Apocalypse WOW: Pat McLaughlin thinks toll evaders will stop to shop in New Albany. Jeff Gahan doesn't return calls. Welcome to tolling preparedness, New Albany-style.

Imagine how a local newspaper might be functioning as tolling approaches. Imagine the hard questions a reporter might be asking of local officials. Imagine the dialogue that might be engendered.

Keep imagining, because we have no newspaper in New Albany.

Meanwhile, it still isn't clear what the city of New Albany's official position will be with respect to the issues discussed in Green's piece. We suspect servile silence, but only because it's what we've been conditioned to expect from Jeff Gahan, but note that if the council president's uninformed opinion is any indication, we might be better off with no opinion at all.

SUNDAY EDITION | Old overpasses to get more wear and tear as Kentuckiana drivers avoid bridge tolls, by Marcus Green (WDRB)

... “Talking to a lot of people that I know, they said they’re going to change their route of going to Indiana and coming around the Sherman Minton and ride all the way around to avoid paying a toll,” said Natalie Neil, who lives in the Shawnee/Chickasaw neighborhood in western Louisville.

Neil said she uses the Minton twice a day for trips to New Albany. More traffic on the bridge is troubling, she said, because there’s “a lot of increase already.”

And:

Traffic on those structures in Floyd County is expected to increase by as much as 118 percent in the coming decades. Indiana plans maintenance and repair work on four of the overpasses before 2018, according to the state.

The state also aims to paint and maintain the Sherman Minton Bridge within the next four years, said Will Wingfield, spokesman for the Indiana Department of Transportation. The Minton was closed for about five months in 2011 and 2012 to fix a crack in a load-bearing beam.

This means that very soon, we'll either lose the Sherman Minton for an extended period, and/or see it tolled. But here's the important part (emphasis mine).

Opponents of tolling interstates often cite traffic diversion as a side effect of tolls and rate hikes.

“Tolls are often easily evaded, usually by motorists who are using an alternative route that unfortunately was not built to handle the level and type of traffic experienced due to that toll evasion,” said Stephanie Kane, spokeswoman for the Alliance for Toll-Free Interstates.

After reviewing projections showing increased traffic on the Minton, she said ambulances and other first responders could face delays getting across the river on I-64.

With the Minton remaining toll-free, traffic passing through New Albany is expected to double in the decades to come. Mayor Jeff Gahan did not return a phone message seeking comment, but council president Patrick McLaughlin said “it’s something that’s been constantly on our radar.”

McLaughlin stopped short of agreeing that traffic will rise at the levels predicted by INDOT, but he said any increase could give the city an economic boost.

“When trying to judge human nature,” he said, “no one really knows how that’s going to pan out.”

Main Street Deforestation Project: If John Rosenbarger's lips are moving, chances are he's lying about traffic diversion. Here's why.

Each time a city official, or a mercenary contractor hired by the city, makes a statement to the effect that the Main Street Deforestation Project is not intended to divert traffic from Main Street -- is not really meant to send drivers scurrying elsewhere, cannot be described as constricting to passage in terms of lane width, and shouldn't be construed in any way as threatening in the least to 18-wheelers and smart cars alike, not to mention bicycles, which will be invited to "sharrow" the roadway with whatever comes traveling down it, and at whatever speeds we fail to enforce -- what we must do is take him entirely at his word.

That's because what the functionary actually is doing is making a very strong case that when the project is completed, Main Street should return immediately to what it once was, as a state road, prior to Rosenbargerization.

In other words, Main Street should be the officially designated through route bisecting downtown from east to west. It should be signposted as the One True Through Route. In particular, through trucks should be compelled to use it.

Accordingly, the city's remaining arterial neighborhood-killing streets (Spring, Elm, Market) should be immediately narrowed to 10-ft lane widths, equipped with all manor of traffic calming features, and be zealously enforced to prohibit heavy vehicle and pass-through usage.

Because: If Rosenbarger keeps saying that no traffic will be diverted from Main, then Main must logically be the place for non-diverted traffic, and just as logically, it follows that on other streets, from which traffic can and should be diverted, such a consistent, daily diversion should become the new normal.

And if Rosenbarger and the city's planners don't agree with this characterization of reality, we've caught them in a lie, haven't we?

Not that it would be a new experience.

---

What was that, Citizen A?

You're objecting to my proposal?

You say that the purpose of the Main Street Deforestation Project was to relieve the roadway of heavy usage and through traffic?

Ah, but that's not what Rosenbarger and Wes Christmas have been saying, have they? Rather, they've been exactly saying as Daniel Suddeath quotes them as saying in the News and Tribune article below.

Me?

I'm the compassionate sort. Lest they be exposed as flagrant and persistent liars, we've no choice except to believe them, right? I mean, that's the only fair course, isn't it? If the engineers and planners say that millions of dollars are being spent ONLY for dandied-up cosmetic purposes, and NOT because the fundamental nature of the street in question is to be inexorably altered, then the city is obliged to follow through in precisely the fashion they continually insist is true.

GROWING PAINS: New Albany says ends will justify the means of Main Street work

... The state paid New Albany to take over a stretch of Ind. 111 including the East Main Street span, and that money is the primary funding source for the project.

Rosenbarger said the goal is to upgrade the area, and the city’s intention is to keep the disruptions as minimal as possible until the work is completed.

As for concerns that traffic will be diverted to other city streets once the project is finished, Rosenbarger said the lanes will be 11-foot in width, which will narrow them slightly but not enough to cause a serious shift in routing.

“Our thinking is that it won’t deflect any traffic off of Main Street when it’s completed,” he said.

The goal is to slow down traffic on the street, which is different than diverting it, he continued.

By now, most New Albanians with a readable pulse grasp that the Main Street Improvement Project has been fraudulent from Day One.

It promises that Main Street residents can be given a grand boulevard, only without the characteristics that might actually render it into ... well, a grand boulevard.

That's because doing so would have required sufficiently narrow lane widths calculated to outrage OTR truckers, who apparently terrify city officials, and who should not be using a revitalizing downtown area for their businesses in the first place, and so these widths were fudged so that the project's self-interested planners could proudly point to them as proof of "no truck left behind," while at the same time nodding, nudging and winking to Main Street residents, safe in the knowledge that the project's other calming mechanisms would achieve the same effect of diverting the traffic without requiring trackable truth to be uttered aloud.

For Main Street residents to get what they have been promised, traffic must be diverted. If it is not, then John Rosenbarger and associates have lied to Main Street residents.

Note: Rosenbarger is a Main Street resident. No conflict of interest there.

But if this is the case, and Main Street residents get the neutered boulevard John has promised them, then the diverted traffic can only move to other downtown arterial streets, in which case residents of those streets have been lied to, seeing as Rosenbarger perpetually denies the very phenomenon of diversion.

Hence, the only way for Rosenbarger not to be exposed as a crass, incompetent, time-serving liar is for Main Street to be declared the One True Through Route, and for the traffic duly confined to Main Street to buck all previous human experience and be so very calmed by his state-financed, genius redesign that Main Street residents abruptly abandon their Nyquill in droves and sleep peacefully forever.

It might require some communication, which is the best reason to believe it cannot occur.

At the present time, the city is so uncommunicative that it makes North Korea's news agency look like a Kardashian feed on Twitter. Back to the newspaper:

Communication has “really been nonexistent” between property owners and the city when it comes to the project and how it has affected the Culbertson West, other establishments and residents, (Steve) Goodman continued.

Duh. The city's chosen "communicators" are Wes Christmas and John Rosenbarger. At least Christmas is earnest about it. On the other hand, as it pertains to telling the truth, Rosenbarger is so crooked that that he needs street department workers to help him screw his pants on every morning.

That Rosenbarger himself regards the public as too stupid to notice isn't surprising. That the Gahan administration believes it, too, is rather depressing. Perhaps an elected official might be persuaded to comment?