Glasser don't care: "As a general rule of thumb, it’s not a good idea to encourage bicycling on sidewalks."

Yesterday we were walking westbound on an almost deserted Market Street, when Diana asked me why a grown man and a woman on bicycles were approaching us, riding on the sidewalk.

"Because they're fucking idiots," I said, "and because the city allows them to be fucking idiots."

But then they saw us, moved to unoccupied parking spaces on Market, and commenced riding against traffic.

Of course, I was being flippant up to a point. Granted, they shouldn't be on the sidewalk, and while ignorance is part of it, the bigger reason is an understandable discomfort (read: fear) of riding on the street alongside the cars, when neither the drivers of these cars NOR CITY HALL itself cares to acknowledge them, to calm traffic, or do anything useful to make their passage safer.

That's why when a useful dupe like Louisville's Chris Glasser crows about Jeff Gahan's excellence in street grid reform, he's actually looking at a Potemkin facade erected by congenital liars, and not the real state of affairs experienced by people who actually live here.

Speck's unfulfilled plan: Intellectually lazy carpetbagging shortcuts from clueless Louisvillians don't make New Albany's streets any safer.

Meanwhile, enjoy this digression.

BICYCLING ON SIDEWALKS (The Cornell University Bicycle and Pedestrian Web Site)

There is momentum throughout the country to make our communities more walking and bicycling-friendly, thereby making them more livable. In trying to accomplish this goal, citizens are challenged by limited physical space, high volumes of vehicular traffic, and overall congestion. The question of whether to permit bicycling on sidewalks is often discussed in the planning process.

As a general rule of thumb, it’s not a good idea to encourage bicycling on sidewalks ...

GREEN MOUSE presents NAWBANY WEEK IN REVIEW for 7 February 2020.

This week's mouse droppings are brought to you by HWC Engineering, because as long as HWC is on the scene, we'll be reminding you that it shouldn't be.

The Green Mouse doesn't push drugs, punch his girlfriend or salute when commanded by anger-management-challenged sycophants.

He's just a drinking rodent with a green problem. 

Yesterday I took a glance over the mouse's shoulder to see what he was scribbling in that ubiquitous steno pad.

Let's all work together on a new city motto. I'll start. "NEW ALBANY -- WHERE KOOL-AID IS KING AND SHEEP ARE SCARED." What do you think? Or this: "COME FOR THE TWO-WAY STREETS, STAY FOR THE ONE-WAY THINKING."

It was that kind of week.

But first, a hopeful sign. This is a wonderful new City Hall feature, and at long last, we see a faint glimmer of transparency.

WEEKLY PROJECT UPDATES:

The following project updates were given at the Board of Works meeting on 02/04/20

JACOBI, TOOMBS & LANZ

➡️ Grant Line Road (Daisy Lane To McDonald Lane):

Last Week: Donated $250 to Gahan4Life
This Week: Donated $100 to Applegate for Office 2018 - 2034
___

BEAM • LONGEST • NEFF

➡️ SLATE RUN ROAD IMPROVEMENT PROJECT - PHASE 1

Last Week: Donated $250 to Gahan4Life
This Week: Donated $250 to Caesar "The Salad" Re-election Campaign
___

HWC ENGINEERING (AND HOME IMPROVEMENTS)

➡️ EASTRIDGE DRIVE QUALITY OF LIFE HOT TUB - PHASE 5.7

Last week: Donated $250 to Gahan4Life
This Week: Two gallons Scrubbing Bubbles (in-kind donation)

---

Things were relatively calm hereabouts until Wednesday evening, when two vicious mind fucks elicited comment. But first, let's revisit the editor's New Year's resolution: a "sabbatical from polemics about local politics."

I said from the start that the Friday column you're reading is an exception, because I'm not a 100% cold turkey kind of guy. Events this week on Wednesday may seem to indicate my resolve is tottering a bit, and to a degree this is true. It's very difficult to cease speaking truth to the prevailing doofuss tomfoolery. However the record clearly shows that I've cut way back, thereby saving time for other important uses (like getting paid), as compared with the hours formerly devoted to explaining the sheer, enduring idiocy perpetuated on a daily basis by NA's ethics-free ruling caste.

I'm making progress, little by little. But when an outsider with an agenda lofts one of those tempting lob passes, every now and then a patriotic citizen just has to slam it home.

Speck's unfulfilled plan: Intellectually lazy carpetbagging shortcuts from clueless Louisvillians don't make New Albany's streets any safer.

Jeff Gillenwater is quoted extensively at the link, and he also made this observation.

In simplest terms, (Chris Glasser) “reported” a bunch of stuff that isn’t factually true. How many times have we had the “thinks he’s educated and liberal but doesn’t have a clue” conversation just in the past few days?

Bunches, Jeff, just as with the other Wednesday night revelation. Prohibition in America often is well-meaning, which doesn't mean it's right.

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Neo-prohibitionism, foppery and hypocrisy at Indiana Landmarks as Family Dollar on Vincennes gets a perfectly legal alcohol sales permit.

Gillenwater again:

The Family Dollar thing is a hoot. I’ve no doubt that a more upscale, historically housed spirits merchant would get a big seal of approval from the same crowd, “vulnerable populations” be damned.

In closing, this week's column lamented the passing of an institution ... and yes, you're getting another Gillenwater quote as coda.

ON THE AVENUES: Alas, New Albany is less of a place without a bookstore.

I am perennially reminded of just how little most people know about what the hell has actually happened around here in those fifteen years and how quickly they take to filling that knowledge void by considering themselves as central to it. That second bit about self-aggrandizement has at least been consistent. Especially troubling is that so many who either clearly didn’t understand the potential or actively argued against it are now (and in some cases still) in positions of power and are (still) actively working against the spirit and substance of those earlier, more independent days that Destinations and a handful of others embodied as a part of New Albany’s second or third or fourth or whichever coming it is.

Next week: Lobotomy or gin? The experts weigh New Albanian coping mechanisms.

Speck's unfulfilled plan: Intellectually lazy carpetbagging shortcuts from clueless Louisvillians don't make New Albany's streets any safer.

On Wednesday in LEO Dead to Me Weekly, there was an extended hymn of praise for New Albany's Jeff Speck-inspired street grid reversion program, as written by the sort of useful dupe who formerly went to the USSR and asked Stalin's groveling, terrified minions what they thought about their dear leader's unparalleled success.

Care to guess what they said?

Of course, the article's befuddled author Chris Glasser is immune to criticism from those who actually live here as to the effectiveness of these epochal street grid reforms -- which in the end, weren't. Street direction did change, but the virtually all the remainder of the supportive mechanisms proposed by Speck were stripped away and tossed into HWC's rancid dumpster, as we've noted in this space time and again.

(Ironically, as with Republicans in the recent impeachment process, most of New Albany's senior Democrats will acknowledge privately that the truth about the post-Speck street grid differs from what they parrot aloud on a daily basis.)

Glasser's real aim was to criticize Louisville's sloth pertaining to these matters. That's fine; Greg Fischer is enduringly awful, but please, don't misrepresent our reality to further your propaganda. I'll repeat the offer I made to Glasser on Twitter:

Any time you want to come to NA, go for a walk, and get schooled about objective reality, I'm happy to guide you. You know very little about what actually happened here; it's like the American socialists who went to the USSR during Stalinism and came back glowing about paradise.

Jeff Gillenwater replied to Glasser with his characteristic command of actual facts, and the article's author devoted five or so minutes to defending his woefully gullible thesis before slinking back to Louisville to plot future intellectual carpetbagging.

This is a fantasyland recitation worthy of the Trump administration.

As is too often the case, a self-styled advocate/expert has little to no idea of what he’s talking about, no actual evidence to provide, and dismisses fact-based disagreement as the work of Internet cranks. Even his opening salvo that projects like New Albany’s are virtually unseen elsewhere is obviously false. As many of us spent a decade or more pointing out before Speck was even involved, reversions to two-way streets have been common for a long time. New Albany is just one on a long list and not a particularly good example. The only thing in the implemented plan that’s all that similar to the Speck plan is the two-way reversion itself. With as common as that has been around the country (not to mention lots of two-way, complete street advocacy in New Albany before Speck), specifically attributing two-ways to “the Speck plan” would be like attributing ice cream to Graeter’s.

Unlike the author, I have been providing a link to the actual plan the Speck design group created for the project. Anyone interested can see for themselves that the HWC plan that was actually implemented bears very, very little resemblance.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cityofn.../NAReport.compressed1.pdf

Meanwhile Glasser, unable to connive a handy way to fit the wholesale discarding of Speck's bicycling plans into his convenient, fawning narrative -- has career bureaucrat and sophistry mangler John Rosenbarger ever been showered with as much adulation for doing little or nothing? -- Glasser merely glossed over bicycling safety as a necessary compromise.

Unalloyed bullshit, and Bluegill called Glasser's mealy-mouthed bluff.

An important point here. Because a majority of the Speck plan was cut, streets are still dangerous for people on foot or bike, more so in some places. It’s so “compromised” that very few benefits have happened. If this is what success is, why would anyone spend millions on it?

In New Albany, we have scattered bike lanes to nowhere - they just randomly begin and end - in areas where high volume, high speed automobile traffic makes them dangerous. Those lanes are hardly used, reiterating the idea they’re a waste.

The article suggests that Speck-proposed bike lanes were altered from protected to just painted. I’ve asked where all those lanes are. No answer, of course, because they don’t exist. It’s unpopular, but I persist in thinking facts matter.

We already had the fights, spent all the $$ without a good example to show for it. Re-doing what was just done isn’t likely. In some ways, we’re further from getting it right than we were. If everyone in L-Ville does go for similar “compromise”, we’ll be even further behind.

As for Speck, he's still talking from both sides of his mouth, which is unfortunate. Maybe his contract requires him to keep "selling" HWC's shambles. It saddens me tremendously, but there it is.

Of course the flunktionaries on the prom planning committee applauded on cue, safe from the horrible burden of comprehension. That's too bad. It's really not that hard to learn.

You merely must want to learn.

Louisville "Streets for People" series is worth a read by New Albanians, because two-way traffic is only the end of the beginning.

We covered the first in Chris Glasser's informative Insider Louisville series here:

Us, too: "Louisville’s roads need to be designed for citizens, not cars."

 ... To take (Louisville mayor Greg) Fischer at his word and judge him by his own standard, our city is falling well short of the administration’s stated top goal. Fischer’s annual budgets speak volumes on this matter — they’re his defining action, louder than his words. Yes, there is a small amount allocated to build a bike network — a pittance that Metro Council undercuts every year during the budget review period — but beyond that, there is virtually nothing that will begin to push us toward achieving Fischer’s goal of 25 percent of trips occurring on foot, bike or bus by 2030.

Glasser's second installment offers an interesting twist on downtown Louisville's "9th Street Divide."

... Much has been made of the city’s “9th Street Divide” — the supposed invisible racial line that separates black Louisville to the west from white Louisville to the east. The city’s segregation (and inequality) is a matter of fact, but the “9th Street Divide” is a fallacy — or at least, a simplification of a broader, more complex idea. What we have, actually, is a crater of surface parking lots in our western downtown, creating a void in what could be a thriving city center.

Yesterday's third and final essay raises a point critical to Jeff Gahan's program of road reworkings in New Albany (in general) and the soon-to-be-finished Downtown Grid Modernization Project (specifically).

The central point is enhanced and in bold.

Streets for People: A missed opportunity on Lexington Road

This month and next, Metro Government will be completing work on the Lexington Road Safety Project — a repaving and redesign of the corridor between Grinstead Drive and Payne Street.

As stated in the city’s press release, the “new configuration is intended to improve traffic flow and reduce accidents as previously demonstrated by similar projects across Louisville.” Bike lanes will be added, and the project will improve drainage along the roadway, which neighbors Beargrass Creek and sits partially in a floodplain.

The colloquial term for a project like this is a “road diet.” It will look like this:

Road diet for Lexington Road.

While a project like this is progress to a certain degree, it’s also a huge missed opportunity — one that falls short of the original goals of the plan and fails to keep pace with what’s being implemented throughout the country. With “progress” like this, we can simultaneously be moving forward and falling behind.

The last sentence neatly summarizes the issue for New Albany. Judging from their past exploits, we can rely on our leadership cadre to declare victory and erect self-congratulatory plaques, but the fact is that the long overdue implementation of two-way streets is only a partial victory. It is the end of the beginning, and there is far more to be done.

There are walking issues, biking issues and connectivity issues. Dan Coffey will disagree, but he's an irrelevant anachronism, a sort of ideological love child spawned by Strom Thurmond and David Duke, to be breast-fed by the Thoreau Institute.

Does Jeff Gahan have a plan for the next phase of street modernity?

If so, let's see it. This whole thing about waiting to reveal designs until the milling begins is so very Ceausescu, isn't it?