Toll bridges: "The mental model that says traffic levels are some inexorable natural force like the tides, which must be accommodated or else, is just wrong."

From 2010. Now he wants to toll interstates.

Joe Cortright's latest dispatch in the "Louisville Traffic Experiment" series (below) prompted a few thoughts from Jeff Gillenwater, NAC's junior editor, from whom I enjoy purloining passages like this one because he's so damned good in expressing them.

I chuckled the other day when Kentucky transportation officials said it would take a while for traffic counts to increase owing to time spent figuring out new or alternative routes. Not only did they not include people deciding to just not make the trip(s) among possible alternatives - something a lot of us pointed out would happen - but they also left out the even more obvious: all the alternative route seekers I know or have heard about are seeking to avoid tolls, not pay them.

Lots of area businesses have instructed employees who regularly traverse I-65 to cross the river at 2nd Street for all their daytime trips. It's not like it's crowded in the middle of the day or takes much, if any, extra time or driving. Likewise, as I've already mentioned, I've had occasion lately to talk with a lot of out-of-towners who are seeking and finding non-tolled alternatives as well.

We're nowhere near good enough at political organizing to stop bad projects like this, but we're not entirely stupid, either.

And now the source:

The latest from the Louisville traffic experiment, by Joe Cortright (City Observatory)

Even with the free alternative closed, traffic is very light on the new I-65 bridges

Time for one of our periodic check-ins on our real world transportation pricing experiment in Louisville, Kentucky. As you recall, we’ve been watching Louisville closely, because just at the end of last year, the city started what amounts to a laboratory experiment in transportation behavior. Kentucky and Indiana build a new bridge to double the capacity of the I-65 freeway as it crosses the Ohio River near downtown Louisville. At the same time, it put tolls on the I-65 crossing, but not on the nearby Second Street Bridge, an older, four-lane highway bridge that connects Louisville to the Indiana suburbs north of the River.

As we reported in February, the initial month’s worth of data on bridge traffic shows that adding tolls (which run from $1 to $4 for cars) have caused traffic levels to fall by almost half, from about 122,000 vehicles per day to about 66,000. We showed photographs from area traffic-cams that show rush hour traffic on the tolled bridges almost empty, while traffic was fairly think on the free Second Street Bridge.

The latest phase of our experiment came this past this weekend, courtesy of “Thunder Over Louisville” a kind of combined concert, airshow and fireworks display that is held annually. To handle the big crowds the come downtown, and afford great vantage points, the city closes the Second Street Bridge. It did so on Thursday. So we looked to see how this affected traffic levels.

Stemler on road-pounding trucks: “A (truck) carrying 20 tons of asphalt or crushed stone – we're taxing (the Clark Memorial Bridge) an awful lot."

Yesterday: One Southern Indiana's hypocrisy is absolutely reprehensible.

To Kerry Stemler, hypocrisy is an art form.

He is a soul-crushing oligarchic corporate criminal suitable for tarring and feathering, or worse.

And these "road-pounding" trucks ... the many trucks belonging to Stemler's own businesses and those of his fellow regional wealth extractors?

Naturally, they need to be kept off the toll rolls, and also off the Clark Memorial Bridge, but are just fine and dandy when speedily rerouted through residential streets in New Albany ... which like the bridge, were not constructed for the use of such vehicles, which is why their presence preferably comes with the full cooperation of New Albany's OWN ELECTED GOVERNMENT, which is happy (or sufficiently clueless) to oblige with nary a peep.

Louisville chamber chair backs commercial truck ban on Clark Memorial Bridge, by Marcus Green (WDRB)

... Besides his GLI position, Stemler sits on the boards of the Finance Authority and a six-person panel in charge of the bridges project's toll policy. In an interview, he said he plans to use his influence to push for several other ideas included in Dant Chesser's letter.

Specifically, Stemler said he also favors reclassifying certain heavy vehicles to avoid the toll rates charged to tractor trailers and exempting Transit Authority of River City buses from tolls.

Notice the deft public transit touch. Fortunately, we have plenty of old masonry walls hereabouts ready to be pressed into service following the show trial.

Bluegill provides the coda, as posted yesterday:

Today is street sweeping day in front of our house-- you know, spend hour after hour writing tickets penalizing residents for minute, non-moving infractions while thousands of cars and large trucks whiz through their neighborhood at 45 mph day. As such, residents crammed all their cars onto the side street to avoid the harassment. With said cars parked on both sides, the folks profiting from the Main Street Bicycle Denial Project placed their barricade right in the middle of the street so no one could get out without backing up down half the street and turning into the glass strewn alley where the street sweeper might actually be useful but never goes. I moved the barricade. Will again tomorrow. It's come to that.

Yes, it has come to that -- with New Albany's streets, and on Kerry Stemler's pet bridges, and the best strategies for coping with both have narrowed to calculated, principled civil disobedience. It may be the best single mayoral campaign idea for 2015.

But wait ... what was that?

You can't see how it is possible for a government sworn to uphold law to instead express disobedience?

Come now.

It hasn't been that long since Doug England publicly announced that he wouldn't enforce his own parking regulations. England didn't strike them, but merely renounced their enforcement. The ordinances remain on the books, and the city continues to ignore its own laws.

As we speak, I suspect those same heavy trucks that inspire throbbing erections on the part of the likes of Kerry Stemler are being exempted from speeding enforcement in New Albany, and I'll continue to believe it until someone within our close-mouthed City Hall proves to me otherwise. If the local chain newspaper can't or won't ask the questions, I will.  

Isn't it an act of willful civil disobedience for a sitting mayor not to enforce the city's own ordinances? If not, then what exactly is it?

Consequently, to campaign for the office of mayor on an explicit platform of civic disobedience as it pertains to matters like one-way streets and Stemler's auto-erotic tolling project strikes me as the most ethical choice available to a candidate.

Apart from drinking beer, that is. I vow to achieve that, too.

Kerry Stemler's statement on the occasion of the Clark Memorial Bridge closing.

Look at the bright side of the 6-week-long Clark Memorial Bridge closing.

It will make it easier for pedestrians to cross 2nd Street on the Louisville side without being murdered by heavy trucks.

What's the plan when the Clark Memorial Bridge closes?, by Braden Lammers (Business First)

... Beyond notifying the public, bridge officials said, they are leaving it up to commuters and the companies to determine the best route to take.

Nash: "Bicycle riders do belong on the road."

It's another excellent column by Matt Nash, one generating a reasonable discussion at the newspaper's pop-up, roll-over littered website. I covered this ground previously ...

Cars are bad enough. Walk it across, for safety's sake.

... but Matt expands nicely on the theme, and does so forcefully. Good work. Please brave the newspaper's impediments to Internet civility, and check it out.

NASH: We have to share the road, by Matt Nash

... I still believe the cyclist was wrong, as the one who had the ability to go the fastest and inflict the most damage, he had a responsibility to make sure he avoided the pedestrian. At the very least he should have stopped and let the walker pass by. Some have also suggested that he should have pushed his bike across the span. No matter what method he should have used, he had the burden to ensure that both parties made it across the bridge safely.

Cars are bad enough. Walk it across, for safety's sake.

At 6:00 p.m. in winter on a Yum Center event night, a bicyclist riding on the sidewalk of an overcrowded bridge -- the only way for non-motorized vehicles to get across the Ohio short of using a dinghy -- hits a pedestrian, knocking him into traffic, and prompting the Jeffersonville police spokesman to utter the nonsensical admonition that cyclists should be on an expanse of asphalt which is entirely and absolutely unpatrolled in the best of times, and where cyclists previously have been killed and their killers not prosecuted by the cowardly local enforcement and justice arms.

I generally defend cyclists, and the one biking in this instance was right to use the sidewalk lest he be killed himself by distracted drivers (the only sidewalk exception I'm willing to tolerate owing to the danger of the area), but he was in the wrong when it came to the way he chose to use the sidewalk. One should only be cycling in saddle at full speed on that accursed bridge when visibility is perfect. Many is the time I've walked my bike across it in deference to pedestrians, because it is their sidewalk, not mine. Ultimately, all of it owes to the near comical shortsightedness of autocentric metro officials and political ciphers, but we already knew that, didn't we?

Pedestrian in critical condition after Clark bridge accident, by Harold J. Adams (Courier-Journal)

A few links to prime stuff at Broken Sidewalk.

What happened to Saturday?

I awoke at 4:30 a.m., decided to read The Economist to kill some time, drank too much coffee and listend to the birds chirp outside. Then there was a morning of work, an afternoon of finishing "The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War" (by Caroline Alexander), early evening biking along the new Clarksville Levee path, then finally a pleasant growler of beer and cigars, porchside, with friends.

Time has been fleeting and will continue to be so. I'll be doing more signposting here than I like, because any time when there's time to tie together more than a few paragraphs, these go toward my various column obligations. In this vein, following are three links to a blog that is a must-read for New Albanians interested in the urban experience in metro Louisville. Have you ever wondered how many of our city councilmen read (blogs like Broken Sidewalk), and if they did, how much the experience might change their views on such matters?

Welcome to Broken Sidewalk! Here, we report on and discuss neighborhood news in Louisville, Kentucky. Any given day, we might be talking about real estate development, transportation, architecture, urbanism, or the nitty gritty of urban life. Please join in the conversation, or learn more about Broken Sidewalk and the stories we cover here. If you like what you see, consider subscribing to our RSS Feed (it's easy). Thanks for stopping by.

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