A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
(Update: Here is the link to a .pdf of the draft report)
(Kindly note that Drinking Progressively is tonight at Bank Street Brewhouse from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in the Reading Room. We’ll recap the Speck study and today’s Board of Works meeting, and chat about other local issues. Feel free to drop in and take part)
Chairman Nash, and the Board of Public Works and (ahem) Safety:
I promised a friend who lives on Market Street that I’d relay his thoughts this morning. He’s in his late twenties or early thirties, and like so many other working people in New Albany, it’s hard for him to make these morning meetings. He and his wife bought one of the NSP properties. When I run into him at the brewery, we talk a lot about quality of life issues, and whether city government “gets it” from the perspective of millennials.
Here is his message:
Just thought I'd share my biking on main street experience with you. Someone is going to get seriously hurt or worse. I was in the supposedly "shared" lane traveling east around the Culbertson mansion, all while cars were zipping past me trying to squeeze through any place they could, forcing me into the parking lanes. Then I had to reenter traffic when I came upon those extensions that are supposed to slow traffic down. What about this renovation and painted biking signs on the pavement was supposed to make it safe for cyclists? I have no problems riding in traffic and sharing lanes, its motorists with NASCAR mentality and ambiguous "shared" lanes that are scary.
Today you’ll be belatedly introduced to Jeff Speck’s street grid reform proposals, and if these are speedily and properly implemented, in what would be a quantum leap forward in to the future compared to the city’s past history of underachievement, these would alleviate to some extent the Main Street idiocy recounted here by establishing mostly protected bicycle lanes on nearby streets, and sharrows on others where traffic actually would be calmed first, but the outside consultant’s sensible remedies should not disguise the simple truth about the Main Street Deforestation Project: It is an utter fiasco, and the parties responsible need be cashiered as quickly as possible.
Here’s why.
When you implemented the Main Street 18-Wheeler Diversion Project, what you did, in essence, was take $2 million belonging to all of us, as intended to maintain an entire stretch of roadway running all the way through the city, and to use the money to facilitate a small group of residents, in a smaller slice of a downtown neighborhood, to bring to fruition their desire to secede from the city’s street grid.
Throughout Speck’s streets proposal, which I read last night, he constantly skirts the issue of the Main Street Political Objectives Project, hinting broadly that well, I can’t do anything about THE mess you’ve already made, so let’s show how it might have been done correctly by applying the planning principles ignored on Main Street to those other streets currently being either passively neglected or actively degraded.
Naturally, as a paid contractor, he’s far too polite to point out what Elm, Spring and Market residents already know all too well after an entire year of experience: The Main Street Enfluffment Project has made their quality of life worse – whether by establishing the ugly principle that one neighborhood is more worthy of having its property values raised than another, or by lowering property values along the other arterial streets nearby by diverting hitherto unseen heavy truck traffic in a ripple effect that still, to this very day, is being denied by the same city officials responsible for creating it, as their stock answer continues to be (if they bother answering at all), “But Roger, this was not the intent.”
Neither was climate change, but that doesn’t make it any less real, does it?
As I write at 7:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, huge Tiger Trucking semis are channeling up and down tiny, narrow 13th Street to Spring, and back to Main. It will continue all day, and it’s been going on for a full year, and I’m not sure I ever SAW more than a handful of semis on my street until last February. The city itself created this problem. Admittedly, the city is not responsible for the hundred or more daily dump trucks passing through town from Clark County construction sites, down Spring, then back up Market.
But you’ve done absolutely nothing about them, either. Fact is, you broke it. Now you buy it and take ownership of it. Jeff Speck tells you how.
If you act quickly to implement Speck’s proposals, it’s the finest possible thing you could do for this city, maybe ever. This is the best shot we’ve had in my lifetime, and perhaps even the chairman’s. But it's going to require a different set of muscles than those required to manage decay. City government will need to believe in this if there is any hope of getting it right.
You've consistently refused to believe people like me when we've shown you the factual evidence and said that walkability and bikeability are what future generations want, or that two-way streets help small business, or that slower traffic by design helps everyone, or that we should not tolerate trucking companies using urban streets like an interstate highway.
That’s why we’re angry, after all.
Hopefully, you’ll believe the professional whose work WE’VE been reading and advocating while YOU’VE been attending Democratic Party prom galas and tossing back a few longnecks at the Roadhouse.
Will you accomplish anything at all in an election year, or do we get to suffer some more while you whistle nervously and stare at the ceiling?
With the advent of the Speck study, you’re now holding the cards. Would you like to play a few of them, for a change?
Thank you.
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