Ghost Town.

I played the "I have a joke" game on Twitter.

Kindly note that Speck, who once designed a street grid for New Albany, only to find most of it dropped into the garbage bin, "liked" my reply.

That's all I need to say about the topic, isn't it?

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.

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.

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.

I'm supporting Carrie Klaus for New Albany Township Advisory Board because I believe she'll come to agree with us about social justice and the street grid.

Expensive and useless. We can do better.

I've been sitting on this for almost two months, thinking about it and trying to come up with the best way to be constructive in my critique of a letter that appeared in the local chain newspaper on August 19.

If the writer weren't a Democratic candidate for New Albany Township Advisory Board, I probably wouldn't even have noticed the letter. Because Carrie Klaus is running (as an aside, she is a founder of Soindivisible), it strikes me as important, if for no other reason than my preference in voting for those who are informed and aware of contemporary trends in street grid thinking.

And, by extension, we take these trends very seriously at NA Confidential. Keep reading, and I'll explain why I support Carrie's candidacy even though we seem to disagree on this particular issue ... so far, at least.

Let's begin with the letter itself, reprinted here in full.

4-way stop on busy street bad idea

In response to Wednesday's article "New Albany to monitor road......" * and Ron Howard's suggestion to consider a 4-way stop at Fourth and Spring due to parked cars blocking the view at the intersection. As a downtown resident and business owner who travels these roads often, I think a 4-way stop on a major thoroughfare is a terrible idea, and one that will just shift the problem the residents of Spring Street are experiencing to neighboring streets, such as Market Street, where I live and work, as people try to avoid the congestion created by a 4-way stop.

A better solution to the problem of not being able to see around parked cars would be not allowing cars to park all the way to the street corner. In some locations downtown there is such a small buffer between the last parking spot on a block and the corner that it is nearly impossible to see oncoming traffic without literally being in the driving lane. Take the corner of Holy Trinity Way and Market Street for instance, and go see for yourself.

As a pedestrian and biker in downtown, I agree that something needs to be done about the speed of cars traveling on our streets, but shifting the problem off on other downtown residents doesn't seem the solution. On Market Street we already struggle with vehicles traveling at high rates of speed, including law enforcement that are not out on runs. Creating congestion with a 4-way stop will only make that problem worse for us. And quite frankly, as a motorist, I don't want a downtown filled with 4-way stops. If we start making motorists stop at every intersection, it won't be long before they decide to avoid our downtown altogether.

— Carrie Klaus, New Albany

In effect, Carrie is saying that while speed may be a problem on Spring Street, anything the city does to reduce it would have the effect of sending traffic to other streets, like hers, and this would be improper because that's what Spring Street is for -- to carry a high volume of high traffic speedily from one side of town to the other, come what may for those trying to develop safe and healthy neighborhoods along the way.

The easiest way to counter Carrie's argument is to become familiar with Jeff Speck and read his New Albany Indiana Downtown Street Network Proposal.

New Albany's Downtown Grid Modernization Project in 2017, which conceptually owes its existence to Speck's opening proposal, was not fully implemented. In fact, it was barely implemented at all, owing to the local Democratic Party's stubborn unwillingness to challenge rampaging car-centrism, but still the stated intent of the project was to spread local traffic among four two-way streets, rather bottleneck it on two.

Four thoroughfares are better than one -- IF they're designed to reduce speed. Unfortunately, the latter was ignored by Team Gahan.

Actually, the problems we've had since implementation in terms of persistent speed and recklessness on Spring probably can be attributed to there being too little congestion, not too much. The same applies to Market, and Elm, and even Main.

Traffic always is slower during peak commutes; the speeds (and danger) increase when there are fewer cars during the other 22 hours in a day, hence Speck's original intent of bicycle lanes on Market and Elm as well as Spring, and the current need to replace the feeble yellow-light pedestrian crossings with bolder and safer four-way stops.

Yes, we need at least two of them on Spring between 15th and 7th, and maybe a third between 7th and Bank. Pass-through drivers need to be using I-265, not Spring Street.

A very useful article to supplement Speck's thoughts can be found here. I'm including what seems to be a relevant concluding excerpt.

The Causes of Traffic and Congestion, by Andrew Price (Strong Towns)

 ... At the end of the day, we should not worry too much about congestion or traffic. Congestion is part of the solution, not the problem. Congestion is feedback that we have built a place people want to be. The response to congestion should be to allow that Mexican restaurant to open up 3 blocks away rather than 2 miles away. To create bus lines and bike lanes that give people alternative ways to get around. The incorrect response to congestion is to build faster and wider streets, because that just reinforces car dependency and all of the negative consequences that come with it.

To summarize:

• Development can add traffic. However, development that brings amenities and people closer together and reduces the need to travel so far can actually reduce traffic. With a mixture of uses, you can achieve a high population density with very little motor traffic.
• A highly-connected street network (either a street grid or organic) with many redundancies better distributes the load of traffic and is more resilient to disruptions.
• Designated thoroughfares and bypasses create an illusion of traffic because they funnel the traffic through a single point (and with this comes the fragility of a single point of failure that can bring down the system).
• Attempting to address congestion with solutions that make it easier to drive can make the problem worse by continuing to make the car the preferred way to get around.
• We should not worry too much about congestion, because it creates demand for other modes of transportation and for amenities to be closer.

In summary, New Albany's more densely populated districts -- generally, inside the beltway, and most of all downtown -- need to function as a city, not as a suburb. The conversion of Speck's recommendations into a two-way paving project cost us the chance to make more progress toward urbanizing the street grid in a shorter amount of time. We've no choice at present apart from applying Band-Aids (for instance, the four-way stops) until another opportunity for advancement comes around.

I use the word "progress" in the preceding purposefully. Speaking for myself, I have a strong desire to identify with progressive policies, but they must be comprehensive and inter-related. To speak of social justice needs without applying these precepts to the way people move around is to neglect a very large piece of the puzzle.

I'll be voting for Carrie Klaus when we make it down to the clerk's office in the coming days. I know she's strong on the more commonly discussed social justice issues, and although we haven't met, it's clear to me that she's perfectly capable of seeing that the safest possible street grid for all users is a vital component of the larger social justice picture.

I'll stop there. Let the discussion begin.

---

* the original newspaper article to which Carrie's letter referred:

New Albany to take road, speed counts on downtown grid, by Chris Morris (Tom May Sussudio)

NEW ALBANY — Several residents, including a city councilman, asked the New Albany Board of Public Works & Safety last week to do something to slow traffic along sections of Spring Street after a man was hit and killed at Spring and E. Ninth streets on Aug. 6.

Officials heard their pleas and steps will begin soon to get a better grasp of traffic and speed on the downtown grid.

City engineer Larry Summers told the board Tuesday that traffic volume and speed will start being monitored immediately on all the streets that were converted to two-way last year, which includes Spring, Elm, Market, Bank and Pearl with "intense focus" on Spring.

"We want to get a better understanding of the traffic counts and speed so we can get an appropriate plan in place," Summers said.

Radar enforcement, similar to that on McDonald Lane, is a possibility.

Ron Howard asked the board to also consider a four-way stop at Fourth and Spring streets. He said cars parked along Spring make it difficult to see oncoming traffic.

Aside from New Albany, "Designing greener streets starts with finding room for bicycles and trees."

The pain of missed opportunities.

Designing greener streets starts with finding room for bicycles and trees, by Anne Lusk (The Conversation)

City streets and sidewalks in the United States have been engineered for decades to keep vehicle occupants and pedestrians safe. If streets include trees at all, they might be planted in small sidewalk pits, where, if constrained and with little water, they live only three to 10 years on average. Until recently, U.S. streets have also lacked cycle tracks – paths exclusively for bicycles between the road and the sidewalk, protected from cars by some type of barrier.

Today there is growing support for bicycling in many U.S. cities for both commuting and recreation. Research is also showing that urban trees provide many benefits, from absorbing air pollutants to cooling neighborhoods. As an academic who has focused on the bicycle for 37 years, I am interested in helping planners integrate cycle tracks and trees into busy streets.

Street design in the United States has been guided for decades by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, whose guidelines for developing bicycle facilities long excluded cycle tracks. Now the National Association of City Transportation Officials, the Federal Highway Administration and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials have produced guidelines that support cycle tracks. But even these updated references do not specify how and where to plant trees in relation to cycle tracks and sidewalks.

In a study newly published in the journal Cities and spotlighted in a podcast from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, I worked with colleagues from the University of Sao Paulo to learn whether pedestrians and bicyclists on five cycle tracks in the Boston area liked having trees, where they preferred the trees to be placed and whether they thought the trees provided any benefits. We found that they liked having trees, preferably between the cycle track and the street. Such additions could greatly improve street environments for all users.

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

The Green Mouse has learned that in response to Midtown neighborhood resident concerns about speeding and recklessness in the aftermath of skateboarder Matt Brewer's death at the hands of a irresponsible driver, both Mayor Jeff Gahan and Board of Public Works president Warren Nash have commented privately and repeatedly that drivers using the Spring Street corridor cannot possibly be inconvenienced by further traffic calming measures.

I trust the Mouse's multiple sources on this matter. If mayor and mentor disagree, then perhaps they'd like to submit a correction.

Of course, they've both lied repeatedly in the past, and it isn't the first time these two execrable human beings slouch before you, exposed as charlatans.

Isn't it about time that Gahan and Nash went on record, publicly, with these "drivers as permanent privileged class" sentiments? Surely Adam Dickey would slobber servile veneration in response.

In reality, Jeffrey's and Warren's street grid "modernization" sham was a campaign-finance impelled paving project, and now their innate cowardice has turned deadly.

So come right out and say it, gentlemen.

Perhaps HWC Engineering already has quantified an acceptable level of pedestrian, bicyclist, skateboarder and handicapped user attrition before anyone need be concerned about the vital flow of money into the mayoral re-election campaign account.

Just remember that when I asked HWC's Jim Rice about the effectiveness of the street grid reversion, he replied that well, they'd sure kept the heavy trucks moving.

How many bodies are underneath those wheels, Jeffrey, Warren and James -- and how many more before you're able to muster a human response?

#FireGahan2019
#FlushTheClique

If you want to know how Deaf Gahan purposefully botched the Speck plan for walkable streets, read this article. Hint: HWC dunnit.

Elsewhere today: 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.

It's very, very simple.

Jeff Speck conducted a street grid study with a mind toward incorporating two-way streets within the context of a larger mandate to redesign downtown streets for the improvement of navigation by all users, not just drivers, and to make them friendlier for non-drivers -- cyclists, walkers, handicapped users, and so on, in a future tense.

Jeff Gahan chortled and handed this plan to HWC Engineering bearing a post-it note:

Apart from the directional shift to two-way traffic -- even Phipps might notice if we don't do at least that much -- do absolutely nothing to inconvenience a driver, or to improve the experience for non-drivers. This shit's for show only, and nothing more. After all, the Feds are paying for it, and we can spin the paving project if nothing else. 

The traffic engineers at HWC were happy to obey the mayor's orders. They got paid, another few thousand bucks passed into Gahan's re-election fund, and just as neighborhood activists were gearing up yet again to picket City Hall for ignoring its obligation to make streets safe, skateboarder Matt Brewer was killed by a driver where a dangerous curve at 10th and Spring feeds into an intersection at 9th, with vision chronically blocked by commercial vehicles that have been illegally parked on the street for the past 15 years without a single peep from ordinance enforcement.

Team Gahan subsequently has ducked, covered and emitted robotic, gurgling and bureaucratic non-answers.

NA Confidential: Brief question: has the accident report about Matt Brewer been released? I’m particularly interested in the role of those Williams Plumbing trucks forever parked illegally on the street, blocking the view. Thank you.

Chief Todd Bailey: All crash investigations handled by the Combined Accident Reconstruction Team are maintained by the Floyd County Prosecutor’s Office. I can tell you the case is still under investigation but if you’re looking for specific information you’ll need to inquire with the Prosecutor.

It's just another reason of too many that Nanny Barksdale got the Reisz-stag all wrong: It isn't the working conditions which are inhumane at City Hall. It's the ruling clique itself.

As if to highlight the gesture of thumbing his nose at critics, Gahan quickly appointed superannuated mafioso wannabe Warren Nash to the Human Rights Commission, and Nash just as rapidly engineered the hiring of his son the councilman to a job with the housing authority.

Jeffrey and the DemoDisnyDixiecrats looked out upon the carnage and found it good. That snoring you hear? It's the News and Tribune, eagerly defending the right of mayors to advertise.

Meanwhile, if you want to know exactly how Gahan botched the Speck plan for two-way streets, read this article. It's one of the best Strong Town pieces I've ever read on the topic:

"Instead of helping connect people to the places they need to go, our city has built expensive public facilities that are both life-threatening and insulting to folks who don’t drive. We have effectively removed much of the public from the public right-of-way. And that's not fair."

Fair, schmair. Deaf Gahan and baseball hall of famer Jim Rice don't give a rat's ass about fair. It's all about the money for them, as the rest of us push the beg button at the dysfunctional-by-design "crosswalks" and hope drivers don't mow us down.

A LOSing Proposition, by Sarah Kobos (Strong Towns)

In cities throughout America, traffic studies are conducted to determine the Level of Service (LOS) for cars. This scientific-sounding metric basically looks at the busiest 15 minutes of the busiest hour of the day, and determines how well auto traffic flows through a given intersection.

Traffic engineers use this data to justify road expansion projects. It’s a bit like showing up during that one holiday meal when you’re hosting every leaf on your family tree, and declaring that the dining room is cramped, so you should add a second story to your house.

Despite its limitations, LOS remains popular because it’s simple. When a street is clogged with traffic during peak use (i.e. supply equals demand), it earns an LOS grade of F. When there’s not another car between you and the horizon? Congratulations! You get an A!

By overemphasizing LOS, we justify expensive, overbuilt streets that are dangerously inhospitable to people—just so folks who use the least efficient form of transportation (single-occupancy cars) won’t be inconvenienced during peak travel times. In doing so, we ignore the many variables that influence the transportation system as a whole: land use and zoning, pedestrian comfort, bike safety, viable transit, trip generation, etc.

But what about the Level of Service for people who walk and bike? Enter the Multi-Modal Level of Service (MMLOS), brought to you by the Highway Capacity Manual. (Because nobody understands the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users like the dudes who design the highways.)

Because it's easy to measure, the Pedestrian Level of Service (PLOS) focuses on four main variables: existence of a sidewalk, separation of pedestrians from motorized vehicles, motorized vehicle volumes, and motorized vehicle speeds.

If you want insight into the mind of a traffic engineer, consider “space per pedestrian,” a key metric based on the width of the sidewalk and pedestrian volumes. I love this because it’s so ridiculous.

All that “space” is not a sign of success. Much of our public right-of-way is so hostile to cyclists and pedestrians that only the most desperate people—the folks with no other alternative—even attempt to walk or bike. If there’s a lot of space on a sidewalk, it’s usually because it’s a lousy or impractical place to walk; it's not comfortable or useful to people on foot. There are a lot of sidewalks like that in America ...

That ugly word again: Plan Commission to consider "luxury" car sales at HyperCars on 13th and Spring.

Better or worse than a neighborhood crematorium?

Oh, dear.

I was surprised to see this one on the Plan Commission agenda.

Public Meeting Item(s):

Docket B-36-18: HyperCars LLC requests a Special Exception to permit luxury auto sales in the C-1b, Local Business district at 1212 E. Spring Street.

It's funny what sort of precedents comes bubbling up from Google searches. This one's from Las Vegas, 18 years ago.

An informal group of citizens on the western reaches of Sahara Avenue is mobilizing to fight another battle against used-car lots in the neighborhood.

Twice the group has defeated proposals and zoning amendments for 10-acre used-car lots along Sahara that would have held hundreds of cars. Now they are fighting a smaller proposal for a seven-car used-car dealership at the corner of Sahara and Belcastro Street.

The would-be dealership, Total Eclipse, is currently a small window-tinting and auto-detailing shop.

More recently over in Jeffersonville, the city council declared a moratorium on gas stations, which are about as car-centric as it gets.

JEFFERSONVILLE, Ind. (WDRB) -- Jeffersonville leaders have put a city-wide hold on new gas stations.

“We don't want to be a city of gas stations,” Councilman Ed Zastawny said.

Council recently enacted a six-month moratorium on new gas station development permits.

“With all the development in Jeffersonville, we found that a bunch of gas stations wanted to come to the same corners," Zastawny said. "And we thought that's a problem."

This next one is from Warren, Michigan in 2015. The counties of Oakland and Macomb are part of Detroit metro, north of the city center -- and Detroit's the veritable Mecca of car-centrism.

Warren Mayor Fouts to veto approval of used car lots, by Norb Franz (Daily Tribune)

Reiterating his concern that Warren will be dubbed “used car lot city,” Mayor James Fouts said Monday he will veto the City Council’s unanimous approval of another used car sales lot and the expansion of a second one ...

... on Eight Mile at Albany Avenue, Majed Marogi purchased vacant parcels and buildings next to his existing Julian Auto Sales and proposed to expand the size of his sales lot by tearing down empty buildings and installing wrought iron fencing.

“It’s going to be such an improvement,” Mallet said.

“It’s exciting to see business come to that area of the city,” Councilwoman Kelly Colegio said.

The wrong type of business, according to Fouts.

“Even if this was going to be a stellar used car lot that everyone is proud of … it’s still a used car lot and sends the wrong message,” he said.

Along East Spring Street amid the acreage comprising the East Spring Street Neighborhood Association (ESNA), a used car lot has been located on the northeast corner of 15th for quite a while.

Just a few months ago, an auto repair business appeared on the southwest corner of 15th and Spring, next to the body shop that's been operating there for decades.

Now the owner of HyperCars, a newly minted auto detailing shop in the former ServPro building on the southwest corner of Spring and 13th, wants to sell "luxury" used cars.

This recurring word, "luxury." But like Mayor Fouts up in Warren said, "it's still a used car lot."

I looked all over New Albany's zoning code and found no reference to "luxury" anything. The C-1b zoning classification refers to a "local" business, and it references the stipulations of C-1a, which seems to be describing small neighborhood retail shops, not car sales, hence the special exception being sought.

I'm the first to admit that the owner of HyperCars has improved the appearance of the building, and you've got to hand it to him for keeping up with current events in New Albany, and grasping City Hall's fetish for "luxury" over all other modifiers, whether applicable to products and services or the human condition itself.

I find it annoying for other, more sadly comprehensive reasons.

When I finally was allowed to attend an ESNA meeting recently and the question of used car sales at HyperCars was raised, the association's Greg Roberts said there'd be none.

Yesterday I asked Greg for a clarification, and he offered this revision: it seems the neighborhood elders have been monitoring the situation, and they knew all along that HyperCars someday would seek to park no more than seven cars at a time on the lot for sale, but no one thought the business actually would pursue an exception this quickly, and learned of it only when the Plan Commission mailing arrived.

That's poor communication on several levels.

The larger irony of yet another used car lot on Spring Street in a residential neighborhood is that when internationally renowned expert Jeff Speck wrote a street grid plan for New Albany, it was significant precisely because it showed how we could begin transforming downtown into a walking, bicycling kind of place.

Then Mayor Jeff Gahan, whose fundamental car-centrism no longer is a topic for debate, blithely stripped Speck's plan of nearly all its usefulness for walking and biking, declared war on street trees, loudly announced victory, and voila -- traffic's barely slowed, the pedestrian crossing signals are a joke worthy of late-night television monologues, almost all of Speck's proposed bicycle infrastructure was deposited on the cutting room floor, and now there's to be an automobile-related business coming to every vacant commercial space on Spring Street.

Combine the purely intentional street grid regression with the Plan Commission's concurrent consideration this week of the peak car-centric Summit Springs Raised Middle Finger, Phase Two ...

Plan Commission to consider phase two of the Summit Springs Kelley Enrichment cluster muck development atrocity.

... and one has no choice except to confirm the wisdom of my high school baseball coach, who turned to us after a botched play and said, "He could fuck up a wet dream."

Yes, indeed. Jeff Gahan's very adept at that.

#FireGahan2019

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.

These useless crosswalk gadgets are Team Gahan's most wasteful expenditure ever -- at least BEFORE the prioritization of a luxury city hall.

If we disguise them as trees, perhaps David Barksdale will have the Tree Board commence another orgy of removal.

These useless "enhanced" (or "high visibility" -- but please, select your own code words for "this dog won't hunt") crosswalks are such an obvious and profound failure that even 3rd district councilman Greg Phipps grasps it, but because the error was cemented into place by the ruling clique to which Phipps is beholden, there cannot logically be a solution involving the councilman.

This would mean challenging Big Daddy G, and that's a good way to have the AdamBot kneecap your next campaign.

Maybe DNA can hang member advertising placards on them.

Crosswalk safety: Phipps goes on TeeVee; Summers gulps the Kool Aid. Jeff Speck had the street grid answers, but Jeff Gahan urinated on them. Unwalkable New Albany -- what a thrill!

 ... Focusing on the topic at hand, maybe Phipps is beginning to see that without Jeff Speck's principled approach to comprehensive street grid reform, two-way automotive friction alone cannot magically produce walkability -- and the majority of bicycle-friendly design components never made it past Gahan's ingrained cowardice.

Can you explain, Jeff Gillenwater?

"Greg Phipps and Larry Summers are both very aware that much more could have been done via this significant expenditure to protect against and start reversing auto-centric culture. It’s too bad both of them chose silence as a means of protecting their vaunted personal positions while a solid plan to do just that was being butchered by their boss. As lots of us have mentioned, two-way conversion as implemented is a bare bones step. Now we’ll have to spend years more and lots of additional money working toward eventually getting it right."

Is last year's two-way street grid build-out to blame for a business slowdown? "Six months of confusing traffic patterns during peak season really put a lot of people in the hole."

At Facebook, Gary Humphrey, owner of River City Winery, shared last evening's SweetFrog revelation that it was experiencing hard times and would be launching a Go Fund Me in order to stay afloat.

SweetFrog: "Please help save your only frozen treat option in New Albany."

Gary prefaced his "share" with this viewpoint about the relationship between infrastructure and small independent businesses downtown.

Here it is, very lightly edited. What do you think?

---

Downtown is needing your help! 

I know a lot of people are wondering what is going on in downtown with all these leaving or failing businesses. Well here's the skinny. I've had my pulse on downtown for two decades, with the last one as a business owner. So here's what happened ...

With years of slow sustainable growth we were able to slowly bring on new businesses while slowly increasing downtown's customer base. It was working.

Then something great happened. Downtown suddenly became the "IN" place to open a business and a flurry of new businesses came in all at once. That sounds great, but it's only great if a flurry of customers follow. That didn't happen as quickly but it was beginning to happen. By the spring of 2017 things were really starting to pick up.

Then, the dagger. Last spring a TV crew sat outside my business and wanted me to go on camera to talk about the changes and upcoming construction. What changes? What construction? I asked. I had no idea what was getting ready to have a huge affect on my business and certainly wasn't able to plan for it. The TV reporter notified me of the two-way conversion and road construction.

Great! I heard the rumors ... never heard the plan. I wanted two-way streets before and I want them now, and I love the two-way. Two-way streets are great for downtown, and I'm a big fan of them -- but here's the part that no one knew or had any input on. The conversion would put confusing cones, confusing lines, confusing signs, confusing lights all around us while all confusingly contradicting one other. 

We can survive this for a month, I thought ...

Then a month went by ... then two ... then three ... coming out of the slowest part of the year, winter, we now headed right into the slowest part of the decade and it was completely unforeseen and out of our control.

I was a cop in this town for 20 years and know these streets like the back of my hand but even I was confused. I'd look at the sign, look at the lines, look at the cones and I hadn't a clue what lane they wanted me to be in. It was confusing! 

I drove around town like I was in the bumper car ring at King's Island. There weren't many accidents but many people stayed away. They stayed away until October.

Six months after it started, the streets reopened to two-way traffic ... and I love it, but six months of confusing traffic patterns during peak season really put a lot of people in the hole. Right in a hole, heading back into winter. Many of them didn't make it and more probably won't unless that flurry of customers we needed then, happens now.

In New Albany, Jeff Gahan still is "cowering before the demands of drivers," but "more and more cities are deciding to wrest control of their streets back from the tyranny of the automobile."

Thanks, B.

Jeff Speck devised a plan for downtown street grid reform. It was emasculated by Deaf Gahan's anointed and indemnified cleaver-wielding assassins at HWC Engineering. Gahan declared victory and moved to the next opportunity to bundle campaign finance.

In New Albany and Florida, bicyclists and pedestrians remain at risk when planners refuse the change car-centric nature of the street grid.

Jeff Gahan's de-Specked two-way street reversion led HWC Engineering to tack on bike and pedestrian infrastructure without changing the car-centric nature of the state's transportation planning.

Actually, almost all the biking infrastructure suggested by Speck was removed amid gleeful cheering by the irresolute likes of CM Greg Phipps (has he ever actually been on a bicycle?), but the analogy holds.

The two-way street grid project has not been transformative because Gahan didn't allow it to be ...

There's plenty of cowering and cowardice in New Albany. Maybe -- just maybe -- in 2019 we can start the process of changing the retrograde default into a paradigm that looks forward.

#FireGahan2019

Cars Are Ruining Our Cities, by Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey (New York Times)

(Mr. Gillis is working on a book about climate change. Mr. Harvey is the chief executive of the research firm Energy Innovation.)

SAN FRANCISCO — We might be living through a new age of miracles. Last month, Los Angeles decided against adding lanes to a freeway, an unexpected move in a city that has mistakenly thought for years that more lanes mean fewer traffic jams.

Shortly before that, Germany’s highest court ruled that diesel cars could be banned from city centers to clean up the air. Mind you, Germany is the land where diesel technology was invented ...

 ... As we write these words, we can sense the bile rising in some drivers. Americans have such a sense of entitlement about cars that any attempt to limit them can provoke a fight, as New York has discovered.

Yet the truth is that people who drive into a crowded city are imposing costs on others. They include not just reduced mobility for everyone and degraded public space, but serious health costs ...

The bottom line?

The bottom line is that the decision to turn our public streets so completely over to the automobile, as sensible as it might have seemed decades ago, nearly wrecked the quality of life in our cities.

In New Albany and Florida, bicyclists and pedestrians remain at risk when planners refuse the change car-centric nature of the street grid.

Read this sentence.

Florida's complete streets law led officials to tack on bike and pedestrian infrastructure without changing the car-centric nature of the state's transportation planning.

Allow me to fix it.

Jeff Gahan's de-Specked two-way street reversion led HWC Engineering to tack on bike and pedestrian infrastructure without changing the car-centric nature of the state's transportation planning.

Actually, almost all the biking infrastructure suggested by Speck was removed amid gleeful cheering by the irresolute likes of CM Greg Phipps (has he ever actually been on a bicycle?), but the analogy holds.

The two-way street grid project has not been transformative because Gahan didn't allow it to be. Speck saw the larger picture, but Gahan made adulterated sausage from it, rendering potential boons to walkability and bikeability into yet another omnibus paving project to appease speeding drivers, and now we're left with paltry returns from what might have been genuinely meaningful, and without the political will to make the necessary changes. Phipps himself already has surrendered -- not that this is unusual.

Yep.

Told you so. Now can we all join together and do the right thing?

#FireGahan2019

Florida’s Complete Streets Law Saved Thousands of Lives, and That Wasn’t Enough, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

A new study highlights the successes and shortcomings of the state's 1984 law that mandated consideration of walking and biking routes in transportation projects.

Florida epitomizes Sun Belt autosprawl and all its attendant dangers for people on foot. The state routinely ranks among the deadliest for walking.

But it could have been worse, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Florida adopted a statewide complete streets policy in 1984. The law stated that routes for biking and walking must be considered in road construction projects, with a few limited exceptions. It also charged the state with developing a statewide “integrated system of bicycle and pedestrian ways.”

The law, now 34 years old, did not transform car-centric transportation planning in Florida, and the state’s streets remain unacceptably dangerous for walking. But even this incremental step saved lives, according University of Georgia researcher Jamila Porter.

Porter and her team compared changes in Florida’s pedestrian fatality rate to national trends, as well as to other Sun Belt states without complete streets policies. They found that pedestrian deaths fell faster in Florida after the complete streets law was adopted than they would have if the state had tracked trends in peer states or the U.S. as a whole. The difference added up to between 3,500 and 4,000 lives saved over a 30-year period.

While Florida’s per capita pedestrian fatality rate fell 60 percent, from 6.36 fatalities per 100,000 people to 2.56, it remains among the most dangerous in the nation for walking. In 2015, only Delaware had a higher rate.

In interviews with 10 Florida DOT officials, each with at least 15 years of experience, Porter and her team also highlight how the law was not sufficient on its own to change the cars-first culture at the agency. While infrastructure for walking and biking was tacked on to projects, the state still focused on moving motor vehicles, not creating safe bike and pedestrian networks.

“We did well what we thought we knew to do well. We provided a 5-foot sidewalk… that was it. Or we provided a bit of bike lane,” said one staffer. But the state was still “consumed with the requirements — that we have adequate capacity for cars on roadways — and part of that was based on the ability of a car to get from location A to B in a timely manner and fast.”

Other state policies worked against the goals of the complete streets law. One staffer pointed out that Florida still places too much emphasis on metrics of motor vehicle throughput, like level of service, that undermine pedestrian safety. Some said that while the state’s policies were better than most, Florida should have made more progress.

Unfortunately, yes: "Driverless cars will be allowed to kill us, because capitalism is a death cult."

It's probably bad etiquette to reprint the whole post, and I do this very seldom, but just this once.

Speed kills, and the author leads off with an important point: while mainstream news coverage emphasized that the "driverless" Uber was traveling more slowly than the posted speed limit, it was moving plenty fast enough -- around 40 mph -- to kill a pedestrian 60% of the time.

Keep this number in mind.

Later this spring when the weather is warmer, I'll be taking the radar gun to NA's "improved" street grid, where two-way friction is being credited for slower speeds. My prediction: we'll see that average speeds still fall between 35 and 40 mph ... or, that very same hazardous 60-percentile.

Then we'll have further proof (as if it were needed) that it isn't Al Knable spinning the deceptive yarns.

---

Driverless Cars Will Be Allowed to Kill Us, Because Capitalism Is A Death Cult (Rebel Metropolis)

As you likely already know, last week a ‘driverless’ Uber test vehicle made by Volvo struck and killed 49 year old Elaine Herzberg while she was walking her bike across a road in Tempe, Arizona.

The vehicle was traveling at a rate of speed that guarantees a 60+% fatality rate when striking pedestrians. The Uber’s autonomous vehicle (AV) didn’t swerve, it didn’t brake. The so-called “safety” driver on board wasn’t even watching the road.

The myth that driverless cars will solve the bad driving habits of humans also died last week. What we’ve learned since then has confirmed some of our worst fears about AV’s.

Some of the blame rests solely on Uber. The anti-union, anti-worker company wasn’t using trained test drivers who should be working in pairs, they were using a solo ‘safety’ driver with a proven record of driving unsafely. Some have also speculated the Volvo’s built-in sensor-based autonomous braking system might have spared the woman’s life…had Uber not disabled it.

More alarming is the frequency that ‘safety’ drivers have had to override when an AV glitches, gets confused, and almost has a collision while moving at speed: on average about every 15 minutes.

But maybe most terrifying is that driverless cars will almost never swerve to avoid an impact, instead relying on braking alone.

@EricPaulDennis: "A super-weird aspect of this crash site is that it occurred at a place where a beautiful brick-paved diagonal walking path was provided across the median, along with a sign instructing people not to use it. This is beyond pedestrian-hostile design; it's damn-near entrapment."

Now I don’t know about you, but back in my driving days I almost never avoided a collision solely by braking, especially with the number of nocturnal whitetail deer over-populating the Mid West.

Armed with expensive sensory arrays alleged to see better than humans can, the Uber AV failed to see a woman crossing the street with a bike directly in front of it. A professional programmer I know familiar with Uber’s design said the current radar & lidar systems cannot see anything better at night than the human eye, and still rely on reflectivity of an object similar to our visual spectrum.

Even with an infrared FLIR system like what police and military use at night, a computer must process all its visual data in real time while moving at speed, calculate all the variables, then react accordingly – a feat now apparently nowhere close to being logistical reality.

And it’s not as though there was any demand from consumers for such a costly, dangerous street experiment in the first place.

So the question must be asked, why is the auto industry doing this?

Simple: pure lust for capital.

From the NYTimes: “Tech companies like Uber, Waymo and Lyft, as well as automakers like General Motors and Toyota, have spent billions developing self-driving cars in the belief that the market for them could one day be worth trillions of dollars.”

As many know who read this blog, the car industry has been bleeding young customers for over a decade. The kids want bikes, they want transit, they want social connection. They do not want to sit in congested freeways like their boomer parents before them.

So the auto industry has been desperately grasping at straws to reinvent the wheel to appeal to a market that simply doesn’t exist, and likely never will.

@RebelMetropolis: "This is the most horrifying vision of dystopian driverless cars I've read to date."

"Driverless cars are going to be one of the main pillars of the economy, it's very important that we do not allow one tragic accident to sway public opinion."

But capitalism has never been about responding to actual market demand. It has always been about extracting wealth from labor, creating monopolies, and lying to consumers about the things they supposedly cannot live without.

The irony, of course, is that the initial roll-out of the automobile a century ago was horrifically deadly. It’s been noted that so little attention is given to regular cases of homicide-by-automobile. To be sure, prior to Elaine Herzberg’s tragic death, 10 other pedestrians were killed by cars on the streets of Phoenix in just one week.

It’s good that we’re shocked by this now, we need to be. Because the scumbag industry lobbyists and the techie bros trying to convince us this new Titanic is unsinkable, they’re going to keep forcing driverless cars down our throats for the sake of profit.

Alex Roy wrote a lengthy class-concious indictment of Uber and driverless cars for TheDrive.com where he asked the most important question of all, “How many more people do self-driving cars have to kill before we have common sense regulation? A society that tolerates 40,000 deaths a year due to human driving will probably put up with a lot more collateral damage, as long as the dead are car-less, or better yet homeless. In this country, that’s practically the same thing.”

The capitalists are dumping billions into technology to do something totally unnecessary, that most can do with a vehicle that uses tech 200 years old. We need to stop these arrogant technocrats who’ve made clear their willingness to put profit over people.

See you in the streets.

Auto-centrism: "A reminder, one we don’t often consider, of the enormous temporal, financial and societal sacrifices we make to ensure that we live where we want and encounter only who we want, when we want."

I went for a walk last night around 7:00 p.m., using the south sidewalk on Spring, where traffic was moving fast.

At least the police were out, and ironically, my first of three near hits came as a driver traveling eastbound abruptly turned in front of me as I was crossing 10th.

He was being pulled over by a policeman because he was speeding, and he was still speeding when he made the decision not to pull over on Spring, but on the side street. He was paying attention to nothing else.

A few blocks later, a westbound driver turned left onto 4th from Spring. Once again I had entered the intersection, once again the driver elected to make a last-second turn, and once again, he wasn't looking at all.

I made the loop and was returning home via the north sidewalk on Spring. There was a crowd at the funeral home on 13th, and as I passed eastbound, drivers were parking their cars two abreast, protruding into the westbound traffic lane on Spring, evidently picking up attendees.

For the third time in thirty minutes, a driver came straight at me. He'd been westbound and made a last-second choice to turn into the funeral home lot, weaving past the illegally parked cars and their oblivious drivers, and not looking to see if anything else was in his path.

Jeff Gahan tells us how safe he's making downtown for all users. He's completely full of shit, and he'd realize this if ever he walked or tried to ride a bike.

The lighting downtown needs to be better, but the crux of the matter is that traffic must move more slowly. Two-way friction has made a dent, but that's all. Pretty much the entirety of the grid "modernization" plan (two-way streets) was implemented as an utter sham, one designed to give the appearance of change without really changing anything. Heaven forbid we inconvenience a driver.

That's not leadership. It's cowardice. We've missed a colossal opportunity, and yes, eventually it can be fixed.

First, #FireGahan2019.

WHAT HAVE WE SACRIFICED FOR TRANSPORTATION INDEPENDENCE?, by Arian Horbovetz (Strong Towns)

... The American obsession with the automobile has opened our world to the magnificence of personal transportation. In a country where our desire to express our free will overpowers virtually any alternative, it is fitting that our cars, our trucks, and yes, our coveted SUVs have taken center stage in the definition of who we are for nearly a century. The future of our hometowns, the safety of our families, the infrastructure we cannot maintain… all of these considerations have taken a “back seat” to our unwavering addiction… the 2500 pound vehicles of mobility we inhabit every day.

Let me take a step back for a moment. Believe it or not, this is not an indictment of the American automobile. We live in a country built on free choice, and who am I to question this American right to personal freedom?

Rather, my motive here is to ask everyone who’s gotten this far without clicking the “x” in the top corner of your screen to have a conversation with yourself. My hope is that anyone who is reading this stops, just for a moment, and really questions what we have given up for the proliferation of one of the most iconic symbol of American freedom. It’s not the American flag that sets us apart from the rest of the world… it’s the automobile. We drive more than any other country in the world despite growing data that shows that this fact likely has more detrimental long term consequences than positive ones. Here’s why we need to ask ourselves… was it worth it? ...

Today's must-read: "Distracted pedestrian laws aren’t really about the evidence. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture."

Far more likely, isn't it?

The Baffler nails it (link below).

All I can say is that I'll do my level best to make this topic an issue in the next round of municipal elections in 2019, irrespective of political parties and candidates.

New Albanians should be disgusted at the vast extent to which Jeff Gahan's clueless coterie squandered the rare opportunity to initiate genuine street grid cultural change in spite of spending millions on projects that while needed, like two-way streets, were cynically and timidly implemented to preserve the car-centric status quo rather than push the city forward.

It remains: speed kills. 

Our next mayor won't necessarily be compelled to tear it all down and start over, but recovering from Gahan's patented shortsightedness will take time and more money. I regret it, but there it is, and "next" will have to deal with it. Let's just make sure there is a "next."

#FireGahan2019

Who’s Afraid of the “Petextrian”? by Jordan Fraade (The Baffler)

The phantom of the “distracted pedestrian” haunts America

 ... “Distracted pedestrian” laws aren’t really about the evidence, though. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture as that culture is about to confront an enormous shift in the balance of civic and technological power—one that threatens to permanently upend the relationship between drivers and pedestrians.

SNIP

Despite the best efforts of forward-thinking urban planners, we can fully expect the profitable regime of car-sponsored ped-shaming to continue, egged on by news reports that smear dead pedestrians, government agencies that treat walking as a suspect activity, and car-company executives who accidentally let the mask slip when they’re tasked with programming their driverless cars to respond in crisis situations. This doesn’t mean that crossing the street while distracted on a smartphone is some sort of commendable civic statement, akin to how many New Yorkers view jaywalking. (After one too many close calls, I’ve managed to get in the habit of putting away my own phone when I cross the street—and, yes, I feel much safer for it.) But it does mean that anyone who cares about making cities safer and more equitable should be ready to take the side of pedestrians, even when emotional, error-prone humans are no longer the ones behind the wheel.

People who choose to take in the city with all five senses, rather than observe it behind tinted glass, should have the right to do so without harassment or fear.