Windmill dunk by Richard Florida: "America devotes far too many of its precious resources to parking."

Outside, it's New Albany, and in this map prepared a few years back by Jeff Gillenwater, parking areas in downtown are colored red. Granted, not all are public auto-friendly spaces, and perhaps pieces of the wasted acreage have since disappeared for infill, as with Breakwater.

The point remains: the red splotches should be vastly reduced -- and as far as Harvest Homecoming's parking needs for one week each year are concerned, just don't go there.

Would you rather generate income 51 weeks each year, or only one?

The article at CityLab is Parking Has Eaten American Cities, and Richard Florida's conclusion is the place to start.

America devotes far too many of its precious resources to parking. This is especially troubling given that driving is in decline. For example, the share of Seattle households with a car has fallen for the first time in at least 40 years, and the percentage of U.S. high school seniors with a driver’s license is at “a record low”—down from 85.3 percent in 1996 to 71.5 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, ride-sharing is up, and cities and real estate developers are striving to reduce parking requirements.

Joni Mitchell famously sang: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” It’s time we reclaim our cities from car storage and use the space for what we need more of, from housing and bike lanes to sidewalk cafes and parks.

As always, Florida offers statistical evidence.

Parking eats up an incredible amount of space and costs America’s cities an extraordinary amount of money. That’s the main takeaway of a new study that looks in detail at parking in five U.S. cities: New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming.

The study, by Eric Scharnhorst of the Research Institute for Housing America (which is affiliated with the Mortgage Bankers of America), uses data from satellite images, the U.S. Census, property tax assessment offices, city departments of transportation, parking authorities, and geospatial maps like Google Maps to generate inventories of parking for these five cities. (The inventories include on-street parking spaces, off-street surface parking lots, and off-street parking structures.)

Friday evening is going to be an interesting test case. There'll be two food and drink openings downtown, and maybe a third, and also Schmitt Furniture's birthday concert is at the amphitheater. Friday's always the busiest night of the week for eating out, anyway.

If all this comes down on Friday and the top two levels of the (free) parking garage are still mostly empty ...

Richard Florida: "Today, the car plays a central role in worsening America’s social, political, and economic divides."

"I’m not trying to blame the car for everything that’s wrong in America. But it is increasingly clear that in addition to wasted time and productivity, reduced quality of life, and even fatalities, the automobile takes another toll. It may be that cars are not only the chief destroyer of our communities, but are tearing at the nation’s political and social fabric."

Lots of sensible evidence here.

How Cars Divide America, by Richard Florida (CityLab)

Car dependence not only reduces our quality of life, it’s a crucial factor in America’s economic and political divisions.

Urbanists have long looked at cars as the scourge of great places. Jane Jacobs identified the automobile as the “chief destroyer of American communities.” Cars not only clog our roads and cost billions of dollars in time wasted commuting, they are a terrible killer. They caused more than 40,000 deaths in 2017, including of some 6,000 pedestrians and cyclists.

But in the United States, the car plays a fundamental role in structuring the economy, our daily lives, and the political and social differences that separate us.

Writing from prison in the 1930s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci dubbed our modern economic system Fordism—invoking the system of automotive production developed by Henry Ford. On the factory floor, Fordism described the powerful synthesis of scientific management and the moving assembly line, which revolutionized industrial production. Applied to the economy, the term captured Ford’s move to higher pay for his workers—the famous $5-a-day wage—that enabled them to buy the cars they produced. At a broader societal level, Fordism catalyzed the shift to a mass suburbanized society.

As Ford himself once put it: “We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city.” The car enabled the American suburban dream, prompting the relocation of the middle class, industry, and business from the city. In doing so, it helped shape the relatively short-lived era of post-World War II prosperity and the rise of a stable, blue-collar middle class, stoking economic demand for the products coming off the country’s assembly lines.

But today, the car plays a central role in worsening America’s social, political, and economic divides.

This can be seen in a simple statistical-correlation analysis by my colleague and frequent collaborator Charlotta Mellander ...

Summers announces plan to "Walk the Walk" by enhancing car-centrism via the Market Street medians. We advocate nuking them to outer space.

As the photos show, reducing the sidewalk width of the north side of Market between Pearl and State means having to cut even more trees -- and shortening the median (which by all rights should be dynamited, not "preserved," historically or otherwise) suggests dismantling and moving David Thrasher's signature fork in the road sculpture.

Better ask the Tree Board.

On second thought, the Tree Board probably is the prime mover of this latest deforestation plan.

Worst of all is testimony from city engineer Larry Summers, who apparently cannot fathom the sad irony of announcing a plan to remove trees, uproot art, maintain a car-centric median, add a turning lane for autos AND take ten feet off sidewalks while still insisting, drone-like, it will "create a place for people to gather and make the street more functional."

If Summers is genuinely interested in this outcome, and he's not, he'd be advocating for reducing lanes to one each direction, ditching the median and extending sidewalks (at the very least).

However, in defense of the city's engineer, by his own testimony he's already working 80 hours a week (his words at last Monday's city council meeting, not mine), as well as fending off the usual territorial pissing challenges from councilman David Barksdale on behalf of redevelopment.

Time and again, Mayor Jeff Gahan and his minions have proven that of all possible outcomes in a situation like this, the one that benefits drivers and their cars will be the one chosen and glorified in Orwellian Newspeak as "walkability."

If aesthetic atrocities are inevitable ... can we #FireGahan2019 ?

Block of Market Street in New Albany to get facelift, by Chris Morris (Plain Tom May Content Dealer)

NEW ALBANY — A section of Market Street, between Pearl and State streets, will soon receive a facelift. But who oversees the project is still up for debate.

Larry Summers, engineer for the city of New Albany, told the Redevelopment Commission about the proposal Tuesday, which will include several aesthetic changes including new lighting, widening the median in certain spots but shortening it near State Street to add a turning lane. He said the sidewalks on the north side in front of businesses will be shortened to 10 feet and benches will be added. The project is being paid for by a grant from the Horseshoe Foundation of Floyd County, although Summers did not have the final cost. He said the hope is to have the majority of the work completed by Harvest Homecoming in October for safety reasons.

Summers said the changes will create a place for people to gather and make the street more functional.

"It will be very unique; it will be its own place," Summers said.

Summers also said the improvements would go through the Board of Public Works and Safety since that board meets weekly, instead of monthly, and must approve all projects that fall into the right of way. However, that did not sit well with all redevelopment members.

"This is a redevelopment project, not a board of works project," redevelopment member, and New Albany City Councilman, Dave Barksdale said.

The bids are supposed to be open prior to Tuesday's board of works meeting. The redevelopment commission members agreed to meet at 11 a.m. Tuesday to review those bids and said they want to have control of the project moving forward. Work may begin as early as this month. A pre-bid meeting was held May 7 and only one contractor attended, but Summers said it was not mandated.

Barksdale also said the two medians on Market will be different looking when the work is completed. He said he hopes money can be found in the future to improve the lighting and overall appearance of the median in the "lower" block.

Summers said there was not enough money to make changes to the other median, but added that would be a priority in the future to improve the landscape and lighting in the median, from State Street to Hauss Square.

"There is a lot of traffic there so we are always looking to improve that section," Summers said.

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.

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? ...

"The negative consequences of car dependency."

Idea credit: Bluegill.

The conclusion first:

Car-centric towns are isolating, discriminatory, expensive, harmful to small businesses, and bad for public health. In contrast, walkable, human-oriented communities tend to be the happiest and healthiest and the most financially productive types of places to build and retain.

Let's focus on building places that cater to the needs of humans, not the needs of cars.

Another outstanding entry from Strong Towns.

THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF CAR DEPENDENCY, by Andrew Price (Strong Towns)

The majority of American towns and cities are built around the automobile. From multi-lane highways to vast paved parking lots, our communities have been shaped around a single mode of transportation over the last seventy years. While this may feel like progress, it has also harmed ourselves and our towns in ways that will be felt for generations.

Today I'm going talk about some of the negative consequences of car dependency and how a more walk-friendly, human-scaled development pattern would make us all better off. Specifically, I'm going to talk about them from the perspective of a town or suburb that has gone all-in on the auto-oriented pattern of development, where car travel and storage is prioritized over any other mode of transportation, and where the entire community is designed around car use.

Some of these negative consequences are:

Social isolation
Discrimination
Expense
Decline of small businesses
Effect on public health

Strong Towns Week: A hat trick by Marohn (autocentrism's cost, invasive semi-trailers and insidious Wal-Mart).

I'm a member of Strong Towns, and suggest you take advantage of this week's "greatest hits" output ...

This week, we are focusing on exposing new people to the Strong Towns message. That’s why we’re posting some of our best content of all time and asking YOU to share it. We’ve set a big goal — doubling our weekly audience — and we need your help to do it.

Sharing our content is one small but vital step you can take to help build a world of a million people who care about our mission. If this article inspires you, please take a moment to share it with someone else.

... to familiarize yourself with the organization's mission:

"For the United States to be a prosperous country, it must have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods. Enduring prosperity for our communities cannot be artificially created from the outside but must be built from within, incrementally over time."

Here are three conceptually linked articles by the organization's founder.

1. "A simple comparison of traditional & auto-oriented development styles. Guess which is more financially productive."

THE COST OF AUTO ORIENTATION, by Charles Marohn

In the United States we've spent the last sixty years reconfiguring our public spaces to accommodate the automobile. The built-in assumption of this approach, especially when it comes to commercial property, is that the more cars driving by the better. In our haste to modernize, what we've overlooked is the lower return on investment we get from this approach, even under ideal conditions. Today we need the humility to acknowledge that our ancestors, who built in the traditional style, may have known what they were doing after all.

2. "No, semis are not a valid reason to build dangerously wide streets."

TRACTOR TRAILER TRADEOFF, by Charles Marohn

... During Big Box Stores Week, I received the proverbial semi-trailer comment. Chuck, I agree that we need to look at street design, but we can only change things so much because we need to accommodate semis.

So logical yet so wrong.

.. Efficiency is one of the core values of our economic system. We don’t care if we’re doing the right thing or not – or, more precisely, our economists assume we are – so long as we do it more and more efficiently. Hauling one big load of merchandise is far more efficient than hauling multiple, smaller loads. Thus whoever can configure their operation to take advantage of this efficiency should win, right?

3. "If cities did the math on these kind of developments, not another one would ever be built."

THE WALMART TROPHY, by Charles Marohn

Walmart builds cheap buildings in order to sell Americans cheap stuff. Joe Minicozzi has documented brilliantly how, the cheaper the store and the more land it wastes, the lower the taxes. The Walmart land development model has taken the concept of "buying in bulk" and applied it to the land in your city. Their goal -- lower every cost -- is directly at odds with the financial health of your community ...

... Walmart buildings are designed to last 15 to 20 years. Simply the city's commitment to maintain the necessary infrastructure extends generations beyond that, let alone the cost of policing and other needed services. If cities did the math on these kind of developments, not another one would ever be built.

"Pedestrians, who are supposed to have the right-of-way, are required to press a button at an intersection in order to get a walk signal, which should happen automatically."

And while we're on the topic of our spanking new beg buttons ...

ABOUT THOSE PESKY PEDESTRIAN CROSSING BUTTONS ..., by Rachel Quednau (Strong Towns)

If you've ever walked on a sidewalk, you've probably encountered the "beg button" at one point or another. That's the button you press in order to get a pedestrian walk signal to light up on the other side of the road. As Alissa Walker writes in a recent Gizmodo article: "Those little buttons on walk signals have been nicknamed "beg buttons"—because walkers are pretty much begging to be able to cross."

This is problematic for a number of reasons, but the biggest is the obvious prioritization of car movement over pedestrian movement. Do car drivers have to pull up to each intersection, lean out their window and push a button in order to get a green light? No, they just wait and the light appears. The Gizmodo article continues:

It's annoying for walkers: have you ever tried to walk a few blocks, stopping to hit the button at every single intersection? Or hit the button just a few seconds too late and had to wait a whole additional cycle? But it also illustrates the backwardness of our street design: pedestrians, who are supposed to have the right-of-way, are required to press a button at an intersection in order to get a walk signal, which should happen automatically.

We know that walkability creates value in a community. It invites people out onto the streets, interacting with one another, visiting local businesses and participating in the livelihood of a place. So why do our cities, time and again, in so many different ways, continue to limit the most basic form of human movement and make it more and more challenging to walk?

When humans outrank anchors 'n' autos: "It’s not about making all cities like Amsterdam. It’s about making them better versions of themselves.”

Well, at least the hue and cry over Spring Street bike lanes recently repainted  (they've actually been there since 2009) has lessened the customary terminal anguish over roundabouts.

Previously, we learned about ...

Leotards, brimstone and "How Amsterdam became the bicycle capital of the world."

"The prevalence of bicycle use in Amsterdam and the Netherlands more generally is a reason why I will never move back to the UK. It is only when you've experienced living in a city that is not dominated by the motorcar do you realise the immense impact it has on your quality of life. The UK now looks like a hellish, backwards, aggressive place full of people who have failed to realise that they've partly created the hell they're living in."

After all, since escaping a culture of car-centric dominance offers further benefits extending in all directions, not merely a bicycle lane or two alone, there's this.

Sharing Amsterdam’s story of transformation into a city for people (Daily Hive)

 ... The experience of living and working in Amsterdam was transformational, shifting her focus from one of environmental sustainability to urban livability. Securing a job as a tour guide to supplement her income, she would show historical photographs of the city’s car-choked streets to tourists, and their reactions were almost entirely uniform: “They would almost always say the exact same thing: ‘That looks an awful lot like my city,’” remembers Dinca.

Dinca and her Californian partner briefly moved back to North America for nine months in 2013, drawn by Vancouver’s reputation for world-class quality of life and progressive politics. But a frustrated stint into the bicycle advocacy scene – including the fledgling Streets for Everyone – would often end in the same reaction from local leaders: “This isn’t Amsterdam”. But, drawing on those archival photos she had collected over the years, Dinca reminded them that, as recently as the 1980s, neither was Amsterdam.

And so, rather than continue down that rather unproductive and unsatisfying path, Dinca decided it was time to return to her adopted home, and complete her Master’s in Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam, with an emphasis on exploring the (often undervalued) connection between transportation and land use planning.

When it came time to select her thesis project, Dinca recalled the old black-and-white photos that she would show to tourists, and asked herself a compelling question: “Why don’t cities learn from their peers’ historical mistakes and successes?”

She knew, for example, there was intense opposition and outrage at the removal of car parking at the time, while, decades later, almost all Amsterdammers would enthusiastically agree it was a positive step. So she set about better defining and quantifying these dramatic steps towards a city for people, and the average person’s reaction to them.

On the errant notion of bicycle licenses.

"I'll be working on the assumption that policy-making is a rational tool to create a better society, not a punishment for perceived irritants. This isn't always the case but it's a necessary premise: if you simply have a gut feeling that cyclists should be taught some sort of lesson and you're not interested in the evidence then there's no point even starting."

I used to take great joy in referring to these environs as the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness, but then I got ticketed for exceeding the syllable limit.

Yesterday during a discussion of sharrow symbols now adorning Vincennes Street -- admittedly a wretched, Rosenbargerian idea, and one revealing the ineptitude of officials unwilling to risk the installation of genuine bicycling infrastructure, either from timidity, stupidity or both -- it was suggested that bicyclists be licensed.

Let's quickly refute this car-centric twaddle. Perhaps the Aussie vantage point is best (just keep blaming the usual victims, drivers), but there'll be two others.

18 reasons why registering bicycles is a bad idea, by Michael O'Reilly (Executive Style)

Right, that's it. Enough already. I'm so tired of hearing the same contention being trotted out every time bicycles are mentioned.

I refer, of course, to the ongoing clamour that cyclists need to be registered.

Show me a news report to do with bicycles, and I'll show you someone on social media or a comments thread carrying on about bicycle registration as if it's the most urgent thing in road safety.

A bike-riding man killed in a "dooring" incident in Melbourne? "Cyclists should be registered." A cycling young woman crushed by a truck in Brisbane's CBD? "They should pay rego."

This week, news about a bill to legislate a safe minimum passing distance when cars overtake bikes drew comments such as "I'll give them space when they pay to be on the roads". Charming.

The problem with such misguided contentions is that they become a form of groupthink. If people hear such things repeatedly, it becomes acceptable to them.

It can also breed animosity - which can spill onto our roads, creating dangerous hostility and intolerance.

In truth, the angry voices are in the minority. Most Australians accept and even support cycling - after all, more bicycles are sold than cars every year. Even among people who don't ride for transport, a survey showed 60 per cent would like to do so – but many say they are too scared.

And Chicago:

Why Bicycle Licensing (Almost) Never Works, by Whet Moser (Chicago)

I’ve said it over and over again: if you really, truly want to improve cyclist compliance with the law, there are countries that do it well—especially the Netherlands—and they do it in part through a comprehensive educational system for cyclists and drivers alike that begins in elementary school. (Their form of driver’s education is also more comprehensive, and traffic fatalities have fallen faster there than in the United States in recent decades.) The Active Transportation Alliance’s Ron Burke gave Biasco some similar suggestions. You get what you put in. Contrary to the beliefs of most newspaper columnists, merely intoning the words “fixie” and “hipster” like a curse is just an exercise in filling copy quotas.

On the other hand, bike licenses have been tried throughout North America, and what you usually get is a bureaucratic facepalm.

Finally the United Kingdom (the lead quote comes from this article):

Why regulating cyclists is unnecessary and harmful, by Peter Walker (The Guardian)

Why don't cyclists have compulsory licencing, training and insurance? Because it would be utterly pointless

Cycling and cyclists are good for society; good for everyone, in fact. You might not like our funny, Lycra-wearing ways, but it's an undeniable truth. If 50% of a hypothetical city's car drivers abandoned their vehicles overnight for bikes it would slash pollution and congestion (for the remaining drivers, too), also bringing less wear to the roads and better health for the new cyclists. It would additionally, at a stroke, dramatically cut the numbers of people killed or badly hurt on the roads, saving millions of pounds and – more importantly – reducing the number of lives lost or devastated through grief or grave injury.

We have lots to discuss in New Albany, and bicycle licensing isn't one of those topics.

"Congratulations, Honolulu, for battling a surge in pedestrian deaths by punishing prospective victims."

The following words summarize the scandal-plagued Gahan administration's approach (more accurately, its absence) in using Jeff Speck's street study as a blueprint for "grid modernization," or, the project that dare not mention "two-way streets" publicly.

If it bikes, blame it.
If it walks, marginalize it.
If it drives, subsidize it.
-- Attributed to Dan Kostelec

In Honolulu's case, walkers have graduated from marginalization to blame, though not unexpectedly, research doesn't support the notion that pedestrian cellphones are the problem.

Rather, it's just another way of cosseting subsidized drivers.

The Problem With Honolulu's New Ban on Texting in Crosswalks, by Laura Bliss (CityLab)

Elderly pedestrians die at a higher rate in Honolulu than anywhere else. Their cellphones aren’t the issue.

 ... Pedestrians can obviously insert themselves into dangerous situations by ignoring signals and walking into traffic—and they share responsibility in plenty of crashes. Using a cell phone while crossing the street can be a hazard, sure. Inherently dangerous to others, however, it is not.

Driving is. So are many of the streets designed to support it. And using a phone in the driver’s seat dramatically increases the chance of a crash. As the economy recovers, more cars are on the road, driving more miles—which translates to that many more people texting and chatting while navigating their two-ton steel boxes. The recent rash of pedestrian fatalities is not all that surprising.

And:

The city’s overall rate of pedestrian deaths is on par with the national average; so is the state’s. Elderly folks also have a harder time recovering from traumatic injuries, and Hawaii’s 65-plus-set are considerably more active than their mainland counterparts. Older Honolulans die on the streets at a high rate not because they’re consumed by their cell phones, but, largely, because there are more of them navigating car-centric roads.

Now, if he'd ever think to use that anchor on speeding cars ... then we might be slowing somewhere.

But here are a few words that rhyme with anchor:

banker, canker, chancre, danker, flanker, hanker, manker, planker, rancor, rancour, ranker, sanker, shanker, spanker, tanker, wanker

Autocentrism: Isn't it time to free ourselves from the chokehold of the car?

The underlined passage might as well refer directly to the colossal missed opportunity of New Albany's Downtown Grid Modernization Project. What Jeff Gahan has chosen to do constitutes the barest of minimums to (a) achieve paving on someone else's dime, and (b) declare victory.

$3 million (or more) later, we'll have climbed painfully into the 1980s. Just imagine what might have been, because if you can imagine it, that's considerably more than the suburban auto-centric mayor can conjure.

The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer

We tell ourselves that we cherish efficiency. Yet we have created a transport system whose design principle is profligacy. Metal carriages (that increase in size every year), each carrying one or two people, travel in parallel to the same places. Lorries shifting identical goods in opposite directions pass each other on 2,000-mile journeys. Competing parcel companies ply the same routes, in largely empty vans. We could, perhaps, reduce our current vehicle movements by 90% with no loss of utility, and a major gain in our quality of life.

But to contest this peculiar form of insanity is, as I know to my cost, to be widely declared insane. Look at how advertising is dominated by car companies, and you begin to understand the drive to ensure that this counter-ergonomic system persists. Look at the lobbying power of the motor industry and its support in the media, and you see why successive plans to address pollution seemed designed to fail.

Suggest a neater system, and you will be shouted down by people insisting that they don’t want to live in a planned economy. But in this respect (and others) we do live in a planned economy. These days transport planners make a few concessions to cyclists, pedestrians and buses, but their overriding aim is still to maximise the flow of private vehicles. Rather than encouraging the more efficient use of existing infrastructure, they keep increasing the space into which inefficiency can expand ...

Parking terror! "Mexico City just made it easier for real estate developers to avoid building parking."

Only recently, we surveyed alleged radicalism that isn't radical at all.

Chatting on Fb about the street grid in NA: "The push to start reclaiming some of our streets and spaces for users and uses other than cars isn't a radical change."

But really, even car-choked Mexico City can figure it out before Louisville Metro? I've got your toll bridge, chump. Thanks to W for the link.

MEXICO CITY IS KILLING PARKING SPACES. PAY ATTENTION, AMERICA, by Aarian Marshall (Wired)

 ... You might be surprised to learn that Mexico City just made it easier for real estate developers to avoid building parking. Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera Espinosa this month announced a new policy that limits how many parking spaces builders can build. He hopes to spur development, which sounds counterintuitive. Without parking spaces, where will commuters rest their rides?

But it turns out sprawling parking lots and looming garages can actually create more traffic and make housing less affordable and city streets more difficult to navigate. By limiting the growth of its parking infrastructure, the largest city in North America thinks it can return some balance to its urban ecosystem. Listen up, United States: Your southerly neighbors might be on to something ...

Chatting on Fb about the street grid in NA: "The push to start reclaiming some of our streets and spaces for users and uses other than cars isn't a radical change."

My friend and colleague Jeff Gillenwater posted the following to New Albany Indiana, a Facebook group that functions somewhat like the discussion groups of old. Italics are the omniscient narrator (that's Roger), with Jeff's comments in normal font. He begins by explaining a photo we use often at NAC.

This overhead view of Downtown New Albany was created several years ago by Josh Poe, then an urban planning graduate student and New Albany resident. Everything in red is off-street automobile parking. With the exception of the parking garage on the corner of State and Market, it's all surface parking (and, of course, doesn't include all the on-street parking that's readily available.) Given how much more densely developed the city used to be, commercial buildings and/or houses were torn down in most cases to create those parking lots. The next time someone tries to tell you New Albany hasn't done enough to accommodate cars, feel free to share. The push to start reclaiming some of our streets and spaces for users and uses other than cars isn't a radical change. It's a response to and corrective for the past few decades of radical change that has already happened.

Also worth noting, here's what was demolished to create the parking lot that eventually became Bicentennial Park.

And the bank and mostly parking next door.

For good measure, Jeff included parking documentation:

Here is a PDF showing a few hundred parking spots in downtown New Albany; publicly owned and free after 5 pm and on weekends.

Downtown New Albany Public Parking Guide

It seemed to one reader that such comments about auto-centrism were designed to discourage auto use downtown, thus defeating the purpose of revitalization by implementing a "European model" to serve the needs of the few, not the many.

People very invested in defending automobile centric culture are, whether they realize it or not or mean to or not, are speaking from a position of significant privilege. Though New Albany, like a lot of other older U.S. cities, was initially designed for multimodal street usage, most of our infrastructure spending has been aimed squarely at automobiles at the expense of other forms of travel for the past few decades. That's actually a short time in our overall history, but has been true for just long enough now that people don't remember it being any other way. Thus, they tend to see calls for more equity between various forms of transportation and any talk of curtailing automobile dominance as demonizing cars and car drivers. What the posts actually do is point out that it's not always been that way. If we could decide to change it fifty or sixty years ago, we can decide to change it now. Realizing what we've given up, what we've lost and are still losing in the process of converting to automobile dominance, is a first step in deciding to pursue change.

As for the "European model" in a pejorative sense ...

New Albany was built by European immigrants on a European model. That's how it was designed to properly function (and functioned well, for 150 or more years. Over and over again for years people have provided links to research, case studies, and successful approaches that have pointed directly to greater overall public good via what you call a European model. That some folks simply choose to not acknowledge that doesn't make the people sharing that information a narrow interest group. If you can show how automobile centric models have proven to be better for us in terms of fiscal responsibility, public health, and environmental wellbeing, I'm all ears (or eyes, as relevant).

Another reader asked whether it is possible to have a vibrant urban area without "cheap" parking on abundant surface lots. Parking garages like the one we used in Chicago last week weren't mentioned.

One of the more interesting aspects of the "hard to park" scenario has to do with perception. People often walk farther from their parking spots and back to their cars at WalMart than they do downtown, but will still insist that WalMart has close-in parking and downtown doesn't. Try to suggest that the environment in which people are asked to walk has something to do with it, though, and ...

Jeff elaborated.

It really is a trip how quickly downtown parking perceptions changed. When my mom got married, she moved from the west end of New Albany... all the way to Sellersburg. LOL. When I was a kid, we still came to downtown New Albany all the time. In the 70s and early 80s, a lot of the older stores were still here. We never expected, even at that late date, being able to park directly in front of a place most of the time. I mean, you might get lucky and something would open up along the way, but we mostly just went straight to the parking garage (formerly located next to what's now Big Four Burgers) and assumed we'd have to walk a few blocks to the places we were going. Now, to hear some folks talk about it, parking on Bank Street to go to a place on Pearl is some sort of inordinate hardship. Oddly enough, a lot of those same people don't think twice about parking in the middle of the Meijer parking lot and walking quite a bit farther to the department they actually need, to the checkout counter, and then back to the car. It might have something to do with the environment in which the walk is occurring.

I mentioned out having just returned from Chicago, where people regularly pay outlandish prices to park downtown. For the record, we parked the car in a garage for four days ($122) and bought two three-day CTA transit passes for $20 each. One reader rightfully pointed to the absence of these transit options in New Albany.

At one point in their respective histories, the Southern Indiana/Louisville metro area rivaled Chicago in transit development. It's one of the things that gives me a chuckle when some folks refer to New Albany's automobile-centered heritage. It just ain't so.

Jeff posted these three explanatory links.

Passenger Rail The Way It Used To Be

Louisville’s Incredible Elevated Rapid Transit Trains

JEFFERSONVILLE/NEW ALBANY TRANSIT HISTORY

The point in sharing examples from other places and comparative histories isn't to say that those places are the same or should be. More than anything, the idea is that places can change themselves and what they emphasize or value and have many times over, New Albany included. Per the original Chicago reference about parking, people pay a lot to park in Chicago because (Rahm's privatization scheme aside for a moment) they think it's worth it to be there. That's a very scalable concept. Funny aside: I deal with Chicagoans pretty regularly now at work, including getting them parked sometimes. When I tell them all-day parking is $6, they laugh at me like I told them a really good joke.

In advocating two-way streets and other components of urban street grid reform, we've always referenced research and experience. We've pointed to successful reforms in other cities, and not just in Europe. I've come to expect a specific rebuttal, which constitutes a form of exceptionalism: "But New Albany is different. Biology and gravity might work the same here, but not street grids."

For a lot of Americans, merely pointing out that a concept came from elsewhere is the equivalent of saying it's obviously wrong. Beyond that, it's often a matter of insisting that WE have always been one way and THEY have always been another. Like "scalable", that applies to a lot more than parking and cars, too. In all seriousness, privilege and the language and power dynamics of privilege are always a big part of conversations around cars and other street users. You can swap out the "we" and " they" parts and a lot the arguments are so similar to other social issues that involve a majority addressing a minority that they're nearly interchangeable on a linguistic level.

Too much information? 

Unfortunately, no one ever said learning was easy. Ten years ago, I understood very little of this. Now I understand more, and if a slow learner like me can do it -- so can anyone. 

Leotards, brimstone and "How Amsterdam became the bicycle capital of the world."

Dan Coffey in Hell.

I'm reminded of former council person Larry Kochert's enduring obsession with biking shorts.

Leotards

Skin-tight leg wraps that threaten the fragile masculinity of a former Gang of Four council stalwart; also called “tights,” as in, “Let’s all get tights, and vote in my garage for a change.”

Well, back then I had the legs for it.

Turns out it's instructive even for the Dutch to be reminded that once upon a time, autocentrism almost won. The article is a must, and this comment highly instructive.

The prevalence of bicycle use in Amsterdam and the Netherlands more generally is a reason why I will never move back to the UK. It is only when you've experienced living in a city that is not dominated by the motorcar do you realise the immense impact it has on your quality of life. The UK now looks like a hellish, backwards, aggressive place full of people who have failed to realise that they've partly created the hell they're living in.

Couldn't have said it any better.

How Amsterdam became the bicycle capital of the world, by Renate van der Zee (The Guardian)

In the 1960s, Dutch cities were increasingly in thrall to motorists, with the car seen as the transport of the future. It took the intolerable toll of child traffic deaths – and fierce activism – to turn Amsterdam into the cycling nirvana of today

Anyone who has ever tried to make their way through the centre of Amsterdam in a car knows it: the city is owned by cyclists. They hurry in swarms through the streets, unbothered by traffic rules, taking precedence whenever they want, rendering motorists powerless by their sheer numbers.

Cyclists rule in Amsterdam and great pains have been taken to accommodate them: the city is equipped with an elaborate network of cycle-paths and lanes, so safe and comfortable that even toddlers and elderly people use bikes as the easiest mode of transport. It’s not only Amsterdam which boasts a network of cycle-paths, of course; you’ll find them in all Dutch cities.

The Dutch take this for granted; they even tend to believe these cycle-paths have existed since the beginning of time. But that is certainly not the case. There was a time, in the 1950s and 60s, when cyclists were under severe threat of being expelled from Dutch cities by the growing number of cars. Only thanks to fierce activism and a number of decisive events would Amsterdam succeed in becoming what it is, unquestionably, now: the bicycle capital of the world ...

The Arnhem-Nijmegen Cycle Superhighway, and fighting climate change by battling autocentrism.

This video makes me want to cry with joy (it's been far too long), then lash out with anger.

You go over there and see what's readily possible in the sense of co-existence.

You come back here and jostle for space with a semi rig on a cowardly Rosenbarger sharrow. Fuck autocentrism.

Biking the Arnhem-Nijmegen Cycle Superhighway from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

Unless you live under a rock and don't ride a bike, you know that the Dutch have some of the best bicycle infra design on this Earth of ours.

While attending the Velo-city 2017 conference in the Netherlands I got to ride (3 times!) the Arnhem-Nijmegen Cycle Superhighway. Imagine being able to bike 18km (about 11 miles) between two medium-sized cities in your country and not have to stop once for cars?

Then there's this.

"To fight climate change, cities also need to fight personal cars, and all the infrastructure they require."

To Fight Climate Change, Cities Need to Battle Cars, by Henry Grabar (Slate via CityLab)

It sounds obvious. But it requires changing the way we build.

Mayors can fund transit, build bus and bike lanes, end free parking, and reform building codes that require it. (Though they mostly don't.) But ultimately, the only way to combat American automobile dependency is to reform the way we build, and in particular, to help avoid low-density settlement patterns that make it impractical or impossible for Americans to get anywhere without a personal car.

Traffic congestion: "The real solution is convincing fewer people in town to own cars, and convincing people who do own cars to use them less to get around town."

Let's get congested -- not the Ohio Valley muck, but the words of Jeff Speck: “Were it not for traffic congestion, we would drive enough additional miles to make congestion."

A few links from the past ...

ON THE AVENUES EXTRA: "No, John Rosenbarger, congestion is our friend. Help us achieve it, or get out of the way."

"On a main street, that which looks like 'vehicle delay' to a traffic engineer looks like economic activity and success to a local merchant."

How very topical: "For the Record, the Feds Don’t Require Streets to Speed Car Traffic."

ON THE AVENUES: When the engineer uttered that scandalous word aloud, it was like Christmas in June.

 ... and something a bit more recent.

Minneapolis-St. Paul traffic isn't a problem. It's part of a solution, by Ward Rubrecht

Ask any driver in the Metro and they’ll tell you traffic’s been bad lately.

Big traffic jams on I-94, 35W, and other major arteries are becoming a matter of routine, and for years our highways have been ranked among the most congested in the country.

The culprit, according to most experts, is the increasing Twin Cities population. Minneapolis has grown by nearly 10 percent since 2010, and St. Paul by nearly 7 percent. More folks in the Cities means more cars on the highway. More cars on the highway means more traffic.

But according to conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment, the real culprit behind all the backed-up traffic is them damn liberals with their hippie-dip buses, trains, and bike lanes.

All that money we’ve been spending on safer, more efficient, and more environmentally ethical transportation solutions should’ve been spent, they say, laying down more blacktop. Widening the highways is the real antidote for the Metro’s congestion problem.

They’re wrong, of course. The reason is an economic principle called “induced demand.” Traffic engineers have known for decades that the only thing accomplished by widening highways is encouraging more people to own and drive cars.

As soon as congestion in one former bottleneck eases due to the the extra lanes, word spreads. That stretch of road gets a good reputation, and more folks get on it with their vehicles. More cars on the highway means more traffic jams, and the whole congestion cycle begins anew.

Meaning: The prescription of building out more lanes on more roads sounds like a good idea, but it’s actually what got us into this traffic jam in the first place.

The CAE report doesn’t just mis-identify the solution. It misdiagnoses the problem. Traffic congestion is annoying, sure — but it’s also a necessary tool to fix what ails Minnesota highways. Hear me out.

We already have too much infrastructure to keep it all in good repair. Adding more blacktop will do nothing more than create decades of increased maintenance costs — Minnesota winters are hell on highways — and make the traffic problem worse. (Picture those months-long lane closures on I-35 and I-94 for routine maintenance each summer.)

The real solution is convincing fewer people in town to own cars, and convincing people who do own cars to use them less to get around town. Viewed this way, traffic congestion is perfect for driving people off the road.

Think of it like the physical pain of a broken ankle. The purpose of the pain is to bring our attention to the ankle, and get us to lay the hell down, and stop stomping on the injury. We could pop a bunch of painkillers and keep walking around, but before long, the painkillers will wear off, and we need another dose.

We’re still moving around, but each new step is just grinding down the bones, further misshaping the ankle. Instead, we need crutches: Something to take the weight off an already stressed system, let it set itself right, and heal.

Traffic congestion is good. Traffic congestion pushes people — elected officials, engineers, and commuters themselves — towards real, lasting solutions. You won’t find any of those in that CAE report.

Embrace the pain, Twin Cities commuters. We should stop hobbling around, even just for a moment, and listen to what it’s trying to tell us.

Driver jailed for three years for ramming cyclist, though nowhere near here -- but that's okay, because bikes will win in the end ... nowhere near here.

Wait -- is this a glimmer amid the riverbank anchor's mud?

Here's a refreshing headline, one seen about as often in metro Louisville as unicorns in plaid.

Driver jailed for three years for ramming cyclist in north London, by Kevin Rawlinson (The Guardian)

Justine Henshaw-Bryan, 25, used ‘car as a weapon’ after Damien Doughty confronted her about using phone while driving

A motorist who used her car to chase a cyclist and ram him into a tree after an argument over her use of a mobile phone at the wheel has been jailed for three years.

Damien Doughty suffered serious injuries after the incident in north London in February last year. Justine Henshaw-Bryan, who is now pregnant and due to give birth in November, claimed her boyfriend had grabbed the wheel.

But the judge told her she had used the car “as a weapon” to injure the cyclist and could have killed him.

“Those who are unable to control their temper while driving and feel that cyclists are fair game must be dealt with severely,” Judge Gregory Perrins told her as he passed sentence on Wednesday.

He said she must have been aware of the risk her driving presented to him. “This was a calculated attempt to run him over and use your car as a weapon. It would have been obvious that to do so would have carried significant risk of injury.”

Similar instances of driver abuse in our vicinity rarely make it as far as a judge given that the non-enforcement culture habitually absolves drivers of responsibility.

But hey, don't get mad.

Get even.

The case for bicycles' inevitable triumph over cars, by Matt McFarland (CNN)

Bikes, long an underdog on streets, will rule the roads eventually.

That's the conclusion of Horace Dediu, a prominent analyst of disruptive technologies, who has spent the past three and a half years researching the future of transportation.

Transportation is arguably the hottest frontier in the tech world. Innovators in Silicon Valley and beyond are spending billions to build flying cars and self-driving trucks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks of digging costly 30-level tunnel networks for cars. Google cofounder Sergey Brin reportedly has a giant airship.
But as Dediu sees it, a familiar, unglamorous technology will own the future: the bicycle. And the big loser will be cars.

"Bikes have a tremendous disruptive advantage over cars. Bikes will eat cars," Dediu told CNNTech, referencing investor Marc Andreessen's seminal 2011 argument that software-driven businesses are dominating the world.

As "Berlin's Streetcars Go West," we've been going south.

Photo credit.

It's what we're missing in this desolate, auto-centric idiocracy. Except that once upon a time, we had it.

Enjoy driving to Derby, suckers.

Berlin's Streetcars Go West, by Feargus O'Sullivan (CityLab)

While East Berlin's streetcars soldiered on under communist rule, West Berlin tore up the tracks. Now, the city is correcting its mistake.

This spring, Berlin agreed to correct a 50-year-old mistake.

Back in 1967, in a city divided between the powers of the Cold War, West Berlin canceled its last streetcar services, focusing its transit network on trains, subways, and buses. Meanwhile, East Berlin’s streetcars soldiered on, resulting in a tram system that today is largely nonexistent in the city’s former western sector.

But 28 years after reunification, the city has realized its error. Between now and 2026, the German capital is set to greatly expand its streetcar network, with the western region receiving most (if not all) of the new connections. Starting in 2021, streetcars will roll back out along the western streets, with officials hopeful that they will streamline the local transit, and maybe even reduce crime in some areas.