Here's the first reference to the K&I Bridge in this blog's 14-year history, occurring on February 10, 2005.
Mayors united in support for K & I bicycle link
Last fall, during a chat with NA Confidential, former Councilman Richard Bliss took note of the K & I bicycling proposal.
The railroad isn’t hard to work with, we recall Bliss saying at the time. He added that so long as you’re willing to take all the responsibility, do all the work, pay for all of it and accept all the insurance liability, the railroad’s right with you on a project.
Readers can click here for links to another dozen articles about the K&I appearing in this space during the last seven years, like this one on February 9, 2016.
K & I: It's like a litmus test for prejudice ... and it's got hazmat, too.
It remains difficult to for me to fathom the disgruntlement in some quarters expressed at renewed calls for the K & I to be converted into a shared use path ...
... Huckabee-voting Louisville East End suburbanites bash the notion of potential expenditures to assist mobility and interconnected neighborhoods, preferring to reserve transportation subsidies for their own auto-centric sprawl.
New Albanians are terrified that ISIS-colored refugees are in Portland, just waiting for a footpath to launch attacks on Dewey Heights.
Portlanders exactly say the same, only in reverse.
All of it remains purely theoretical, and yet already social media experts are debating policing levels, surveillance against chicanery, and all the other details barely mentioned when the Big Four's conversion was lauded as a victory for modernity.
Then there's the entity that should be on the nationalization chopping block, Norfolk Southern.
Fast-forwarding to the present, it seems the local imagination drought still very much afflicts us. Today a Facebook discussion broke out about Green's WDRB piece (below), and I believe these viewpoints lowered my IQ by at least 30 points, leaving me with very little brain power to emphasize a point we've been making here for about a thousand years, or at least since President Lincoln mistakenly awarded right-of-ways to the railroads from terra firma down to the planet's core, and up in the sky all the way to Jupiter.
Nationalize Norfolk Southern's skanky asses.
Wait -- that's a valid consideration, but not what I meant to say, which is this:
Whether the K&I pedway happens or not, the decision and the process will have next to nothing to do with New Albany, in the sense that the city of Louisville will be the prime mover.
Kentucky owns the river, and Norfolk Southern the bridge. New Gahanians are merely bit players in all this, so if the mayor starts taking credit for any of it, vote for someone else.
ANYONE else. After all, #EightIsEnough
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer backs new effort for K&I Bridge pedestrian path, by Marcus Green (WDRB)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Mayor Greg Fischer and Louisville waterfront officials say the time is right to renew the push for pedestrian and cycling access on the K&I Bridge.
The Waterfront Development Corp. broached the issue briefly at its meeting this month after Fischer, a board member, asked whether the renovated Sherman Minton Bridge will include a path for cyclists. That project won’t.
But Fischer told WDRB News in an interview that it’s important to finish an Ohio River loop between Louisville and Southern Indiana, where a trail system in Clark and Floyd counties is being completed.
On the Louisville side, early work is underway to expand Waterfront Park to the west and toward Norfolk Southern Corp.’s railroad bridge between the Portland neighborhood and New Albany, Ind.
Despite previous pressure from elected officials and business leaders in Kentucky and Indiana, Norfolk Southern has resisted efforts to allow people on the span’s former car lanes. The company did not return a phone message seeking comment ...
