A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
My usual Thursday column space has been pre-scheduled for the timely "rewinding" of a 2013 essay about the annual advent of Harvest Homecoming.
In our municipality’s case, it isn’t workers’ rights but uncomfortable irony that bedevils the citizenry, second only to bed bugs, and so the dire threat posed by ironic detachment must be recast into simpler truths, like the prevailing fiction that Harvest Homecoming has anything whatever to do with economic development apart from the money necessary to perpetuate the fest itself.
However, there is so much to write about, isn't there?
Concurrently with Harvest Homecoming's arrival, this administration's signature "shining path" public works project is inching toward an abysmal conclusion, and so for those too busy chuckin' punkins to pay attention, let's take a look at what Jeff "Walkable City" Speck has been doing.
Speck is the man hired by the city of New Albany to study our ragtag, dysfunctional streets and recommend changes to enhance walkability, make these streets safer, and in a presumably comprehensive way, bring this persistently dirty river town into modern times.
Yesterday morning, Speck released an article at City Lab: Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety and Must Be Replaced Now. I made it the basis of a posting at NAC; more about that in a moment.
States and counties believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong.
Speck left absolutely no doubt as to the ultimate importance of the lane width topic. It is a foundation of his platform. Here is what he tweeted about the article:
ATTENTION! This is the most important article I have ever written. Please read, share, and join the fight!
Later in the day, Speck wrote words that may come back to haunt him when he returns to NA to present his street study, and is confronted with our generations-old, institutional imbecility.
Reading comments to my article, I wonder: what makes people who have never travelled so confident that things they haven't seen don't exist?
Someone might say: "Roger, why all the pessimism?"
First, there are those long years of experience listening to illuminating barroom opinions about Europe, spouted by people who've never been any further east than Cincinnati.
More pressingly, there's this: As the streets specialist we've hired to advise us makes it perfectly clear in national forums that 10-ft traffic lanes are the mantra for any street grid's makeover, the city of New Albany prepares to put the triumphant finishing touches on a multi-million dollar Main Street project with lanes that have grown in width like John Rosenbarger's nose, from 10 feet to an "official" 11 feet, with a "two foot offset" rendering them into ... that's right ... 13-foot lanes.
In turn, if a traffic project ostensibly intended to calm traffic fails miserably to implement the one sure mechanism for doing so, chances are that traffic will not be calmed, in which case every bit of the Main Street project's expense and squandered opportunity cost has been devoted to cosmetic fluffing, not altered function.
And about those ritzy sidewalk address engravings? A reader beings this to our attention, asking:
"When you look at the existing city ordinance pertaining to street numbers, do you feel spending 'our money' on horizontal, inset sidewalk plaques makes sense, as they don't meet the City's own ordinance requirements?
§ 99.02 POSTING OF HOUSE NUMBERS.
(A) All owners or occupants of commercial or residential buildings located within the city limits should be and are required to conspicuously post their address so as to be easily visible from the street on which the building or home lies.(B) The address shall be in standard arabic numbers no smaller than three inches high and shall be posted either on the improvements or on a sign or mailbox on the street.(C) The numbers shall be of a color in contrast to its background so as to be easily read.(Ord. G-93-156, passed 8-19-1993)
The city of New Albany has opportunistically spent "free" state monies, as intended to be used for future maintenance, on a showpiece project, the engineering of which contradicts most of what paid consultant Speck is about to advise us to do.
With the remainder of the city increasingly disgusted at the attention lavished on one neighborhood to the exclusion of all others, a few functionaries have fanned out to privately issue promises that given time and someone else's money, they'll botch Spring Street (for example) in precisely the same way as Main, meaning that traffic will not be calmed, walkability will not be enhanced, and bikers will be provided street access by means of sharrows symbols drawn on every uncalmed street.
Victory will be declared, and nothing will have changed. Our own Jeff provides his usual succinct (and damning) summary.
The distance between the parking lanes and median on Main Street is indeed 13 feet. With those wide lanes in place, the median itself will act as a buffer against oncoming traffic, further reducing any sense of car-slowing friction that would normally occur from pushing sufficiently narrow, opposite direction lanes closer together. Bike lanes have proven effective at helping to slow traffic (not to mention providing a transportation alternative), but they're absent as well. In short, there's little reason millions of dollars later to slow down on Main Street.
My biggest concern with the City's potential implementation of Speck's plans for the remaining grid isn't that they won't do anything but rather that they'll do a lot of something, inserting their own stunted reasoning into it instead of just following directions. If Main Street and other recent projects are any indication, there's a strong likelihood that they'll spend an enormous amount of money building something ineffective in a way that will make it much more difficult to correct in the near future. To do Main Street well, for instance, would likely involve removing or at least substantially reducing the median. Who's going to pay for that having just built it?
So far, it's area residents who are eating crow and the City that's serving it.
If you ask me, "stunted reasoning" is a polite way of referring to a steaming cow pie, but for once, perhaps I might profit from some semblance of ironic detachment.
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