In addition to two tours - one of which I described in Part I, I also attended concurrent sessions ranging from regional transportation planning and vehicle mile travel reduction, greenhouse gas reduction, infrastructure investment strategies and community job growth, public health (obesity) with land use planning, walking and "wheeling" planning (found a potential solution for Military West and 1st Street!) and hurricane prone coasts with sea level rise (and you thought California had problems).  You can click on Local Government Commission for the pdf files or power points (or even MP3) for these sessions (these are not quite ready but will be posted soon).

The second tour I went on was Sunday morning after days of rain and very cold temperatures.  I was worried that I would be warm enough for the bicycle tour, but the sun came out without a cloud in the sky and I was able to peel off one of my four layers as it got warmer.  We started out across from the NASCAR Museum. We rode along several miles of paths along the light rail.  Then we rode through the residential areas where traffic speed had been a major problem.  The City of Charlotte uses "street diets" and neighborhood round abouts -  the car in this picture is navigating oneThe bike lane was picked up again along a completely restored surface creek (it had been straightened and was mostly a "sewer".

While the ride was fun and beautiful, the message was clear that to slow traffic down, many strategies have been used including reducing the car lanes, eliminating dedicated right hand turn lanes (too many bicycle and pedestrian accidents), small landscaped roundabouts with measurable difference in bicycle and pedestrian accidents (not to mention auto accident rates) and what may seem counter intuitive, more cars moving better along routes (less noise, easier ingress and egress and other benefits).

This bicycle ride prepared me for my flight home to our wonderful city.  I was happy to be back.