Speck's Downtown Street Network Proposal is here: "Literally and figuratively, New Albany is at a crossroads."

It's almost as though this passage was written with Bob Caesar in mind. 

(Update: Here is the link to a .pdf of the draft report)

I've read a draft of the Downtown Street Network Proposal for New Albany, as prepared by Jeff Speck's team.

That's because it was revealed on Monday that city engineer Larry Summers is to discuss the proposal at the Tuesday morning Board of Works meeting at 10:00 a.m. in the 3rd floor conference room of the City County Building. City Clerk Vicki Glotzbach was kind enough to e-mail a .pdf copy, and I'm grateful. As soon as there is a way of sharing it with readers, we'll do that.

For now, note simply that the proposal, in its pristine, pre-political-sausage-making form, is mostly inspirational. It recommends two-way streets, road diets, lane width reductions, protected bike lanes and the removal of many traffic signals in favor of four-way stops. It's much more than that, but bear in mind that it's late in the evening.

In fact, the report is so profoundly out of keeping with this city's 200-year record of anti-intellectual underachievement that it might well have been delivered to City Hall by androids from a flying saucer.

Among other things, the proposal constitutes 100+ pages of constant, concise, and often scathing refutation fully applying to most all of the city's street planning cadres and their work prior to the present day -- and, bizarrely, some of the very same functionaries previously responsible for the cancerous condition of the street grid will be handed a scalpel and asked to perform surgery on it.

This prospect scares the daylights out of me.

It's like this: Does Jeff Gahan's secretive, Byzantine city hall team have the political cojones to get this thing right? Beginning tomorrow, we'll find out. As the Bookseller has pointed out, this is the most important opportunity New Albany has had since before many of us were born.