My alarm bells started sounding with this.
New Albany mayor, business owner talk about city’s growth, by Caitlin Bowling (Business First)
“I think New Albany has become more visible to people,” said New Albany mayor Jeff Gahan.
Gahan expects traffic through downtown New Albany to increase after tolls are introduced on the two new Ohio River crossings.
People who currently drive over the Kennedy Bridge to get to and from Jeffersonville and Clarksville might opt to reroute through New Albany rather than pay a toll to cross the river via Interstate 65, he reasoned.
Given the article's uncharacteristic muddle, it is possible that the mayor was quoted out of context, but to the casual reader, the preface of "visible" sounds very much like the words of those who believe the axiom about traffic counts determining the viability of a business's location.
It is crucial to understand that this is an axiom rooted in the "logic" of suburban sprawl, not core urban reality.
The fact that these two realities are utterly incompatible helps to explicate, if not explain, the perennial cluelessness of downtown business operators like Bob Caesar. He looks out at the surrounding historic buildings and sees a strip mall paradigm, not a dense urban center's. He fails to recognize the reason for his own success: Skill and ability at what he does, qualities that would not change if Pearl Street were replaced by four lanes of one-way traffic -- although amusingly, in such an imagined case, he'd no longer have any customers at all, because they'd be driving past too quickly to care, eager to get to the other side and a Kay Jewelers somewhere in the exurb.
Reading the mayor's words in Business First, and accepting them at face value, yields a terrifying thought: Is the molasses-intensity slowness of the city's street grid planning to be understood as increased traction for the Caesaresque, dreamworld notion that a vastly higher volume of traffic passing through New Albany to access the untolled Sherman Minton Bridge could be a truly wonderful thing, because we'll be able to show off our charming, revitalizing downtown to even more people, who'll stop here, spend money and forget why they "chose" New Albany in the first place?
My succinct rebuttal to this viewpoint during the subsequent Facebook discussion:
The primary point is, and remains: If an untolled bridge is central to a driver's reasoning, then whatever route he or she chooses is going to be about the quickest way to and from the untolled bridge. What lies in between is utterly irrelevant. And that's the problem.
Jeff G. then offered a summary of sorts, one worth reprinting here, prompted by those people contemplating the implications of an untolled Sherman Minton, and advocating what seems to them the easy "cure" of making it possible for the hoards of pass-throughs to traverse New Albany as quickly as possible by retaining one-way arterials, even widening them, and increasing speed limits.
After all, it's what the gospel of suburban sprawl ordains.
But we're just not suburban, are we?
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In terms of the "counterintuitiveness" of it all, there's a really simple way to put it: Build for more cars, get more driving. Build for transit, get more transit ridership. Build for bikes, get more bicycling. Same for walking. Subsidize sprawl as we have for a few decades now, get more sprawl. The notion that whatever you plan/build for is what you get has proven true repeatedly all over the country. It's actually very intuitive, only made difficult by people being so unable to envision anything other than what they've seen recently. The truth is, a good portion of New Albany's on-the-books street laws still reference multimodal use. There is an expectation of cars but other modes of transport on equal footing as well. That's how and why our streets were meant to properly function ...
Drawing an arbitrary line through the middle of the metro and charging people to cross it in the name of better connections, as our state and regional "leaders" are doing, is dumb. Responding to that on a more localized level by making New Albany a less attractive place to live via the purposeful welcoming of even more high speed, neighborhood killing, pass-through automobile traffic would be dumber. To then suggest that more residential development is needed while simultaneously touting factors like increased, high speed traffic that make a place a less desirable residence is dumbest. I'm not sure what comes after dumbest, though I fear we may get a clearer picture of it pretty soon ...
Gas taxes and automobile related fees only cover about 35% of road expenses in Indiana and Kentucky. Drivers haven't actually been paying for roads for a long time. We rob other areas, i.e., give up services we could otherwise have, to pay for them. Instead of either raising those taxes and fees to actually cover expenses or curtailing so much car-centric development, local governments and developers just keep building more and more automobile infrastructure and new construction requiring services knowing they don't have the money to pay for it, let alone for the long term maintenance and negative impact of sprawl. It's hollowed out our cities and left us in a financial lurch.
Blocks of buildings sit nearly empty or in severe disrepair while we're busy building more blocks that won't generate enough revenue to cover their own expenses. We already have far more built environment here and all over this country than we have people to use it and pay for it. "Growth" and "development", as usually defined, are counterproductive. That's why cities and states around the country are focusing more and more on their older, close-in, more densely populated neighborhoods with transit, bicycling, and walkability. It's cheaper, leads to more positive economic outcomes, and is sustainable over the long haul.
Our metro is so far just flat out too dumb to follow the many examples from around the country and world. All of this is stuff Roger and I and lots of others have been talking about for years with regard to New Albany, the Bridges Project, and the region in general. Now that it's too late and we're stuck with this monstrosity, the outrage that should have been made very apparent during those previous years is finally starting to kick in ...
Refusing to be a part of the Sprawl is one of the primary reasons we moved to older, denser New Albany. Had we understood how strongly the sprawl mentality still dominates City thinking even downtown, we may not have made that choice. A lot of us keep hoping, begging, pleading, and hollering for them to get past it, to make so many private investments (aka the Renaissance) worth it, but local and regional governments have been inexplicably slow to even acknowledge it. See: Bridges Project and responses to it ...
Bridge honchos know good and well they're creating more traffic and devaluing older, inner-city neighborhoods. They know that the traffic projections they fudged to justify the project in the first place have not been remotely accurate over the many years we've now had to judge them. They don't care. The project was specifically designed to promote sprawl and benefit those who profit from it. That's the Bridges Project's primary function. State transportation planners have publicly stated they expect approximately 30,000 cars per day or so diverting through New Albany to avoid tolls via the Sherman Minton. Privately, those same planners have told NA city officials they actually expect substantially more than that. If even a relatively small percentage of the increased traffic cuts through our neighborhoods as many do already, we're sunk without adequate preparation. Inviting them in via larger, faster roads while providing no alternative to driving is the poorest strategy possible.
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