Ranting on John Rosenbarger's fundamental contradictions in the aftermath of an atrocious day in the neighborhood.

Yesterday I attended the FAN Fair workshop featuring John Rosenbarger (New Albany Public Works Projects) and his daughter Beth (Planner/GIS Specialist in Bloomington IN), entitled "It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood."

Spoiler alert: It was anything but.

Beth was delightful in recounting how she learned about walkability's importance by living in myriad other places, and arborist Greg Mills made an excellent, albeit brief, presentation about trees as part of the solution. Bravo to the organizers for their efforts.

But after listening to John Rosenbarger speak, I am now more comprehensively pessimistic than ever before as to this city's hope for any semblance of street grid change in my lifetime. 

It will take days to organize these thoughts into a coherent whole, but the gist was this:

We are prepared to spend endless years talking about the wonders of complete streets, admiring the way such matters unfold anywhere else except here, but because any such wonderment must be defined by half-ass, no-ass measures that require absolutely no political comprehension or open political support, because the citizenry is abysmally conservative, and consequently almost nothing can ever be allowed to happen, even though we grasp that it must, and whatever does leak through the cordon can happen only slowly, incrementally, over endless decades, reflecting planners like Rosenbarger's workplace experiences and rampant personal design prejudices. 

The predictable overall result of yesterday's presentation: Much delightful information that succeeds in other places not named "New Albany," there are few if any "workable solutions" for neighborhoods in such a pit as "New Albany," and absolutely no hope for change here, where we live, even as we know better.

Let's begin with one of many examples. Last week, I took advantage of the one-way comment feature at the East Main Street Top-Down "Improvement" Project web site to ask chief engineer Wes Christmas a question, paraphrased:

Won't the East Main Street project have the effect of diverting truck traffic to other streets, especially Spring?

He answered:

"The E Main Street improvement was not designed to cause diversion of any existing traffic. The improvement was designed to provide for improved and safer pedestrian mobility throughout the corridor, in part by reducing the speed of existing traffic, including trucks."

Ohkaaay. Yesterday, when I queried him, Rosenbarger quickly echoed this sentiment, although conceding that from a walkability standpoint, the street's revised lanes will still be far too wide, a political compromise undertaken precisely for the purpose of not deterring trucks from using the calmed street., but merely slowing them.

In other words, as Bluegill has repeatedly pointed out, the walkability "improvement" of Main Street begins with measures designed to negate any desired improvements, even if such improvements are more sorely needed virtually anywhere else in the city other than Main Street.

The point to me about truck diversion is this: What is likely to happen in real life?

If you're a truck driver considering the merits of the new, reshaped Main Street, which already was a two-way street anyway, and slower than one-way arterials (if Main Street residents spent a month living on Spring or Elm, they'd understand the difference), what are your driving calculations likely to be when deciding on a route from one end of town to the other?

Clearly the design compromise, whereby a median is added to Main (incidentally precluding the single best place in the city for bicycle lanes that actually matter) and lanes kept unnecessarily wide, merely improves the prospects for trucks to self-divert to other streets ... especially the one-way streets ... where absolutely nothing has ever been done, in design or enforcement, to discourage the presence of trucks by slowing them down at all. Or, for that matter, cars.

Christmas said: We're trying to reduce the speed, not divert them ... but if they have another street to use without reduced-speed streets, what in hell's name do you think is going to happen?

And: Isn't that diversion, whether intended or not?

Rosenbarger spend quite a lot of his time yesterday mumbling about the unacceptable costs of congestion, which pretty much proves something I've been saying for a while about inbred political cowardice, and although I'll have more to write about this with time, what I think about this, I phrased in the form of a tweet to Jeff Speck yesterday afternoon:

@JeffSpeckAICP When your city planner outlines complete street options by parsing 50 shades of traffic congestion, you grasp political fear.

He retweeted it, and that makes me feel very good.

Conversely, while many of the complete street platitudes uttered yesterday make me feel good, the reality that there is no discernible will on anyone's part to implement them induces a very bad feeling. If you really believe the city will wither and die unless something is done, as Rosenbarger actually said aloud -- for heaven's sake, John (and your political bosses over uncounted generations) -- doesn't it mean you're ready to dispense with the idiotic charade and actually DO SOMETHING to change it?

On the Rosenbarger planning conundrum, and FAN Fair, here I come.

Let's take a moment to review.

In early December, as we considered the probable effects of the Main Street "improvement" project on similar streets nearby (read: what is judged right for Main likely will not be judged right for Market, Spring and Elm), I lobbed a pass toward the rim and Bluegill duly slammed it home.

(I've been asking) a slew of questions about city streets. Long experience has taught me the utter futility of expecting answers from anyone who actually matters, although there’s nothing to stop me from attending various meetings and poking a rhetorical stick through the bars, all the while questioning whether it’s me or them inside the cage.

Specifically, I asked:

If the city does not do for Elm, Spring and Market what it proposes to do on Main, how does the city explain to residents located on or near these other three streets why it is city policy to depress their property values owing to the greater good required of those transiting the city's streets to reach the other side?

As Groucho Marx never said, “Guess the secret word, and win an invitation to a Democratic Party fundraiser.” The word is “holistic,” and the best answer – the only answer – I’ve received so far comes from NAC’s own Jeff Gillenwater, as posted on Facebook, and since it undoubtedly is the correct reply, let’s take a look.

The City is well aware that what it's doing on Main will divert more auto traffic onto those other streets, Spring in particular.

That's why they're doing it first. That's why the oft expressed "need" for a traffic study does not include Main in its current form as a functioning part of the total grid. That's why the barely there, boilerplate "study" done to justify changes on Main contains no mention of connections to or projected impact on surrounding areas nor any other alternatives than the one they chose before doing the study.

From New Albany's earliest days, Main Street was and is supposed to be the highway, the through street, the primary connector of downtown to other places, but city planners don't want it to be that anymore.

Much like the sacrifice of Mount Tabor residential areas for poorly developed commercial strips on its fringes, the sacrifice of Spring and other nearby streets for Main has long been a part of the plan. And that's precisely why they don't/won't talk about it out loud. A part of any holistic answer, historically and currently, likely has to do with diverting auto traffic to Main, not away from it. That, however, doesn't fit the current gerrymandering scheme.

Ever since the two-way streets discussion first emerged some time ago, occasional chats with John Rosenbarger nearly always have featured a variation of this comment from him at some point in the conversation, accompanied by suitably uncomfortable body language: "Well, if we can't reconvert them to two-way streets, we can at least calm traffic on them."

Now, if I'm misreporting this in any way, John can correct me, but I've heard him say it more than once.

I've always judged his response to be the default ambiguity of an appointed official who has retained his position for decades by adapting, chameleon-like, to whatever political winds are blowing as administrations change. I've defended him and other planners for the thanklessness of their professional duties. These days, my thoughts are becoming somewhat less charitable. I'm beginning to catch the whiff of betrayal in the air.

Since we began peeling back the layers of the Main Street project, it has become ever more obvious that the city's planners have proceeded in precisely the way Jeff suggests in the passage quoted above, and did not begin doing so just yesterday. If so, then the ripples from Main Street, effectively dooming the arterials to an eternity of counter-productivity, have been known, observed, accepted, and part of the plan all along ... in a place where planning in the most general of terms possesses the same sought-after panache as unscooped dog turds festering on the sidewalk.

John is a city planner. John lives on Main Street. John's authored a plan that exalts walkability on his own street, and ignored it elsewhere. There may or may not be a connection, but the oft-repeated component we can summarily dismiss is that the work John does somehow is purely secular and in the realm of unavoidable engineering-wonk, and as such, entirely apolitical.

Bullshit. In fact, John does not work for an eternal, heavenly code of street width and pass-through. He works for Mayor Jeff Gahan, an elected official, and all these decisions whether those made are those finding a home in File 86, ultimately are political decisions. As such, they're up for consideration and reconsideration in the political arena. Let's not forget that.

According to the following report on  the forthcoming FAN Fair, John will be speaking about the desirability of alternate transportation, which presumably includes walking. Originally I was to be in Indianapolis on that day, but I've changed plans. I'll be at the FAN Fair, and with any luck, I'll be allowed to ask several of these questions, prime among them: Is walkability to be confined to Main Street, or do the rest of us in Outer Slumlordia get a chance, too?

FAN Fair: Walking, biking and busing not just an alternative in Southern Indiana; Inaugural event addresses region's sustainability, environmental issues, by Daniel Suddeath (N and T)

SOUTHERN INDIANA — It may be labeled as alternative travel, but biking or walking to destinations is just another mode of transit to many planners and transportation experts.

Not only does it increase social interaction while decreasing greenhouse emissions and dependence on fuel, but so-called alternate transportation is also cheaper and making a footprint even in Southern Indiana, according to local experts.

“I do think that we are living in a transition period where the tide is shifting toward developing and retrofitting communities to be more sustainable,” Beth Rosenbarger said.

She is a planner and GIS specialist for the Monroe County Planning Department in Bloomington, and also the daughter of John Rosenbarger, who is the director of Public Works Projects for New Albany.

The Rosenbargers will be among the guests speaking about topics such as energy independence and alternate transportation during the inaugural Floyd Action Network FAN Fair on Feb. 1 ...

(For more information, visit the website www.floydactionnetwork.org)