Connecting Duo at CBC with Merry Oaks

The Merry Oaks Neighborhood Association board had a cybermeeting this month, via email, and agreed on a letter to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Department about Merry Oaks connectivity with Duo at CBC:

The Merry Oaks neighborhood has a strong value around pedestrian, bicycle and public transit use. As evidence, please note that we have successfully lobbied the City and County for in-place ped/bike trails to the adjacent Plaza Midwood neighborhood and to the Merry Oaks School Campus. Many of our residents use the bike lanes and CATS buses on Central Avenue for commuting.

Consistent with this, we strongly support eventual public bicycle and pedestrian connectivity from Tuscan’s proposed development Duo @ BCB to the interior of the neighborhood (Cosby Place). This will allow current residents to more easily walk to CATS buses on Central Avenue. It will also allow Duo @ CBC residents to walk/bicycle to the Briar Creek Greenway/CDOT connector off Arnold Drive which takes them over the creek and through the woods to Plaza Midwood.

However, we do not support a full extension of Briar Creek Road for eventual vehicular access to the interior of the neighborhood.

Be aware that we fully understand and support the City’s connectivity policy with regard to new subdivisions. However, in the case of our existing very small neighborhood, we do not see compelling reasons to add additional vehicular connectivity to the interior of our neighborhood.

---We only have around 450 homes with no possibility for vehicular connectivity to any other neighborhood. Therefore, there is adequate ingress/egress from the neighborhood for our residents.

---Signalized ingress/egress at Briar Creek Road may encourage cut-through traffic from Eastway Drive. While we acknowledge that the connectivity policy exists precisely to provide this kind of option, in this case it could be devastating to the dead-end Cosby Place and other small neighborhood streets.

Tuscan’s plans call for minimizing impervious surface and significant tree save on this heavily forested parcel. We are concerned that a public street would compromise this intention.

Thank you for considering our concerns about this.