Traffic Cluster, Part Two: We'll never resolve traffic issues until "leadership" is willing to lead, not pander.

It occurred to me last night that as the coronavirus pushes unprecedented bicycle sales, here and across the country, Jeff Speck gave us a diagram for downtown streets purposefully rebuilt to accommodate modernity in the form of bikes and biking.

Our mayor threw it out the window.

Had he paid attention and been progressive, we now would have the ideal grid for a pandemic, the sort of step even Jeffersonville hasn't managed.

Instead, we have more of what we plainly specialize in as a municipality: congenital underachievement, plain and simple.

It boils down to this.

According to Team Gahan, all traffic issues have been magically resolved by pure genius since the prime cuts of the Speck grid study were rendered into oatmeal-flecked, fat-encrusted sausage to suit the needs of pay-to-play campaign finance.

According to genuine reality, most such issues remain, because our emperors routinely fail to wear clothes, and partisan politics infects everything, leading otherwise thoughtful people like my district councilman Greg Phipps to cautiously treat symptoms with band-aids, leaving major violators like the thoroughly non-calmed Spring Street three-mile long interstate ramp untouched by critical scrutiny.

Yes, Greg you're absolutely right; four-way stops are needed in the neighborhoods. Drivers occasionally run a four-way at full speed, but usually they at least slow before doing so, whereas stop light signals impel drivers to increase their speed as they approach the intersection.

But unless some of them are placed on Spring Street itself, or something else done to slow ever-escalating speeds (which police bizarrely deny even occur), heavy trucks will continue to travel in excess of 40 mph THROUGH A NEIGHBORHOOD WITH MORE CHILDREN LIVING THERE THAN AT ANY TIME IN PHIPPS' RESIDENCY AND MY OWN.

Phipps need only glance outside his window at the tonnage streaking past and feel the vibrations, but he won't, because City Hall is in denial, and City Hall lickspittles are not allowed to ask questions pertaining to demonstrable reality. Big Daddy must be obeyed, and Spring must remain an artery for dipshit drivers.

Because, I suppose, that's who we are as a city: enablers for misbehavior.

We can change this for the better. All we need is a willingness to act. Why must it be this hard to convince them to attack problems that can be seen plainly with their own eyes?

Perhaps it's because they refuse to look.

New Albany council discusses traffic problems, by Daniel Suddeath (Returning Journalist Laps Papa)

NEW ALBANY — The most prominent concern for residents is traffic, and it’s time to ramp up efforts to ease those worries, New Albany City Councilman Scott Blair said during what may be the last virtual gathering of the body.

Traffic was the primary issue discussed during Thursday’s council meeting, with members expressing different ideas for how to address what they said is a city-wide problem.

A book to look for this summer: "Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America."

If anyone cocooned within the bunker-bound Team Gahan inner ruling circle would like to read this book, I'll buy it for them.

It limits my potential monetary exposure to what, three or four people? I'll even buy a copy for the hall of fame automobile supremacist Jim Rice of HWC Campaign Engineering.

But no matter.

New Albany's power brokers in municipal government don't read books, do they? Least of all the monetizer at the top.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, by Angie Schmitt (Kirkus)

A surprising study of anti-pedestrian urban planning in America.

Most readers will be unaware that pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed since the 1970s; in 2018 alone, 6,283 pedestrians were killed trying to cross the street. Former Streetsblog editor Schmitt takes us for an uncomfortable ride into the hard realities of why pedestrians are more unsafe now than they've been in decades.

In a book that will sit comfortably on the shelf next to Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, Schmitt provides an exhaustively researched study of the intersection of automobiles and pedestrians. The author uncovers a car-obsessed America whose civic planning is designed to discriminate against walkers while accommodating motorists. Unlike, for example, many European countries, the motorist has more rights than the pedestrian in the U.S.

Even worse, as Schmitt explains, thinly veiled racism and classism are at the heart of many of the traffic laws that essentially treat pedestrians as second-class citizens. Pedestrians hurt or killed by cars are often blamed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the problem, Schmitt shows convincingly, is often the flawed road systems themselves. And it’s not just the engineers who design these systems, but also the politicians who allow poor urban planning to go unchecked.

The narrative is a deft balance of anecdotal and informational content, emphasizing the real-life human tragedies caused by anti-pedestrian bias but also backing it up with statistical research. Most importantly, Schmitt debunks common assumptions that pedestrian deaths are either blameless random accidents or, more often, the result of laziness or inattentiveness on the part of the walker.

In reality, the culprit is a sometimes-lethal combination of badly designed streets, increasingly larger vehicles on the road, poorly estimated speed limits, and a lack of crosswalks, among other infrastructural failures.

Bravely exposes the human cost of public and political indifference toward pedestrian safety.

Charles Marohn went to Paris and learned a lot of simple things that elude us in America.

"I’m not suggesting it would be easy or straightforward for North American cities to become Paris, but as my friend John Anderson has said many times, we don’t need to be Paris, we just need to be a slightly less crappy version of America."

I've trimmed this down a bit, hoping Marohn doesn't mind that I've left his five central observations intact.

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The Streets of Paris, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

1. Street Trees
Especially here in my hometown, I’m constantly hearing how we can’t have street trees, largely for maintenance reasons. The leaves drop and mess up the drainage. The roots damage the pipes. They are in the way for people in wheelchairs. Car drivers will hit them. And my favorite: If we ever need to widen the street, they are in the way.

And, of course, there is the persistent criticism of street trees: They won’t grow. My response to all of these criticisms has been to point to amazing places full of street trees and say, “If they can do it, why can’t we?” Paris is full of street trees, and it has been doing it successfully for a lot longer than any modern North American city has existed.

2. Ubiquitous Bollards
In the United States, our civil engineers often insist on a clear zone on each side of the street. You can ‘t place anything in the clear zone because, by the theory of Forgiving Design, if an automobile is driven off the driving surface, the sudden stop from hitting a fixed object will harm the driver and any passengers of the vehicle. This thinking is rightfully applied to highways and areas where we want traffic to move fast without the potential for conflict. When we apply Forgiving Design to local streets, though, we get absurdities like breakaway light poles along sidewalks. There isn’t a clearer statement of the North American engineer’s values than that.

I actually encountered an engineer once that didn’t allow a sandwich board sign because of the hazard it presented to automobiles should they strike it.

Needless to say, Paris has gone far in the opposite direction. Seemingly everywhere a vehicle could operate at speeds that would injure people, they have erected obstacles to keep the errant car from striking a human. Absorbing the kinetic energy of a collision is the responsibility of the car and driver, not the people walking along the street. This is cheap, easy, and really effective.

3. Narrow Streets
In the United States, we use transportation funding as a mechanism to address public safety concerns. Our fire departments often operate on the theory that if you can respond to an emergency quickly, the public is safer. European countries have a much different approach, one that emphasizes prevention over response time. Here in the United States, we require wide lanes, wide shoulders and wide clear zones along our streets so that emergency response vehicles travel unhindered to any emergency. The concept of a clear zone is ridiculous in Paris.

I’ll note that you are far less likely to die in a fire in a European city than an American one. Ditto a traffic collision. Two of our classic Strong Towns memes apply here.

4. Slip Lanes
When a design prioritizes building wealth in a place instead of moving traffic, the basic geometry of the public space shifts. In terms of wealth creation, I really like how this street is designed. There is human space on the edge; wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side and meet a pair doing likewise coming from the opposite direction. They are protected by bollards along the entire stretch. Then there is a one-way slip lane for drivers seeking a place to park a vehicle — these lanes are constrained to ensure slow speeds. Then there is a parking lane, although with a decent amount of that space given over to scooters and bikes. Then a boulevard to provide some vertical framing for the street in the form of street trees and nice lighting. The center has two driving lanes with opposing flow, and then it all repeats along the other side.

For cities that want to make their stroads into wealth-creating streets, this is a great cross section to utilize.

5. Shared Space Intersections

Finally, I’m a huge fan of shared space intersections—intersections that lack traffic markings, including stop signs or traffic signals—and I ran into a great one in Versailles. With tired kids and wife, I didn’t get to linger as long as I would have liked to, but in the short time I was there, I did see the humane mingling of humans and vehicles induced by slow speeds and the more chaotic design.

The idea of a chaotic design is anathema to everything North American engineering practice stands for, yet when drivers are less sure of their own path—let alone the path of others—they do remarkable things like slow down, look people in the eye, and yield. It’s a beautiful thing to watch; it’s just too bad there are so few examples here in the United States.

Slick Jeffie knows how to slow the cars, but he won't. Maybe Mark Seabrook will take action where the Democrats have failed.

“You move through a space and you dwell in a place.”

Here's another one:

Streets ahead: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality, by Charlemagne (The Economist)

It isn't rocket science, but it might as well be given the timidity displayed by Gahan's ruling elite. If they would periodically remove themselves from their own massive vehicles, walk around a bit and survey the situation, they'd understand; if it doesn't feel safe without 4,000 lbs of plastic and metal as protection, then it probably isn't.

But that's no way to perpetuate Gahan's lifeblood of pay-to-play political patronage, is it?

Why Speed Kills Cities, by Andrew Small (City Lab)

U.S. cities are dropping urban speed limits in an effort to boost safety and lower crash rates. But the benefits of less-rapid urban mobility don’t end there.

 ... The most obvious immediate benefit to a fundamentally slower city is the safety boost it delivers. Reducing speeds is the best, easiest, and fastest way to quickly radically improve safety, for both drivers and anyone in front of them. A recent report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates that rising speed limits in the United States have led to an additional estimated 37,000 deaths over the past 25 years. “We know that very small changes in speed can have big consequences for pedestrians,” says Jessica Cicchino, the vice president of research at IIHS. “A pedestrian struck at 25 miles per hour has 25 percent chance of being seriously injured—but that climbs to a 50 percent chance at 33 miles per hour.” Importantly, lower speed limits also reduce the number of crashes, as an IIHS study found last year in Boston after it lowered its default speed in 2017.

Speed kills in a more abstract sense, too. Building urban roads that can handle a large number of vehicles traveling at 35 miles per hour and up means making them wider, with fewer curves. High-speed highways and street-level limited-access urban thoroughfares famously do a host of bad things to those who live nearby or underneath these big hostile barriers. What’s less discussed is what they’re doing to the people inside the cars. In his recent book Building and Dwelling, the planner and urban scholar Richard Sennett writes about how going faster in cities has lead urbanites to value “space” over “place.”

“You move through a space and you dwell in a place,” Sennett told CityLab’s Ian Klaus last year. “It’s a distinction for me that has to do with speed and automobiles. When people start driving at a certain speed, they lose awareness of where they are. … Where this gets reflected in urbanism is the more we create spaces where people move fast, the less they understand about what those spaces are. At about 28 or 30 mph people, moving through an urban environment stop being in a place and are in space instead.”

The time benefits one gets from boosting speeds in urban areas can end up being surprisingly modest: In downtown streets, the difference between a 25 mph commute and 45 mph commute is roughly an additional 48 seconds for every three-quarters of a mile traveled, according to Nelson\Nygaard. It’s also worth remembering that even urban “rapid transit” often isn’t really all that fast. (The New York City subway averages 17 miles per hour.)

When human- or animal-powered urban movement was the norm, there was much less anxiety about losing time in traffic jams, Sennett writes; in the twisted streets of old cities, congestion was accepted as just an fact of life. Only when cities like Paris transitioned from narrow lanes to wide Haussmann-style boulevards did urbanites began to associate speed with freedom of movement—witness reports of widespread road rage that sprouted up in Paris in the 1870s and early 1880s. Urban traffic jams today are a visceral sign that something has gone wrong—the city wasn’t working. Like not being physically touched in public, the desire to move freely—and not be stuck in traffic—is a sensation we take for granted as natural. But it’s a historical construction of our auto-centric sensibilities.

In his prescient 1973 essay, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar,” André Gorz makes a similar point about how private cars turned speed into a commodity that, when introduced into the city, created havoc: “When everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie,” he wrote, “everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets.”

Sennett also uses traffic flows to show the problem of scaling from the local to the urban—a theme in the debate to how to create an “open city.” He compares Lewis Mumford’s top-down garden city urbanism with Jane Jacobs’s bottom-up street-ballet localism. Both Mumford and Jacobs famously loathed the impact of the automobile, but Mumford argues that you can’t build infrastructure bit-by-bit, the way Jacobs sees the urban fabric: When you’re engineering how to circulate millions of vehicle trips, you have to plan at a bigger scale. By that logic, perhaps urbanists shouldn’t demand slow lanes or slow neighborhoods: They should ask for a slow city ...

Remembering Matt Brewer, bidding Williams Plumbing an affectionate farewell and beseeching City Hall to give a damn about public safety.

One year ago yesterday, Matt Brewer was struck and killed NOT by a minivan, as stated in this article, but by a DRIVER.

Apparently the minivan's DRIVER was exonerated on the scene by the NAPD, and later by the Floyd County Prosecutor, although we can't know any of this for sure because there exists no clear pathway for the general public to know the results of such investigations even though the facts are essential.

There is zero transparency in such matters, because the American legal system seems to be constituted to protect drivers of automobiles first and foremost, not non-drivers who suffer the brunt of auto supremacy's daily mayhem.

However there remains a very good chance that Matt was struck and killed owing to the obstruction of an illegally parked Williams Plumbing truck on the northeastern corner of Spring and 9th, as I documented last year in this series of nighttime photos. Watch as the red car approaches, disappears for an instant behind the truck, then reappears to continue speeding down Spring.

It literally constitutes a "dead man's curve," with the dogleg in the street constituting the first hazard, then the commercial vehicles stacked at the corner -- and, of course, dangerous speeds have NOT been reduced by City Hall's ineffectual "calming."

In fact these commercial vehicles have blocked sight lines at this corner since 1987, when Williams Plumbing bought the building and converted it to what amounts to an industrial use, which in practice has meant neglecting it consistently into a neighborhood eyesore.

Imagine: as the Williams Plumbing fleet of commercial vehicles has grown they've been parked for free on the public right of way -- advertised free on the public right of way, and been safety hazards on the public right of way. It's been a privileged existence, "free" of responsibility.

Why?

In fact, I've been pointing to all of this -- the parking violations, the dilapidation of the building and the cheek of it all -- almost from the inception of the blog.

2008.

All of it to a rousing chorus of snores from city officials, who for 32 years have been shirking THEIR responsibilities.

Non-learning curve: This ON THE AVENUES column repeat reveals that since 2011, we've been discussing the safety hazards on Spring Street between 10th and 9th. Too bad City Hall is deaf.

Earlier this year I asked street commissioner Mickey Thompson if something had  been said at long last to Williams Plumbing about the illegally parked trucks, as I'd noticed they'd been moved around the corner to occupy public parking spaces on THAT street, not Spring (still illegal, by the way, but less of a public safety hazard).

Thompson said yes -- because he'd said something, not ordinance enforcement, the existence of which is rumored though not always witnessed save for street sweeping day.

Two weeks later the trucks began appearing parked on the southwestern side of Spring, blocking vision there, then predictably soon returned to their previous location of 32 years by the sidewalk in front of the decaying building.

I'll leave it to others to memorialize Matt, for whom I still mourn -- not as a spouse or the closest of friends, just as an acquaintance, neighbor and fellow lover of life whose day always was brightened when our paths crossed. As Rickert's story below well illustrates, Matt inspired many and will continue to do so. We mustn't forget him. 

Speaking for myself as a heretic, rabble-rouser and all-purpose irritant, I'm as angry today as I was last year, but "adulting" means sublimating anger into something positive. Ideally this would be Jeff Gahan and his merry crew of oblivious car-centric campaign finance leeches deciding finally to take action to make the city safe for non-automotive users, but I know this isn't going to happen.

Consequently I take great joy in this announcement.

As far as I'm concerned, good riddance. A bit of advice to neighborhoods around the city: be on the lookout for a relocated Williams Plumbing. One of your buildings is about to be trashed.

Hopefully the structure, once a delight when Cora Shrader owned it, isn't too far gone that it can't be saved, and put to better use than Williams Plumbing has these past 32 years.

Matt, you're missed. You remain an inspiration, but you deserved better from the mouth-breathing cretins who run this city.

Southern Indiana skater remembered for his inspiration, passion; friends and family gathered for a memorial skate Tuesday for Matt Brewer, by Aprile Rickert (Hanson's Bible Verses)

NEW ALBANY — Bright. Loving. Happy-go-lucky. Super chill. Simple.

This is how friends and family described Matt Brewer at a memorial skate Tuesday at Silver Street Park in New Albany, an event that allowed them to come together and celebrate the man they lost one year ago.

Matt died Aug. 6 of last year at the hospital from injuries suffered when he was hit by a minivan at Spring and Ninth streets. He was doing what he loved most at the time of the accident — skateboarding — and those who knew him said he leaves behind a legacy of inspiration and positivity in the local skate community.

"He loved it," his mother, Judy Brewer, said as she and other family members sat under a shade tree Tuesday afternoon, watching his friends skate the park in his memory. "If he wasn't working, he was skating. All the time. He'd just go down to the park and skate all hours of the night."

The day after Matt died last year, dozens of friends showed up to the skatepark at the New Albany riverfront — a spot where Matt had spent a lot of his time — to show their love. His mother said it made her happy to see them out again Tuesday at the one-year anniversary.

"I think it's great," she said. "It's nice that people still remember him and the guy he was and what he liked to do."

But those there at the park don't have any intention of forgetting the man who taught them so much — as a friend, a teacher, a supporter.

"I think a lot of local skaters just looked up to him — he was skating all the time," said Scott Thompson, who grew up with Matt and went to high school with him. "He was a really good guy, too. He was really kind."

T.J. Gusler said he started skating when he was around 13 or 14, about 10 years younger than Matt. Gusler said Matt had a way about him that made one want to do well.

"He was super supportive," Gusler said. "If you were trying something and it was like a big deal, he'd get his camera out and you're like 'Oh, Matt's excited; I'm going to keep trying to do this.'"

The memorial wasn't held this year at the riverfront park, which is undergoing remodeling to make way for a new park there as part of a skatepark/art installation project of the Carnegie Center for Art & History. He'll always be part of that riverfront space, his friends say.

"You knew every day you'd go down there and he'd be there, ready to go," said Shane Hockersmith, who was one of the scores of skaters Matt inspired throughout Southern Indiana and Louisville. "[He] would do anything for any of us, especially kids growing up who skated. He would take you to spots with him, show you how to do things, sit and talk to you.

"He was definitely the biggest supporter of skating."

Matt's spirit is one that will live on in the community, with seeds that have taken root in the younger kids. Andrew Nicholson, skater and downtown resident who helped organize Tuesday's event with the others in the skate scene, said he'd met Matt four or five years ago when Nicholson had started teaching his son to skate.

Matt had helped, teaching the 10-year-old cool tricks, supporting him and his father along the way.

"Matt would encourage my son not only to be a better skater but to keep trying," Nicholson said. "And he'd encourage me to be a better skater and reassure me that I was doing a good job as a father."

This was just the way Matt was, Nicholson said. His character helped others to be better.

"Seeing him constantly going at it inspired other skaters to keep going," Nicholson said. "I've never seen Matt mad; he always had a smile. Even if you weren't a skater you always got greeted with a smile."

Nicholson called the local skate community "very tight, very close, very supportive," which was evident in the faces of those who turned out to honor their friend.

"The skate community here in Southern Indiana and Louisville is an encouraging group of guys, girls, people, who like to push one another to not only be better skaters, but be better humans," he said.

#SlowTheCars ... because Slick Jeffrey Gahan doesn't give a damn about pedestrian safety on Spring west of State.

A reader writes:

I just realized that the City County Building doesn’t even have a crosswalk on Spring Street! They don’t value any pedestrian’s right of way, do they?

Or, here:

Yes, it's the enduringly hazardous spot where West 1st Street crosses E. Spring to become Hauss (but there is no) Square (there).

Jeff Speck suggested a possible way to reformat one-way streets near the interstate interchange into two-ways, but Jeff Gahan chose to ignore this advice owing to his abject terror of offending drivers who race through this area on a daily basis. You see, Gahan and his team want New Albany to be walkable, though for only so long as drivers aren't inconvenienced.

If westbound drivers not increasing speeds to beat the light at Spring and State, they're doing it to avoid a stop at Scribner Drive -- precisely at the spot where a dozen legal offices and the public library lie directly across the street from both local and federal government buildings.

There is not even the pretense of a crosswalk at West 1st, and some of the most amusing (as well as harrowing) spectacles I've ever witnessed are government employees -- up to and including city council members -- precariously balancing their Big Gulps as they dodge flying cars and trucks to try to cross to the City County Building.

You can't help thinking: They see the problem, they experience the problem, years go past ... and absolutely nothing is done. Then, as we talk to them about walkability, the topic is greeted with blank faces.

I'll make it easy: if you fear for your life then no, it isn't walkable, no matter how many times Pinocchio Rosenbarger insists it is. Verily, If not for dysfunction, we'd have no function at all.

But this week on Friday, Gahan will meet Speck again -- and the lies will flow like cash-stuffed envelopes from HWC Engineering.

Gahan, Rosenbarger set to go full frontal Pinocchio about their urbanism credentials when the Congress for the New Urbanism 27 meets in Louisville June 11-15.

Public safety for non-automotive humans? Gahan fails, utterly.

This fellow is a candidate for city council in Cincinnati. Note his words in bold. Can you imagine a New Albanian politician -- any New Albanian politician -- stating the case this forcefully? Alas, I cannot. The needs of drivers in a narrow sense always outweigh the needs of humans from a broader perspective -- and had Jeff Gahan ever understood any of this, would there be a single sharrow painted on a New Albany street, or those idiotic pedestrian crossing lights?

Opinion: Fatalities climb as few changes are made to calm traffic, by Derek Bauman (Cincinnati.com)

The people of Cincinnati are facing a public safety crisis of immense proportions. Since 2013, crashes involving pedestrians are up nearly 50%. Thirty-six pedestrians have been killed in that time.

During 2018, in the city of Cincinnati alone, more than one person a day was struck by a car. As a candidate for Cincinnati City Council in 2017 and crisscrossing our city, I heard a consistent message from residents everywhere. We want safe streets. We want to feel comfortable walking to the neighborhood coffee shop. We want traffic to be calmed. We want road diets. We want drivers to slow down. We want to be able to ride a bike safely. We want more traffic enforcement. We want to feel safe, and our children to be safe, when walking to school.

Despite these pleas for help, not a whole lot changed. It’s been business as usual while the body count continued to climb.

Cars FAST, speed testing slooooow as Deaf Gahan looks forward to the year 2026 for traffic calming measures downtown.

The bookseller filed a report midday on Friday.

As many of us had expected the speed test on Spring Street has ended 3 days after the primary.

It took six months for HWC Engineering's deliberate abacus to register sufficient "results" which may or may not correspond with what we see with our own two eyes each day.

These "results" now will be compared to precinct vote totals to ensure Jeff Gahan's dwindling support isn't compromised by drivers infuriated at a two-minute delay to cross town.

But even as we speak, the speed pandering test has being shifted to Market and Elm Streets.

Came a follow-up over the wires yesterday.

I asked 'is the test over' and the contractor smirkingly said 'on THIS street.' It was as if he was counting his gold and shopping for a new bass boat.

But wait a minute. HWC Engineering surely is synonymous with gold in the mind of our wheeler-dealer Bunker Elvis.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 1: Mysterious CRS Marketing and the inevitable HWC Engineering tie-in.

So, if a speed test is to be run simultaneously on both Market and Elm, that's another six months, which coincidentally takes us past the fall mayoral contest and into a presidential election year, when nothing further will happen because everyone's busy arming for the culture war.

Add on six month increments for another dozen streets, and we're far into Veneer King's fourth term -- he'll be drawing social security, we'll still be testing streets, the cars won't be moving any slower but every HWC Engineering employee, sub-contractor and their grandchildren will have copped a new bass boat.

Don't look at me, 3rd district "progressive."

I sure as hell didn't vote for him; you did -- and now you're getting exactly what you deserve, good and hard. Stick around until 2023, just before the primary, and 3rd district councilman Greg Phipps might be allowed by his handler to produce another miracle just like this one.

The four-way stop at Elm & 13th, and why openness and transparency matter.

Previously, back at the beginning of December, 2018, we took a closer look at how unreal this simple process can be in Anchor City.

Speed Thought Control: Board of Works, city engineer still unable to grasp reality when it comes to speedway street grid dangers, so they spout meaningless drivel.

Shouldn't they be fighting to implement safety measures, rather than making the sort of "we can't do nuthin' at all" excuses, just like this oldie but still goodie:

Summers said he does not think a stop sign or signal can be installed at Fourth and Spring because a traffic count would not warrant one. He said there is not enough traffic on any of the side streets, off of Spring, that would require a stop sign.

Jeeebus, Larry: then conduct the fucking traffic count as a prelude, and if the state's cars-first standards aren't serving the cause of walkable street grid safety, can't we fight against THEM, to do what's right for US, rather than dismissing safety because enhancing safety is too much trouble?

The verdict is fairly clear. Jeff Gahan has no intention of slowing cars downtown if doing so inconveniences drivers.

He's a dull-witted, car-centric suburbanite, and that's that.

#SlowTheCars: "We need to design our streets so that drivers feel unsafe driving at speeds that are unsafe."

Our urban streets will not be safe until we slow cars. We won't make a significant dent in slowing cars if our toolbox is a combination of signage, more enforcement and driver education. Those are all nice, but the primary hurdle we need to overcome is our propensity to over-engineer, to apply highway thinking to local streets.
-- Charles Marohn

An oldie (2015) but a goodie. Last week while walking to work down the south side of Spring Street at around 10:00 a.m., I paused to watch the digital display by Williams Plumbing, situated just after the horrendous curve at 10th Street. For almost five minutes the sign continuously read "too fast, slow down," or whatever the words.

Gahan botched the two-way reversion, and now, beginning next year with a different mayor and a new council, it will be time at last to find ways to repair the short-sighted damage. 

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Slow the cars, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Yield in the crosswalk, sure. Outside of the crosswalk....well, good luck mate.

For those of you that drive, I’d like you to start taking note of something. I’d like you to mentally document the way that pedestrians act at crosswalks. When you approach a crosswalk and there is a pedestrian walking across the street, look at how they respond to your presence.

If they are like most people, they will do something to pick up their pace and clear the intersection more quickly. They’ll walk faster. They might even run. I’ve even seen people retreat back to the side of the road then wave me – the driver – through.

Now think of approaching that same intersection except, instead of a pedestrian crossing, there is someone in another car. What does that other driver do? Do they pick up their pace to clear the intersection for you? Do they retreat whence they came and wave you through? Of course not.

Why the difference?

The obvious answer would be the asymmetry of danger between the pedestrian and the automobile driver, the former being far more vulnerable. That might be the case in some instances, but you can observe pedestrians rushing across the street even when the car is fully stopped, the driver has made eye contact and there is no real risk.

I think a more pernicious reason for this behavior is that many – perhaps most – Americans today have accepted the notion that streets are for cars. Period. Anyone not in a car might be allowed in this space as a courtesy, but the paved street is – first and foremost – the dominion of cars.

Last week someone sent me this video on pedestrian safety from the Des Moines police department. While very well-intentioned, especially considering (insert your own crass SWAT team and/or militarization reference), I found the premise to be incredibly disturbing. First, they state that there is confusion over who has the right-of-way at “intersections and at crosswalks.” Okay, but then they add this (0:48):

The biggest problem drivers face is being able to understand all the different types of pedestrian signs.

Say what?

Now, to cut the police a little slack, their role in this crazy system is to maintain order. There is nothing more orderly than a bunch of signs and a plethora of laws telling us where each type is to be deployed and how everyone is legally required to act at said deployment. I’m not shocked that the Des Moines police department might view this as a regulatory problem.

Still….drivers are having trouble understanding the signs? So, if every driver clearly saw and understood the signs but pedestrians were still getting mowed down – or, more likely, people were simply choosing not to walk because they did not feel safe or comfortable doing so – that would be okay? It would be orderly, but that is clearly not the optimum outcome.

One of my twin hometowns – Baxter, the fully suburban one – took this thinking to the next illogical step in a recent project they completed. Along their expanded stroad are not only signs for a pedestrian crossing just in case one encounters that sub-variant species rarely found in suburbia, Homo Sapian Carless, but they actually each have a preceding sign telling you there is a sign coming up. Very orderly. Very dumb.

Just the Federal Highway Administration
defining a street as a highway.

This is all to be expected, however, for a centralized system like ours. While there are many local projects that don’t get state or federal funding – the small ones – the outside resources for the rest is what drives the mission and focus of all these local street departments. For instance, the bible for placing signage is a book known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The Federal Highway Administration version of the MUTCD – think of it as Patient Zero – defines a street as “see Highway” (no joke). It then defines a highway as:

Highway—a general term for denoting a public way for purposes of vehicular travel, including the entire area within the right-of-way.

Is it any wonder people don’t feel safe crossing a street outside of car? The mentality of our entire system – and subsequently everything we communicate to driver and pedestrian alike – is that the street is the sole dominion of the automobile. Everything and everyone else is an interloper to be tolerated, at best.

And if you think that is too harsh, consider this paradox: When we design for fast-moving traffic, we go to great lengths to remove obstacles from the clear zone; anything that won’t give like a tree or a wall. Anything we have to place in this clear zone we then design to be “breakaway” so that it gives way when a car collides with it. I’ve even seen state DOT’s demand that retailers remove sandwich board signs on the sidewalk, not because it was distracting but because the signs could damage a vehicle if the vehicle went off the stroad and hit them (note the sign was four feet from the actual building, which might also cause some damage if struck).

We go through all this trouble to make things safe for vehicles and their drivers, but then we allow – and sometimes even design for – pedestrians to be in this space. We put sidewalks right on the edge of roadways that we post at 45 mph, even knowing that most people will drive 55 mph. Regardless, a pedestrian struck at 45 mph is just as dead. Perhaps traffic engineers are not offended by this as pedestrians are technically “breakaway” as well.

So we tolerate pedestrians, essentially at their own risk. If we wanted to build streets to not just tolerate pedestrians but to actually accommodate people – who, by the way, are the main indicator species of a financially productive place – what would we do differently?

Last week someone sent me one of those articles that details the history of automobile/pedestrian interaction. This one was in Collector’s Weekly and, despite the unnecessarily provocative title, was a great read. The most amazing part – and the answer to making streets that are financially productive once more – is the different attitude towards pedestrians. From the article:

Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play. “Common law tended to pin responsibility on the person operating the heavier or more dangerous vehicle,” says [Peter] Norton, “so there was a bias in favor of the pedestrian.” Since people on foot ruled the road, collisions weren’t a major issue: Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages yielded right of way to pedestrians and slowed to a human pace. The fastest traffic went around 10 to 12 miles per hour, and few vehicles even had the capacity to reach higher speeds.

As the article went on, it detailed things such as “silent policeman” and “traffic turtles” that essentially thwarted the speed ambitions of drivers so as to keep the public realm safe for everyone. The expectations were different:

“If a kid is hit in a street in 2014, I think our first reaction would be to ask, ‘What parent is so neglectful that they let their child play in the street?,’” says Norton.

“In 1914, it was pretty much the opposite. It was more like, ‘What evil bastard would drive their speeding car where a kid might be playing?’ That tells us how much our outlook on the public street has changed—blaming the driver was really automatic then. It didn’t help if they said something like, ‘The kid darted out into the street!,’ because the answer would’ve been, ‘That’s what kids do. By choosing to operate this dangerous machine, it’s your job to watch out for others.’ It would be like if you drove a motorcycle in a hallway today and hit somebody—you couldn’t say, ‘Oh, well, they just jumped out in front of me,’ because the response would be that you shouldn’t operate a motorcycle in a hallway.”

Forgiving design principles that traffic engineers employ have replaced the “that’s what kids do” burden on the driver with a “that’s what drivers do” burden on all of society. If we want to make our cities prosperous again, we have to return that burden to the driver. Not just at intersections. Not just where there are properly specified signs. It is their burden, their responsibility, everywhere, all the time. Period.

Now here’s the catch: we need to design our streets to reflect that reality. We need to design our streets so that drivers feel unsafe driving at speeds that are unsafe. That’s an entirely different America than the one we live in now, but one that’s actually less expensive to build and more financially successful once completed.

In Brainerd MN as in New Albany IN: "I find myself having to accept another senseless death, another feeble response, and the promise that nothing is going to change anytime soon."

Marohn's description (link below) of Wise Road in his hometown of Brainerd can be easily visualized in the context of Spring Street in New Albany.

Over a space of car-centric decades, Spring Street was engineered to be a highway zipping traffic through populated areas. The idea was to move cars from one side of the city to the interstate ramp on the other side, as quickly as possible.

Then it became evident that the goal of revitalizing neighborhoods was plainly incompatible with the continued use of this street as a highway. It took more than a decade to convince community pillars of this obvious fact, but finally a handful grudgingly did their homework and concluded something needed to be done -- less about the design, more about silencing dissidents.

We know what happened next. Mayor Jeff Gahan took control of street grid reform not as a means of doing what was needed to slow drivers, but to loudly and garishly pretend he'd done so.

Traffic calming became another grandiose paving project, with the usual cash-laden fruit baskets passed around. Victory was declared, and yet of all the ways Spring Street might have been altered by purposeful design, only the barest minimums were deployed. Accordingly, we were urged to venerate politicians who'd "solved" 20% of the problem.

Now the same pay-to-play engineering firm that gleefully sabotaged Jeff Speck's masterly street grid reform plan at Gahan's behest is conducting yet another round of speed studies.

Does anyone really think HWC Engineering will conclude that the company's Speck retrofit was fundamentally mistaken?

We don't need a mayor who responds to every emerging situation by commissioning another taxpayer-funded study from the same old suspects, who promptly deposit tithes in the re-election fund before producing the pre-determined result.

Rather, we need a mayor who leads. As it stands, we have a vacuous cult of personality.

#FireGahan2019 

---

Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn lives just a few miles from one of the deadliest roads in Central Minnesota.

But no one in his town seems to be particularly worried about it. And we bet you have a road just like it in your town.

How have our communities become so apathetic about the deaths of their citizens? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Today, Chuck is taking a hard look at Wise Road, and using it as an object lesson for breaking through the inertia around traffic deaths. 

It won't be easy. There aren't many options—according to Chuck, there's really only two. But it's the hard work we need to do if we want our towns to be strong.

How will you help #slowthecars?

-Kea and the rest of the Strong Towns Team.

Hello, Larry ... and Jeff, and Warren, and HWC: Improve the city by slowing the cars in walkable places.

The folks at the Strong Towns feed at Twitter finished Sunday with two excellent links.

First, something perhaps never before uttered at a Board of Public Monetization Works and Selective Safety meeting in New Albany.

"If you're looking to help small businesses thrive, maybe you should start thinking about how to slow down your commercial streets."

Cyclists Spend 40% More In London's Shops Than Motorists, by Carlton Reid (Forbes)

New research from Transport for London (TfL) claims that people walking, cycling and using public transport spend more than motorists in local shops. Conducted by Matthew Carmona from University College London's Bartlett School of Planning, the research reveals that those not in cars spend 40% more each month in neighborhood shops than motorists.

The research was conducted in areas of London which have benefitted from Dutch-style streetscape improvements, such as the addition of cycleways ...

From London, Strong Towns moves to Italy.

"It's not every day that you hear about an Italian village that followed North America's lead and ran a highway through its downtown. Will they do what most American cities are afraid to do, and use good design to #slowthecars in their walkable places?"

Italian Village Installs Speed Cameras, Records 58,000 Infractions In 2 Weeks, by Merrit Kennedy (NPR)

... "We hope that these speed gauges can be an effective deterrent to motorists and that they can benefit the citizens of Acquetico, because you do not want to make cash with the fines, but it is necessary to protect people's safety," the mayor told the news agency, according to BBC.

Why so fast?

The mayor proceeds to explain that the highway is designed for speed, and drivers use it as designed.

Wait -- might this be the fundamental problem, Mr. Rice?

ASK THE BORED: Faced with 75 signatures on a petition, Nash, Summers and the clueless BOW non-safety board can't muster a single empathetic response.

Last Tuesday the Board of Mute Nostril Agony reached a new low. 

A brief summary: With their own two eyes, 75 neighborhood residents can see that drivers speeding through their neighborhood need to be slowed at the critical intersection of Elm and Jay, and the response from Warren Nash and Larry Summers? In essence, it's this:

We're the experts, peasant, so believe us when we tell you that your own two eyes are quite mistaken. INDOT is like a God, and we merely arrange the sacrifices.

Their hallowed engineering metric says there must be many more cars, traveling at even greater rates of speed, making the situation far worse, before slowing drivers can so much as be considered.

Only then will they check their nut sacks to see if any courage might be hanging there. Spoiler: there isn't, so they'll drag HWC's Jim Rice down from Indianapolis to explain that Daddy Gahan Knows Best.

It's offensive and appalling, this robotic lack of basic human empathy with which Gahan, Nash, Summers and their board of abject time-serving cowards pretend to care about "safety" even as they duck, cover and flee responsibility when drivers claim the lives of Chloe Allen and Matt Brewer, and strike and injure so many others.

However, last Tuesday police chief Todd Bailey offered a potentially devastating, constructive observation.

We have ourselves a precedent.

There's a "line of sight" issue at the intersection of Elm and Jay -- and at several other nearby intersections, too, including Elm and 13th, and 9th at Spring, where the Williams Plumbing trucks continue to park unhindered, and impede sight lines, in spite of this futile ordinance prohibiting it.

Ordinance enforcement, anyone?

(crickets chirp, pins drop, and somewhere, a dog barks)

Instead of tired bureaucratic excuses conjured unconvincingly by the usual C-minus students, maybe there can be action without the same-old campaign fund donations?

Dead Man's Curve has killed, and it will kill again unless our cowardly ruling clique does its job.

Here, there and everywhere, "In crashes that kill pedestrians, the majority of drivers don't face charges."

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Both Jeff Gahan and Warren Nash believe that driver convenience far outranks considerations of human life.

Green street design: New Albany can't have nice things because our "leaders" don't, and our "pillars" aren't.

Because for the clique to even intelligently discuss it, they'd first be compelled to imagine it. They can't, and it's not even close.

And so we settle for the best that C-minus students can offer. It isn't much.

‘A VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF GREEN’: HOW STREET DESIGN CAN BE CALMED BY NATURE, by David Goldberg (Sightline)

Making Cascadia’s streets more like gardens ensures complete streets are green streets.

A revolution is brewing in the streets of Cascadia’s major cities. Not since the mid-20th century has this region seen such a wholesale remaking of city rights of way.

Rapid growth is driving experimentation in ways to move more and more people through the same corridors, whether by foot, bicycle, transit, rideshare or private vehicle, all while accommodating a rising tsunami of deliveries. And as as ever more buildings fill urban space, those public rights of way become critically important refuges for greenery.

Until recently, traffic engineers designed streets solely to move cars. For them, street trees were to be eliminated as roadside hazards and landscaped zones were a hindrance to “vehicle throughput.” Today, though, planners increasingly see space for trees and plants as vital to safety, clean waterways, and resiliency and adaptation to climate change.

Some cities are beginning to fuse four strains of fresh thinking that have emerged over the last decade or so:

Complete Streets
Vision Zero
Green Stormwater Infrastructure
Urban Forestry

“Trees and other plants clean the air, add economic value to real estate and commercial sales and they make places where people want to be,” said John Massengale, co-author with Victor Dover of Street Design: the Secret to Great Cities and Towns (Wiley 2013). “Perhaps most importantly, they slow cars down, which is critical to achieving Vision Zero.”

“There is a virtuous cycle of green,” said Brice Maryman, senior landscape architect at MIG|SvR in Seattle. “Giving street space over to plants and trees helps slow vehicles, and once you have slower vehicles you can use even more space for natural functions.”

Also, some of the same techniques that can be used to calm traffic and create safe zones for people on foot or bicycle offer opportunities to introduce more soothing vegetation and ecological functions—ensuring that complete streets are green streets ...

Neither City Hall nor HWC Engineering sees a problem with this mishap-plagued intersection. Maybe we should appeal to Floyd County government for help.

Photo by AGB.

Insightful observer AGB photographed the scene on Sunday afternoon after a driver deposited his car in the yard of the home on the southwest corner of Elm and 13th.

Yet another wreck at Elm and 13th. This time the cars hit and one went into the yard and hit the house. But those flashing pedestrian walkway lights that nobody pays attention to were a much better choice than 4 way stops ... there is only a 2-way stop here and you can't see around the cars parked. So there's often wrecks/near wrecks at this intersection.

Ironically, it was precisely this intersection that I mentioned last week to Jim Rice of HWC Engineering, the mayor’s preferred contractor for street design, as worthy of added study owing to sight lines and the completely ineffective solar-powered "high visibility" pedestrian crossings.

Rice quickly brushed me off, asking how I knew for a fact these crosswalks don't work. I replied that as a frequent walker, a couple hundred hours of direct experience is something not to be ignored; he answered by denigrating real-life observation as opposed to the sheer brilliance of that segment of the populace which has chosen to become engineers.

Sorry, Jim. If the choice is believing you or my own two eyes, you can hurriedly beat a retreat back to suburban Indianapolis (by car, of course) while as a walker, I'll continue crossing in the middle of the block -- because this is safer than the prevailing reality following your de-Specked abortion of a two-way street grid plan, which your presumably flawless firm of flunkies conjured between amassing campaign donations to a failed mayor who ordered the car-centric butchery in the first place.

As an aside, the idiocy of these "high irrelevancy" pedestrian crossing lights is so blatantly obvious that even 3rd district councilman Greg Phipps noticed it, and made at least one appeal to the somnolent Bored of Works, maybe two.

To no one's surprise, BOW has been completely unresponsive -- and as fatigued city engineer Larry Summers informed council just a few weeks ago, he's so busy coordinating campaign donations from paving companies that there's no time for the consideration of other matters.

Unfortunately, Phipps has a history of stopping short of useful action that might offend Dear Leader, so here we are. Perhaps it's time for residents of the 3rd district to learn from the instructive experience of Vulcan, West Virginia in the late 1980s. There's a crucial and delightful twist, seeing as the USSR and the GDR no longer exist.

Let's ask the Floyd County commissioners for help with this intersection, seeing as we're getting none from the Anchor Regime.

Feeling forsaken by their own government, after repeated pleas to have a new bridge constructed, the people of this West Virginia community made an unprecedented move which soon garnered international headlines. At the height of the Cold War, residents of Vulcan wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, as well as to communist officials in East Germany, detailing their plight and requesting foreign aid from the nations.

Sensing an opportunity to shame the American government, the Kremlin immediately dispatched journalists to the United States.

Interviewing the residents of Vulcan and broadcasting their troubles to the rest of the world, the government in Moscow did what the residents of Vulcan had been attempting to do for years, bring attention to their transportation nightmare.

By mid-December 1977, newspaper headlines around the country were announcing, “Small Town Seeks Russ Foreign Aid” (Spokane Daily Chronicle).

The Spokane Daily Chronicle wrote, “Soviet officials were amused today by reports that the small town of Vulcan, W.Va. has appealed to the Kremlin for foreign aid… The town, with a population of 200, asked the Soviet government for financial help to build a bridge after the town was turned down by the U.S. and West Virginia governments.”

Embarrassed by the attention their lack of assistance was receiving, state officials wasted no time in committing $1.3 million and built a bridge for the tiny community.

New Albany doesn't have the balls for this traffic calming solution.

"Traffic calming measures aren’t just concrete and strategic design: they’re a clear signal that drivers don’t own the roads we live on, and that our streets are where residents live, not just where we drive our cars."
-- Kea Wilson

Read all about it. What to do when driver bots hate traffic calming?

Wilson proposes involving the neighborhood in the decision-making process; beautifying; educating; building incrementally; and celebrating.

When your city hates your traffic calming measures, by Kea Wilson (Strong Towns)

 ... This is the uncomfortable reality of the movement to #slowthecars in our human-scaled neighborhoods; all too often, drivers really, really hate being slowed down. And a lot of them will stay angry, no matter how beautifully you argue that narrowing your road makes your neighborhood immediately safer for all modes of transport — and let’s be clear, it does. There’s no magic wand that will force all your neighbors to be happy about changes to the streets they drive down every day — much less stop them from flooding the alderwoman with calls to get the “hazards” removed, especially when the nightly news is all but telling them to do it.

Does that mean we shouldn’t #slowthecars? Nope. The safety and financial productivity of our cities is far too important.

But it does mean that we can and should get a little better at implementing traffic calming measures each time we attempt them. That’s the essence of the Strong Towns approach.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from my neighborhood’s Great Concrete Ball saga of 2018 that might help in your town too ...