Charlotte is a city of parking lots. It is the most populous city in North Carolina, sitting at the middle of a metro of roughly 2.9 million people, and almost all of that growth arrived in the era of the car. Retail strips, office parks, medical buildings, church campuses, self-storage, distribution. Every one of them came with asphalt, and every piece of that asphalt has lines on it that somebody has to maintain.
The lots differ more than people expect. Ballantyne, on the south side toward the South Carolina line, is a 2,000 acre edge city built recently and built wide, so the lots there tend to be large, freshly laid and laid out to a plan. Midtown sits immediately east of Uptown, a dense mixed-use district between the business core and Elizabeth, Dilworth and Plaza Midwood, where the lots are tighter, older and wedged between buildings that were there first. A layout that works in one is wrong in the other.
