Wednesday, November 14, 2018

It's the design, stupid: Months too late, but now the city will deploy speed radar detector signs on Spring Street, so as to collect information fundamentally flawed by the mere presence of the detectors.

All the way back on June 22, the Green Mouse observed the inexplicable.

Neighborhood inequality? On the placid street where Caesar lives, traffic must be moving too fast. Someone fetch a traffic engineer!




Back down here in the flood plain, City Hall's two-way grid design changed nothing apart from direction; the new street design continues to produce traffic speeds that are unsafe -- people actually die from it and not a soul employed by the city will address this fact -- and now we erect speed radar detector signs as some sort of compensation, presumably in the hope that the sight of these detectors will itself reduce speeds enough to declare victory ... or give another contract to HWC.

I'll repeat again: every bit of this is perfectly obvious to anyone who spends 15 minutes on foot or riding a bicycle in the vicinity of Spring Street. And yet something this simple continues to elude the professional monetization class in this city.

Why's it so hard for them to admit they're wrong?

Radar detector signs going up on Spring Street in New Albany
, by Chris Morris (Collected Sermons of Tom May)

NEW ALBANY — Motorists soon will notice something a little different along Spring Street.

Radar detector signs, similar to the ones on McDonald Lane, are scheduled to be installed the first week of December. There will be six signs, three in each direction spaced along Spring from Vincennes Street to State Street.

City Engineer Larry Summers said the signs will tell drivers how fast they are traveling, and well as collect data on speeds through particular areas of the street.

While the street conversion from one-way to two-way traffic last year slowed traffic, residents along Spring still say other measures need to be taken to keep motorists from exceeding the speed limit. Following the death of skateboarder Matthew Brewer, who was struck by a minivan at Spring and Ninth streets in August, residents came before the New Albany Board of Public Works & Safety pleading that something be done to make the street safer.

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