor’s office, located in the municipal building on W. Hargett Street, was recently built from a massive Post Oak tree that was brought down by Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Poole, who passed away last December, was instrumental in inspiring leaders to realize that Dorothea Dix Park could be North Carolina’s “Central Park.” One of those leaders was Mayor Nancy McFarlane, to whom the table is dedicated.
“This is basically a Greg Poole story,” says Carlton Midyette, who serves on the executive committee of the Dorothea Dix Park Conservancy, the body that raises money to help pay for Dix Park. “He was a relentless promoter of this park. He was a wealthy man who cared about a lot of city causes and did a lot for a lot of city causes.”
Poole had the tree dated and discovered that it had been planted on the Dix property in 1856, the same year Dorothea Dix Hospital was built. Being an amateur woodworker himself, Poole wanted to do something with the tree.
“He decided that this treasure needed to be saved,” says Midyette. Poole brought in equipment, had the tree cut into logs and took it to a wood yard for storage. From there, Poole and other Conservancy members met with local craftsman Stuart Kent and the idea for a table was born.
f8 Photo Studios
“We came up with this idea to do this table for the mayor,” says Kent. “We dedicated the piece in Nancy’s name, in honor of the Conservancy, to honor the work she had done. I designed the table after the Scottish-American furniture designer Duncan Phyfe, which celebrates the history of furniture design in America, and North Carolina, where a great many of Duncan Phyfe [pieces of furniture] have been reproduced.”
Building the table wasn’t easy. The lumber had been dried incorrectly and was cracked substantially in many places. Kent had to repair the material before he could even begin building the table and it took three builds before the table was complete.
“The day after I glued it, it cupped pretty severely,” says Kent. “I cut it apart and built a tabletop a second time. After the second time it had twisted—it had done something completely different. I cut it apart and put it together a third time. I built another table to build this table on that had a very heavy frame that I could force the wood to stay clamped to. It stayed there for a year.”
When Kent unclamped the wood a few months ago, it finally stayed flat, allowing him to finish building. Last month, Kent delivered the table—with the assistance of Raleigh police officers—to the mayor in her office, to the delight of McFarlane and her staff.
But Kent didn’t work on the table alone. Often, Poole visited Kent’s shop in Greenville to work on the project with him.
“There are two places on the tabletop where he was learning to use the hand plane with me,” says Kent. “He was 84 years old and didn’t have the body strength and would lift the plane up and tear the fibers out. I decided to leave those places in the tabletop—two little divots. Those are the hands of Greg Poole and that makes it very special. Nancy put her hands on it and it was a pretty touching thing.”
The table now celebrates the leadership of local officials and the incredible effort it took to make the park happen—and will continue to in the years to come.
“[Poole] was close to the mayor, close to the mayor before her, and did a lot to inspire the city and the state,” says Sean Malone, president and CEO of the Dorothea Dix Park Conservancy. “It was his idea and we’re thrilled to see that coming to fruition and to donate the table to be part of the mayor’s office.”
Raleigh is a great place for drivers, but for pedestrians? Not so much.
Recently, the personal finance website WalletHub analyzed the hundred largest cities in the U.S. using 30 indicators of driver-friendliness. Factors included accident likelihood, traffic and infrastructure, gas prices, annual hours in traffic congestion and car theft rate, among others. Raleigh ranked No. 1 overall as the nation’s best city to drive in, beating out Orlando, Tampa and Lincoln, Nebraska. Four North Carolina cities appeared in the list’s top 10.
On the other hand, a recent study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration listed Wake County as having the second highest frequency of pedestrian collisions in North Carolina. Wake was second only to Mecklenburg County, the home of the state’s most populous city, Charlotte. Overall, North Carolina ranked 16th for pedestrian collisions. And nationally, pedestrian collision numbers are only rising.
“A lot of drivers in this area are unaccustomed to looking for people,” says Ashton Mae Smith, a Raleigh resident and former candidate for the Raleigh City Council, who was struck by a vehicle on Hillsborough Street four years ago. “Culturally, we put a lot of burden to be noticed on pedestrians and cyclists instead of on drivers. That’s a bit of a challenge.”
Raleigh, for its part, has some infrastructure for pedestrian safety, but there are definitely areas in need of improvement.
“Lower speed limits in urban areas, traffic diets, leading pedestrian intervals at signals are all ways we can help,” Smith says. Traffic diets (or road diets)—a term generally used to describe removing travel lanes from a roadway to use the space for bike lanes, pedestrian refuge islands, transit and parking—can be particularly helpful, leading to a crash reduction rate of around 19 to 47 percent according to the Federal Highway Administration.
“But some of it is as simple as the City installing sidewalks and more frequent crosswalks,” Smith continues. “A lot of the incidents we see are people at mid-block crossings or in an area of town where crosswalks are quite a distance apart.”
Capital Boulevard is particularly problematic, along with New Bern and Glenwood avenues, all long, busy roads with businesses located on either side. Pedestrians tend to cross where it’s convenient and, to save time, don’t necessarily want to walk down to broadly spaced crosswalks—especially to get to or from a bus stop.
Streets and intersections closer to the urban core have different issues.
“At Dawson and McDowell at South Street, the crosswalk signal is, like, 12 seconds long,” says Smith. “At Hillsborough Street and Glenwood, the signal light has been covered for a year and a half or two years now. And if you get off the bus right at Washington Street but want to get to Fletcher Park, good luck! Or, you can walk all the way back down to Peace Street.”
Smith says she wasn’t tempting fate by jumping into busy traffic when her accident happened. Instead, she was halfway across Hillsborough Street with a walk signal when a Kia Soul turned left from S. Harrington Street and hit her. After a little time in the hospital, some surgery and a lot of physical therapy, Smith says she’s still feeling both the physical and emotional effects of the crash.
“You should see me walk downtown,” she says. “I’m pretty much on high alert all of the time. There are more drivers and fewer people paying attention.”
The City is Taking Action
While there are ongoing issues, the City of Raleigh isn’t sitting idly by.
“We have focused on pedestrian safety for a long time,” says Eric Lamb, the transportation planning manager for the City’s transportation department. Lamb points to a 2009 rating from the nonprofit Smart Growth America that put Raleigh at No. 6 for worst pedestrian safety in the country.
“The system was based on our metro area, but Raleigh made up a significant portion of the crashes being recorded,” Lamb continues. “Since that time, we have taken steps to improve pedestrian infrastructure and pedestrian crossings and, as such, our ranking has improved consistently in the last 10 years in that evaluation.”
One of the steps the City took in response was to create the Raleigh Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, an all-volunteer body appointed by members of the Raleigh City Council. It also installed leading pedestrian indicators, such as those on Fayetteville Street, that light up the “go” signals for pedestrians before those for cars, so drivers can see pedestrians in the crosswalks before they start moving. Once-dangerous Hillsborough Street has undergone a facelift, making it safer and more attractive for bicyclists and pedestrians. And the city is installing more crosswalks with pedestrian refuges on Wake Forest Road so pedestrians only have to cross one lane of traffic at a time.
“Each street is different,” says Lamb. “One of the problems with parts of New Bern is not having any sidewalks, period. We have projects going on right now to improve that. With Capital, what’s interesting is that we have some limitations on how frequently we can create crossings.”
To these ends, the city has retrofitted more sidewalks in town and has upgraded intersections. It also installed road diets along Peace Street between Glenwood Avenue and Cameron Village that, though they increase traffic congestion slightly at certain times of the day, have seen crash rates drop dramatically for pedestrians and vehicles.
Currently, the City has allocated more than $20 million solely for sidewalk improvements, which is more money allocated for pedestrian safety than in the last 20 years combined.
“One of our challenges has been us playing catch up to our growth and urbanizing streets where growth has already taken place,” says Lamb. “For a city our size, that is a pretty substantial challenge. We take pedestrian safety very seriously and we’ve taken a lot of steps to improve our environment.”
