A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Surely at least a few New Albany governmental officials and their perennial glad-handlers, the Democratic Party’s oblivious and antediluvian grandees, have not failed to grasp the supreme irony of Jeffersonville’s miraculous overnight conversion to regional hot spot.
It’s all because of a bridge, of course, but not just any bridge. It’s an urban conversion of an abandoned rail link, and an epochal adaptive reuse. It’s a bridge for people who walk (gasp), and to a slightly lesser extent, those who bike. It is not one of the billion dollar bridges being constructed for cars, trucks and automotive-laced Viagra bingeing.
What’s more, the Big Four pedestrian bridge is a generator of virtual reality unparalleled outside of Pixar. The novelty of the bridge’s mere presence is a glamor shot for Jeffersonville, which in the main is no less gritty than before, but now finds itself sexy as viewed from mid-river, suddenly acclaimed by area style arbiters as the latest and greatest Southern Indiana city ever to have refrained from canal building.
All of this front-running is fitting and proper, and personally, I’m happy that Jeffersonville finally has a shtick to call its own. Sadly, there’ll be some tough times ahead for Jeff’s emerging downtown indie entrepreneurs as the Kerry Stemler Memorial Cluster Project achieves full monetary tumescence, because Stemler’s Golly will deter those driving among us, for whom walking was something to be abandoned after high school, along with homework, pom poms and hope.
At the moment, it’s more interesting to see the Big Four’s effect on the New Albanian civic thought process. However, as usual, first there must be evidence of thought.
I see the outline of something from 1947. Can someone call the forensics team? It might be an idea, or at least a local Democratic Party platform plank.
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I think that New Albany’s recurring, historic and indigenous manic depression currently is being manifested by bridge envy on an epic scale.
While it is true that the K & I bridge should be forcibly removed from the leaden grip of Norfolk Southern – the quicker and more violently, the better – in order to “close” the recreational loop, hopes and dreams that a railway Hail Mary will occur any time soon is a waste of valuable time in the here and now.
Furthermore, even if the K & I opened tomorrow for pedestrian and bicycling use, timer-serving city officials like John “Let’s Move the Tractor Trailers Down Spring and Elm” Rosenbarger could not be trusted at all to actually link it to anything in any way that makes sense.
It’s relatively easy to imagine eager folks coming across the K & I and descending to the Greenway, but it’s impossible to picture them moving from the bridge to Vincennes Street without encountering a Rosenbarger Roundabout serving to channel them right back to Portland, or perhaps 50 mph traffic discouraging forward progress.
Trust me on this one: When I’m elected mayor, Rosenbarger will become the highest paid cigarette butt remover this city has ever seen, leaving him free to mutter like a plucked peacock about the eternal stupidity of his political bosses, and the boundless depravity of the general public, but deprived of his ability to punish us any further with Gail Wynand-style “improvements” to the street grid.
But I digress.
Actually, New Albany doesn’t need a pedestrian bridge, although we’ll take it when it finally comes. What we need most of all is to look at the principles animating the success of the Big Four, and to apply them to the city’s layout at-large.
Self-evidently, these animating principles are walkability and bikeability. If our street grid reflects the characteristics that now are making the Big Four so popular, we benefit even more than Jeffersonville, because in New Albany, walkability and bikeability can be harnessed to connect neighborhoods with the central business district, and link the same neighborhoods to outlying “thinking” destinations like IU Southeast and the Purdue Center.
Two-way completed streets made suitable for all persons, not just those piloting motorized vehicles, should be the stated, above-board, publicly advance and ultimate goal.
Apart from Rosenbarger himself, who quite soon will be looking for creative, self-serving ways to biblically emulate Peter and deny Jeff Speck three or more times, New Albany’s city officials theoretically agree with me, and promise to embrace Speck’s street study as a means toward the end I’m prescribing here today.
Will they follow through?
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The tractor trailer driver unceremoniously flipped me off, and I laughed out loud.
After all, all I’d done was take his picture – more accurately, I’d photographed his block-long vehicle occupying the entirety of Spring Street, from one side to the other, inclusive of both bicycle lanes to nowhere, in an effort to make a turn without commanding the sidewalk.
But why the bird, dude?
How do you know that my shutter wasn’t snapping because my hot male metal engine lust had been aroused, and that far from denigrating you, or exposing you, that I was expressing my solidarity with you – with all that power, all that huge machine-precision monster truck clear-the-fuck-away authority, right here in the so-called “neighborhood” where I live?
Or: Is that Peterbilt, or are you just happy to see me?
It’s just life in Truck Through City, where on consecutive days in June, neither the city council nor the board of public works (and safety, natch) had any clue as to existing rules governing use of the streets both purport to administer. Thanks again to Todd Bailey, our returning chief of police, for his ongoing research about the same, and his public avowal that problems obviously exist.
Wow. Think about it. If the mayor knew you were going to be open and honest, Chief, you may not have gotten the job back.
Good luck.
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