Is the Raleigh-Durham area behind in its thinking and planning?

[DPK]

DPK it would be interesting to relate your chart with the years of annexation.

[DCMetroRaleigh]

Arena: I stand firmly on the side that arenas don't belong in downtowns or areas of a downtown that people live in. A low and midrise downtown is pedestrian friendly. Its livable. Its active all the time. An arena area is active only when there is a game or other event. For those who think a downtown should be a destination primarily, then I give them a maybe. Downtown Raleigh being physically small, never had room for something like the RBC center. For those who think these uses can coexist, I ask if you would want to live within even a half mile of an arena. Having been to arenas in DC, Atlanta, Denver, Charlotte and New York, the clusterf*( of gameday is not good for local neighborhood. Denver has probably the best setup of what I have seen with all of its arenas on the edge of downtown, preserving the integrity of downtown itself. I agree that the RBC Center way out on Wade Avenue is probably too far out, but I prefer that over wiping out any existing 4-block area in our downtown proper.

[urban980]

Nice find on the population Atlside!!! I stand corrected!!! I knew off the top of my head that Winston and Charlotte were pretty close back in the 1920s. From what I had heard, Winston was larger at some point between the 1920 and 1930 census due to annexation. Charlotte annexed more land in return to remain larger. Again, this is only what I have heard. I can't find any proof of this. I do know that Raleigh has almost tripled it's land area since 1980 (going from 50 sq/mi to 141 sq/mi).

One thing I would like to see in Raleigh is a freeway going from north Raleigh to downtown (via Capital Blvd). This freeway would help downtown attract the kind of businesses that build skyscrapers. Light rail trains could run on the median of this freeway. Such a project would cost 2 to 3 billion dollars, but it would yield billions more in development!!!

[Jones_]

I vehemently disagree. The Verizon Center is widely and accurately credited for precipitating the emergence of the Gallery Place shopping and entertainment district in DC, which is threatening to displace Georgetown as DC's #1 entertainment district. The Verizone Center is a true asset for an entire portion of DC.

[Atlside]

^It's never valid to compare cities by their municipal city limits population. Every state has different laws on what constitutes a city and what powers a city has to do annexation. It's better to count urbanized area, county population or metro area population depending upon what you are looking for.

[Atlside]

What do you mean by progress? Political leanings, urban planning, what? Please be more specific.

[Atlside]

If you can find the data. So far I can only find acreage data added for Raleigh:

http://raleigh-consult.limehouse.com/porta...d=1203989576616

All I can find for Charlotte is this cool little map, which is great but does nothing in terms of numbers:

http://ww.charmeck.org/Planning/Annexation...ion_History.pdf

I just need data for WS, Gboro, Char, and Durham to overlay it as another series on the chart.

As a side note after searching for these cities annexation data, from what I can tell Charlotte has a habit of annexing a crap load of stuff every 2 years... which might explain how they got to be such the behemoth they are now. Raleigh on the other hand appears to jump on new area every 5-10 years.

[urban980]

But, the urban area as you've stated is really the only way to tell how much a region is growing.

[monsoon]

I speak in part as an administrator of this site. I find these kinds of comparisons rather pointless and this topic seems to be more bait than a topic anything having to do with a discussion on what needs to change in terms of local planning and "thinking" (whatever that means). In re-reading the first post in this topic, there was a straw man created and burned right off. I really don't see what population comparison numbers have to do with anything.

If you guys are really interested in this type of discussion please re-open another topic to do so.