“You can’t have good land use without good transportation, and you can’t have good transportation without good land use.”
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The Town of Chapel Hill in collaboration with 97.9 The Hill WCHL & Chapelboro.com present “Our Town: Stories of Chapel Hill.” Each month you’ll hear from the people at the heart of your local government who are learning, serving, and working together to build a community where people thrive. This month, Tas Lagoo and Ben Berolzheimer from the Town’s Planning Department, share how their work shapes Chapel Hill now and in the future.
Photo of Estes Drive Extension Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvements via ChapeHillNC.gov
Tas Lagoo: My name’s Tas Lagoo. I’m the long-range planning manager in the Town’s Planning Department. It’s easy to think that just because there is a department that happens to be called the planning department, that that department is the only set of eyes that are responsible for that type of work, but it really is so interconnected. Our Public Works team, our Parks and Recreation team, our amazing Chapel Hill Transit organization, all of those departments and organizations and entities really collaborate to make sure that Chapel Hill’s growing in like a, in a reasonable, orderly way.
Ben Berolzheimer: I’m Ben Berolzheimer. I am a mobility and greenways planner in the Office of Mobility and Greenways, which is a division within the planning department. Office of Mobility and Greenways is focused on implementing the town’s mobility plan, which lays out exactly how the town wants to shape the way people get around. It has a goal of shifting the mode of transportation away from single occupancy vehicles to a multimodal system that includes transit, biking, walking, and driving, carpool, all sorts of things. You can’t have good land use without good transportation, and you can’t have good transportation without good land use.
Lagoo: Land use and transportation are basically two sides of the same coin. The Land Use Management Ordinance, “LUMO,” helps with the land use side of that, and then Ben’s work makes sure that people are able to get around town without relying on cars as much.
Berolzheimer: We can have this world-class everywhere to everywhere greenway system, but if those greenways don’t get you conveniently to where you need to go, like there’s nowhere to live or nowhere to shop or nowhere to just exist near those greenways, then it’s really not going to move the needle on getting people out of cars and starting to use greenways as a reliable source of transportation.
Tas Lagoo and Ben Berolzheimer at 97.9 The Hill WCHL
Lagoo: We don’t need to reinvent the wheel for a lot of this stuff. We know the right thing to do. Other communities have shown us the way to do it. It’s just about making it a priority here and ultimately putting really significant public investments into building that future. Planning is the way we shape change. So if you want the community to remain diverse and vibrant and inclusive, that can’t happen unless the physical environment changes to continue to support that diversity and, and inclusivity. So what planning has opportunity to do is make sure that the physical environment is able to change in a way that supports the community that we want.
Berolzheimer: And I think what that speaks to, Tas, is like the difference between reactive and proactive and having the opportunity to be proactive is really beneficial as we think about what the built environment will look like in the future. Really what it comes down to is making strategic infrastructure investments and strategic planning and growth decisions. And when you pair those two things, what results is just good planning.
Lagoo: Given that we work in a profession where so much of the fruits of our labor are, are delayed, right? In some cases we may never see the fruits of our labor, I think it’s, it’s a challenge to always be on the lookout for the more immediate wins. Sometimes that means really small wins, uh, celebrating when you see a, a home that was built on land that otherwise wouldn’t have made it feasible. And, and that can be cause for genuine celebration. Other times it’s, you do get to see a, a large project kind of coming out of the ground, but the really big picture stuff definitely takes more time.
Berolzheimer: Well, it’s interesting because when I think about local government, I came to local government to try to make more of a difference. Conveniently, the Office of Mobility and Greenways at the town, which is within the planning department and we do some long range thinking and planning, we were ultimately formed to do project implementation, to take the plans that we do have, the, all the great engagement and groundwork that we’ve laid over the years in Chapel Hill and actually try to start seeing things come out of the ground, whether it be bike lanes through resurfacing projects or large capital project greenways such as Cameron Avenue and the Bolin Creek Greenway, as well as just small safety improvements around town, improving crosswalks, making them safer with lighting or flex posts.
Lagoo: I think a good example of how you can see planning in action in Chapel Hill is essentially any new development that you see around town. Any construction site is the result of the rules that are on the books and what we as a town have said we want to allow or we want to see around town.
Berolzheimer: Planning for mobility in action means thinking about where people are going to need to go around town today and in the future. And I think that’s, that’s one thing that we focus on is giving people at Chapel Hill the option to choose how they get around town. And I think the way that connects to what Tas was saying is that you can’t have great greenways without good, (well-located) housing and commercial areas. And the link of land use and transportation planning, they’re really all one and the same, and there’s no way to sort of separate them out.
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