The bike lane through Uptown is finally complete

Details: The $7.15 million Uptown CycleLink project stretches from the Little Sugar Creek Greenway to the Irwin Creek Greenway. 

• The two-way bike lane runs underneath Interstate 277 along 7th Street, down a short segment of McDowell Street, and then continues onto 6th Street through most of Uptown, until the very end, where it runs into 5th Street.

Why it matters: Charlotte was designed for cars, and as leaders look to make it more pedestrian, bike and transit-friendly, they have to reorient its streets.

• “Charlotte, like a lot of sunbelt cities right, has largely been designed around moving people in cars and trucks,” Shannon Binns, founder and executive director of nonprofit Sustain Charlotte tells me. “Historically until more recent years, there hasn’t been a major priority in making sure that our streets can safely accommodate people who are walking and biking and accessing transit.”

Flashback: Sustain Charlotte started petitioning the city for a bike lane in 2016.

• The city opened the first phase of the bike lane in 2019, which ran from Little Sugar Creek Greenway to the light rail tracks.
• It was separated from lanes of traffic by bollards, or small posts, but now the city has replaced most of those with a concrete median.

The big picture: Cutting down on emissions from vehicles is one of the key ways to combat climate change.

What’s next: The city is holding a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the project’s completion at 10 a.m. Saturday. Binns hopes it can be a model for future bike lanes across the city.

• “We’re hoping it really becomes a catalyst for many more of these, and eventually an entire citywide network of safe and protected bike lanes like this,” he says.