A message to everyone — including drivers — about those Plaza Midwood planters | Opinion
If you’ve moseyed down the Midwood Mile any time in the last year or so, you can’t help but conjure up the mental before-and-after photos. Right around the pandemic’s rise, Charlotte’s Vision Zero program helped begin — and eventually win — a conversation around traffic calming and beautification between Parkwood and Central Avenues.
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The idea was this: Choke the four-lane roadway down to two lanes, use the free space for bikers and trim what’s left with 70 or so planters designed to beautify the area while calming traffic all in one swoop.
When the opportunity to maintain these planters arrived, we leapt. To have a hand in a grassroots initiative that betters Charlotte in the ways we already know best? No brainer. Right? Right???
You can probably guess where this is going.
Sadly, more than a third of these planters have been dented, damaged or outright destroyed due to traffic accidents, creating oddly-spaced gaps, diminished safety and the foreshock of broken windows theory: We know how well-intended neighbors feel a deep dismay when repaired planters appear disfigured again just weeks later.
While the neighborhood association is left holding the bag, we refuse to lose a great thing to the annals of Charlotte history.
In fact, we’re calling on all of us to think this one through and do what’s right:
We’re asking for your contribution. Vision Zero is as much a public initiative as a Plaza initiative, and with soaring maintenance costs, we urge you to revive your place in the partnership. Your continued financial support can help us toward a goal that we all believe in, and our residents have been more than willing to step up thus far.
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Charlotte can continue to make a name for itself by doing the right thing, investing in Vision Zero initiatives and stepping up as a leader in safer city planning. To pull the rug is to undermine not only this project on the Midwood Mile, but others all over the city. Our town deserves leadership worth following.
Slowwwwwww it on down. Haste makes waste — or way, way worse. Dozens of planters have been compromised since the initiative’s launch, which is difficult to stomach in light of their original purpose to reduce the number of accidents in the area. No one’s perfect, but it’s staggering to think just how imperfect our collective driving record is with this much destruction in such a manageable stretch of road.
On top of that, we need all the muscle we can get. Direct action is how almost anything gets done, and it can start as simple as speaking with a city council member — Danté Anderson, committed cyclist and chair of the Public Safety Committee is a good contact for starters. We’ll need her, you and anyone who’ll listen on our side and ready to rattle a few cages!
We’re asking for your courteousness. Governments, drivers, neighbors — they’re all made up of the same thing: people. People who, generally speaking, want the best for one another. We all want safer streets. We all want fewer accidents. We all want nicer things. And as the common dominator in each one of those, we all have to invest in getting this right.
Kris Steele is a Charlotte-based entrepreneur who co-runs the Brand & Movement for Crown Town Compost, LandScapes and Farm — a closed-loop waste-to-farm ecosystem. He also leads the LendScout Mortgage team. He lives in 28205 with his wife, three kids and three dogs.
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This story was originally published July 31, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
