Bicycle Infrastructure Fail(s): "The primary problem is that traffic engineering ... still has influence on planning and urban design."

Which is why, when you remark to an engineer that your city won't ever get the streets right until it decides that one really must break eggs to make an omelette, and the engineer replies that "every day I break more eggs than Waffle House," it's perfectly clear just how big of a broom will be needed for the toxic clean-up.

Or maybe a scythe and a few pitchforks wouldn't hurt, either.

If we design cities for humans, with respect for the human experience, safety, logic and ease-of-use, you wouldn’t see stuff like a bike lane in the middle of a street, or sharrows, in any city.

Ding ding ding -- that magic word, sharrows, which is the invariable "do nothing and declare victory" tactic of the Rosenbarger sect.

To paraphrase Stonewall Jackson: "Fire 'em. Fire 'em all."

Bicycle Infrastructure Fail(s), by Mikael Colville-Andersen (Cities of the Future)

... Best Practice in bicycle infrastructure is basically a century old. Dedicated bike paths date from 1892 when an equestrian path was turned over to bikes on Esplanade in Copenhagen. In 1915, the first on-street, curb-separated cycle track was installed on Strandboulevarden. From there, protected bike infrastructure spread out around the world.

Over 100 years, the infrastructure has been tested by easily hundreds of millions of daily cyclists. Planners have tweaked and experimented, made mistakes and fixed them and ended up with a Best Practice that is simple, effective, safe and cost-efficient. Generations of planners and engineers have done an amazing job and just handed us everything we need on a silver platter. There are only four types of infrastructure in Danish Best Practice. One of the designs fits any street in the nation and any street in any city in the world. Copy-paste, baby.

Why, then, do we see crap like in the photo, above, showing up on city streets? Who, in their right mind, would ACTUALLY choose to put cyclists in the middle of a street with speeding cars on either side? Certainly not anyone with an understanding of the bicycle’s role in urban life as transport or a sincere desire to encourage cycling and keep people safe. As I suggested on Twitter, find the person who is responsible and fire them. A flippant remark – but still a serious one.

The primary problem is that traffic engineering, in certain countries, still has influence on planning and urban design. In America, where this infrastructure was put in, bicycles are placed in the same category as motorized vehicles. In countries that GET the bicycle’s role in cities, they are regarded as fast-moving pedestrians and we’ve been planning for them for a century.

Yo, Jeff Gahan -- meet Jeff Speck. Remember when Speck told you how to avoid bad street design? Oh, I see.

Jeff Speck provided New Albany with a detailed plan for reverting our streets to a sensible design, one capable of supporting and enhancing quality of life in neighborhoods, instituting multi-modal uses and contributing to indie business success.

Jeff Gahan handed it to an engineering firm that employs the wife of Gahan's economic dishevelment director. There'll be ample monetization of campaign finance, but thus far, there's no indication of substantive, transformative reform.

You'd expect such from a local Democrat?

For those keeping score, it's an example of copying the municipal governance designs that DON'T WORK, not the ones that do.

The Simplest Way to Avoid Bad Street Design: Copy the Ones That Work, by Jeff Speck (City Lab)

Models matter. Let’s design more streets like the streets we already love.

When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you’re a traffic engineer, it seems, everything looks like a highway.

If traffic engineers did not control the design of so many of our public spaces, this might not be a problem. But they do—and that’s especially true here in the U.S. Even when traffic engineers have the best intentions, too many simply lack the tools to make successful places. In the typical American city, asking a traffic engineer to design a walkable street is like asking a hammer to insert a screw.

Cutting to the chase. Have past practitioners of city planning in New Albany ever learned from their mistakes?

Have they ever been held accountable?

Let's ask John Rosenbarger and Scott Wood, shall we?

City planning is not just an art, but also a profession, and like in the professions of law or medicine, its practitioners have a responsibility to learn from past successes and failures.

Study of precedent makes it clear that boulevards create street life and enhance real estate value, while highways obliterate street life and sunder real estate value. It is not too late for Lowell to embrace a model that will transform this site from a place that is easy to get through to a place worth arriving at. Similarly, all of our cities, as they contemplate expensive reconstruction of obsolete roadways, have two models to choose from, one led by engineering, and another led by precedent: the study of places we love.

As we move ever closer to bridge tolls, Team Gahan remains AWOL.

New Albany's new slogan: "Truck Through City" ... Part 93: Bored of Works approves monster truck jamboree for any street where the bored don't already live.

I'm working on a new logo for the Bored of Works. More about that in a bit, though first, here's the gist.

Let's get our weekly trucking porn a-rollin' down those urban interstates.