Sherman Minton Bridge leadership litmus test as Mark Seabrook stays for the entire meeting, while Jeff Gahan lasts seven whole minutes.

Ever since it was announced that repairs to the Sherman Minton Bridge might require its complete closure, or barring this drastic remedy at least a prolonged period of reduced access and heightened economic pain for New Albany, we've been waiting for Team Gahan to step up to the plate and lead.

Silly us.

At Thursday evening's "Six Great Ways to Suffer" community meeting at the Calumet Club, which began at 5:30 p.m., I arrived at 5:37 p.m. to find Dear Leader standing outside the venue's exterior door. Like most reasonable people, I assumed he was on his way inside.

But no; actually he was leaving. 

As more than one onlooker confirmed, evidently one glance of 125 persons milling around the third floor ballroom caused Gahan's agoraphobia to kick in with a vengeance, and he turned tail and skedaddled, terrified of an unscripted setting in an enclosed space amid uncontrollable people.

Probably there exists medication for this condition, maybe even marijuana-laced Rice Krispies Treats with a Kool-Aid chaser, although first the patient must concede to being ill. If it's too much for his insurance policy deductible, maybe the Genius of the Floodplain could donate some of Mr. Lanz's money to the Democrats, who in turn would give it back to Gahan for a scholarship prescription.

Meanwhile Mark Seabrook, Republican candidate for mayor who is about to be pilloried by the Fanged Adamites for poor health, arrived early and stood through the entire presentation.

Like I always say: Socialists for Seabrook in 2019.

As for the content of the proceedings, I'll leave that to another post. It should suffice to say that there'll be epochal pain accompanied by scant recognition of the very real possibility of epic small business tribulations.

At the end of the day, it comes down to this: there are no good choices, because this manner of clusterfucking is what happens in a society that has concluded the very best way to have "mobility options" is to compel people to drive everywhere for everything, generally with cars occupied by the driver alone.

But what, Gahan worry?

After all, it's not like HE'S going to be the mayor when the hammer falls in 2021.

Posterity will affirm it: "Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?"

“When it came my turn to present, the solution I proposed for trips of less than a mile -- and more than half of urban trips are this short -- was shoes, available since 1600 BC.”
-- Samuel I. Schwartz

I've heard it said that drugs rewire the brain. This may or may not be true, but to me, driving definitely does. We become something different when we're behind the wheel, and for the most part the difference is unpleasant.

Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake? by Nathan Heller (The New Yorker)

For a century, we’ve loved our cars. They haven’t loved us back.

In America today, there are more cars than drivers. Yet our investment in these vehicles has yielded dubious returns. Since 1899, more than 3.6 million people have died in traffic accidents in the United States, and more than eighty million have been injured; pedestrian fatalities have risen in the past few years. The road has emerged as the setting for our most violent illustrations of systemic racism, combustion engines have helped create a climate crisis, and the quest for oil has led our soldiers into war.

Every technology has costs, but lately we’ve had reason to question even cars’ putative benefits. Free men and women on the open road have turned out to be such disastrous drivers that carmakers are developing computers to replace them. When the people of the future look back at our century of auto life, will they regard it as a useful stage of forward motion or as a wrong turn? Is it possible that, a hundred years from now, the age of gassing up and driving will be seen as just a cul-de-sac in transportation history, a trip we never should have taken?

And this.

It is odd, then, that we still look to the mid-century for evidence that cars proved their necessity and worth. Tell someone that you cannot drive, and they respond as if you had confessed an intimate eccentricity, like needing to be walked on with high heels before bed. “Re-e-eally! ” the reply goes. “How do you . . . ?”

The answer is planes, trains, buses, ferries, cabs, bikes, feet, and the occasional shared ride: almost anywhere in the world can be reached this way for less than the amortized cost of a car and its expenses.

And this.

The original sin of cars, the problem from which other problems emerged, was commercial pressure for private ownership—for the car to be a personal vehicle in your garage rather than a shared technology woven into the transportation network, as early electric cars would have been. The costs of this decision can be seen on every curb: the typical American vehicle spends ninety-five per cent of its life parked.

It appears this 95% of a car's time parked is spent by its owners bitching and moaning about the period of 5% movement.

Multi-modal planning to break the pattern of automobile dependency.

"Many current planning practices reinforce a cycle of increased automobile use, more automobile-oriented community redevelopment, and reduced mobility options. There are good reasons to break this pattern."

What I like about this piece is the way Litman refutes the familiar and shrill "either-or" war-on-cars paradigm by which car-centrists tend to frame the debate.

Multi-modal planning is nothing more than redressing an unsustainable and counter-productive imbalance. As Bluegill noted elsewhere yesterday:

Drivers are often very quick to point out proportionality when they think they pay for all the streets and roads. I like to hook them up with actual facts and then ask which half or so of street space they prefer so other users can have the other half.

It's important reading.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be walking downtown to get my hair cut.

Breaking the Cycle of Automobile Dependency, by Todd Litman (Planetizen)

... People sometimes misrepresent these issues, implying that the alternative to automobile dependency is a car-free transport system, but in most cases the best system is multi-modal, in which people use the most appropriate option for each trip: walking and bicycling for local errands, public transit on major travel corridors, and automobiles when they are truly most efficient overall, considering all impacts. Multi-modal planning ensures that everybody, including people who cannot, should not, or prefer not to drive receive their fair share of public investments in transport facilities and services ...

"The embedded violence of the automobile is something we take for granted."

It comes down to this: Speed and inattention kill, and our society routinely encourages both, whether by design, selfishness or neglect.

If you don't walk or bike in these settings, you simply can't ever understand it. Any city official or engineer who believes otherwise is delusional.

By extension, designing purported "solutions" in the absence of understanding constitutes a fool's errand.

The Everday Surrealism of Automobile Violence, by Bill Lindeke (Twin City Sidewalks)

... The only real conclusion here is that the embedded violence of the automobile is something we take for granted. Cars are deadly, and we’ve surrounded ourselves with them. At the flick of a foot, any drugged-up maniac can kill just anyone at any time, even someone minding his own business riding the city bus down Dale Street at seven miles per hour. Designing a society around the automobile is not only wasteful of our energy and collective resources, not only alienates us from each other and feeds our most misanthropic feelings, but it must result in senseless death. This is the only outcome when our cities practically require everyone to wield a weapon every day.

"In almost every way imaginable, the car, as it is deployed and used today, is insane."

It starts and ends with this. I've broken down the article into bullet points. If the author's thesis is valid, and I believe it largely is, then the corollary is that virtually every decision taken by city government begins with the acknowledgement of this fundamental, unshakable insanity.

Think about that.

The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life, by Edward Humes (City Lab)

Considering the constant fatalities, rampant pollution, and exorbitant costs of ownership, is the car’s dominance a little insane?

 ... But convenience, along with American history, culture, rituals, and man-machine affection, hide the true cost and nature of cars. And what is that nature? Simply this: In almost every way imaginable, the car, as it is deployed and used today, is insane.

• First and foremost, they are profligate wasters of money and fuel.
• While burning through all that fuel, cars and trucks spew toxins and particulate waste into the atmosphere that induce cancer, lung disease, and asthma. These emissions measurably decrease longevity—not by a matter of days, but years. 
• There are also the indirect environmental, health, and economic costs of extracting, transporting, and refining oil for vehicle fuels, and the immense national-security costs and risks of being dependent on oil imports for significant amounts of that fuel.
• Then there is the matter of climate. Transportation is a principal cause of the global climate crisis, exacerbated by a stubborn attachment to archaic, wasteful, and inefficient transportation modes and machines. 
• If the price of gasoline and the vehicles that burn it actually reflected the true costs and damage they inflict, the common car would go extinct. Gasoline would cost way more than $10 a gallon. That’s how big the secret subsidy is.
• And that’s not even counting cars’ most dramatic cost: They waste lives. They are one of America’s leading causes of avoidable injury and death, especially among the young.
• If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered. 
• The car is the star.

Finance, design, suburbs and "The Growth Ponzi Scheme."

It doesn't get much clearer than this. In fact, the Strong Towns website in large measure constitutes a shovel-ready campaign platform for any candidate interested in the future of a city like New Albany.

(That's okay, Dan. you're exempt. Permanent recess for you! Yay!)

The conclusion first:

"We need to end our investments in the suburban pattern of development, along with the multitude of direct and indirect subsidies that make it all possible. Further, we need to intentionally return to our traditional pattern of development, one based on creating neighborhoods of value, scaled to actual people. When we do this, we will inevitably rediscover our traditional values of prudence and thrift as well as the value of community and place."

Now, let's read.

THE GROWTH PONZI SCHEME (Strong Towns)

(This article originally appeared in Grist)

We often forget that the American pattern of suburban development is an experiment, one that has never been tried anywhere before. We assume it is the natural order because it is what we see all around us. But our own history — let alone a tour of other parts of the world — reveals a different reality. Across cultures, over thousands of years, people have traditionally built places scaled to the individual. It is only the last two generations that we have scaled places to the automobile.

How is our experiment working?

At Strong Towns, the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization I cofounded in 2009, we are most interested in understanding the intersection between local finance and land use. How does the design of our places impact their financial success or failure?

What we have found is that the underlying financing mechanisms of the suburban era — our post-World War II pattern of development — operates like a classic Ponzi scheme, with ever-increasing rates of growth necessary to sustain long-term liabilities.

Out with the down-low: "We don’t ban the car. We just prioritize it."

There is no conceivable gain from timidity. If the point is for the city to do something to assist core revitalization, rather than to make excuses and blame businesses, then the answer is obvious, and must be implemented with boldness.

Damn it, John Gonder: Help revitalization and small business prospects downtown with two-way streets!

In Beane We Trust: "Getting better every day" is for New Albany, too.

Following up: Progressive embarrassment, political cowardice and NA falling behind Jeffersonville.

As indicated somewhat openly by the recent helter-skelter proclamations of New Albany's presumed economic "development" director, City Hall's flailings are beginning to become embarrassing, and frankly injurious to the business at hand. Not knowing something is one thing, and can be cured through learning and instruction -- if the student cares to learn.

On the other hand, being a bad actor plainly spoils the broth.

Open Letter to a Car-Addicted City, by Brent Toderian (Planetizen)

... We’ve been transforming more and more of the road space we had into wider sidewalks, bus-only lanes, separated bike-lanes and other space for active, healthy, space-saving transport. And our commute times and vehicle km’s travelled, two of the biggest definitions of success for traffic engineers, have both been going down. In other words, it’s easier to get around the city, and a lot more people are making "trips." Just with fewer cars.

We don’t ban the car. We just prioritize it last. And that works better for everyone because moving more people takes less money and less space.

Drinking Progressively: Let's make it Tuesday evenings, beginning on November 25.

Basically, sharrows suck, so naturally New Albany plans more of them, so we can be "bike friendly" on the cheap.

Back in May, we sneered at another of John Rosenbarger's signature megalomanical muddles.

Rosenbarger giveth and He taketh away; thus shall autos be glorified at the Beechwood intersection with Charlestown Road.

 ... Useless bicycle lanes originally marked just a few years ago, which start and end nowhere, and that never were calibrated to guide a cyclist through an auto-centric intersection, now will be rendered even less useful than garden-variety useless ... with the compounded uselessness occurring just a few blocks from Monon Street, where there'll be a brand new park not connected in any way, shape or form to any non-automotive form of transport.

The intersection reboot is complete, and last night I noticed that it includes a new, dramatic step to resolve the bicycle friendliness issue mentioned above. Previously nonsensical and disconnected bicycle lanes now are routed through the automotive cluster muck by means of a sharrows symbol painted on the street.

Like a nightmare, it all came back to me: The city official in August, whom I quite like as a human being, but have never even once seen riding a bicycle, assuring me that New Albany's way forward to status as a red hot, bike friendly town was to have sharrows everywhere instead of more costly measures to actually achieve something.

At their very best, sharrows are a component, as the excerpt below makes clear.

However, in the absence of other (better) street use reform measures, the sharrows notion is little more than propagandistic palaver. Main Street's freshly minted conceptual catastrophe is a fine example. On a street already sufficiently wide to incorporate bicycle paths amid narrowed traffic lanes, we've opted instead for a median and wider traffic lanes, which will speed traffic rather than calm it (speed limit reductions notwithstanding), thus rendering sharrows both useless and potentially dangerous to bicycling novices who don't yet share a general contempt for sharrows as a municipal cop-out.

So what do we intend to do with our opportunity? Talk crap, paint symbols on the asphalt, then move on to build a dog park.

That's the New Albany way, and it's dead wrong -- at some point, probably literally.

Want to Increase Cycling? Sharrows Won’t Cut It, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

Shared-lane stencils for bikes, a.k.a. “sharrows,” definitely have their place in a balanced and healthy street system. But these friendly reminders to drivers to share the road have their limits as a tool to boost safety and create more inviting streets for biking.

A study by the LA County Bicycle Coalition [PDF] showed that sharrows do little or nothing to encourage new people to take up cycling, the way bike lanes and cycle tracks do.

That’s why communities should not rely on sharrows when more effective interventions are called for. Unfortunately, Sam Ollinger at Bike San Diego says her city has fallen into this trap:

In the last year, San Diegans have seen the increasing number of shared-lane markings, also called “sharrows.” Sharrows are appearing everywhere: Adams Avenue, Park Boulevard, Broadway, El Cajon Boulevard, Grand Avenue, Voltaire Street, Chatsworth Boulevard, Hotel Circle South, Pacific Highway and more. However, these sharrows are being used as a cheap band-aid instead of implementing real change on our roadways that would increase the number of people riding their bicycle for transportation or recreation.

For starters, San Diego’s Bicycle Master Plan recommends sharrows on roadways that are too narrow for bike lanes. Sharrows are recommended on roads that have a minimum width of 14 feet. Bike lanes are recommended on roads that have a minimum of 15-17 feet. El Cajon Boulevard, for example, has three travel lanes in each direction – it has more than enough room for a bike lane.

So how can the City of San Diego increase the percentage of people who ride a bicycle? A recent report [pdf] from the Mineta Transportation Institute, an institute that was established by Congress to research “multimodal surface transportation policy and management issues,” concluded that in order to attract a wide segment of the population, a bicycle network’s “most fundamental attribute should be low-stress connectivity, that is, providing routes between people’s origins and destinations that do not require cyclists to use links that exceed their tolerance for traffic stress, and that do not involve an undue level of detour.”

Thanks to motorized oligarchs like Kerry Stemler, "We still pursue an elusive automobile paradise like a swamp-lost Conquistador seeking the Fountain of Youth."

Thirty years of European travel memories are inextricably linked with public transportation.

In all those years, there has been precisely one rental car, used to explore the Irish countryside. To be sure, I've hailed taxis and been a passenger in private vehicles, but in terms of distance traveled, it's probably less than 5% riding in a car.

For the remainder of those many kilometers, it has been trains, streetcars, subways, buses, bicycles, boats and my own two feet. Any time I've had the good fortune to be in a European city of any size, having use of a car simply wasn't necessary. Berlin in September is the most recent example.

For decades, it has been my view that the single greatest marketing innovation in American history was convincing people that automobiles serve as sex organ enhancements and libido extenders. Sheer brilliance, I say.

I just wish I didn't have to drive everywhere. Sex is great, and it's even better on a tram; after all, you can use your hands for something other than gripping the steering wheel. Just don't tell this to Kerry Stemler. He might start humping his car.

Joe Dunman: Will Louisville ever be a city of transit vision? (Insider Louisville)

 ... The Bridges Project was probably inevitable, but it should have been completed decades ago. Instead, nearly 15 years into the 21st century, Louisville is pouring resources into wider highways as if it was still the 1960s ...

 ... After all, the best way to alleviate vehicle traffic is to get people out of vehicles. Other modes of transportation like light rail, subways and suburban commuter rail are efficient, time-tested ways to move people around without clogging the streets (unlike buses, which contribute to traffic). And they’re easier on individual pocketbooks, too. Owning a car is expensive. Taxes, insurance, gasoline, maintenance and all the other related costs of driving are a major financial burden. With the threat of bridge tolls looming over cross-river commuters, driving continues to lose its liberating appeal in this age of stagnant wages.

On the Stroad, Ferguson and the predictability of auto-oriented decline.

And what is a stroad?

A STROAD is a street/road hybrid and, besides being a very dangerous environment (yes, it is ridiculously dangerous to mix high speed highway geometric design with pedestrians, bikers and turning traffic), they are enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive.

Now, on to Ferguson, Missouri. As the author observes, he cannot comment on the racial aspect, but can offer a few ideas about how we Americans so enjoy designing for decline.

Stroad Nation, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

We can’t over-simplify the dynamics of all that has happened in Ferguson, but it’s obvious that our platform for building places is creating dynamics primed for social upheaval. The auto-oriented development pattern is a huge financial experiment with massive social, cultural and political ramifications. It is time to start building strong towns ...

... What I see with Ferguson is a suburb deep into the decline phase of the Suburban Ponzi Scheme. The housing styles suggest predominantly 1950’s and 1960’s development. We’re past the first cycle of new (low debt and low taxes), through the second cycle of stagnation (holding on with debt and slowly increasing taxes) and now into predictable decline. There isn’t the community wealth to fix all this stuff -- and there never was -- so it is all slowly falling apart.

Decline isn’t a result of poverty. The converse is actually true: poverty is the result of decline.

Rosenbarger giveth and He taketh away; thus shall autos be glorified at the Beechwood intersection with Charlestown Road.

Earlier this morning, we urged someone to tell John Rosenbarger that "Modern bike lanes call for modern reference guides."

Now, let's see how the Rasputin of Redevelopment applies such advice in daily practice. We begin with this newspaper story:

Busy New Albany intersection will soon be upgraded, by Chris Morris (The Moultrie Observer)

One of New Albany’s busiest intersections will soon receive a much needed upgrade, and most of the work will be paid for by the federal government.

The Indiana Department of Transportation met with New Albany city officials, engineering consultants, utility company representatives and contractors this week to coordinate implementation of a $214,792 Beechwood Avenue-Charlestown Road intersection improvement project. The work will include adding a left-hand turning lane on Charlestown Road to Beechwood and a new LED crosswalk and stop light.

Let's take a look at the aerial view.

If you look closely in the bottom left quadrant, you'll see bike lanes on both side of Charlestown Road between the Beechwood intersection. These lanes were triumphantly installed during the most recent England administration, after which the King drank a few bottles of wine. They extend roughly three blocks southwesterly, to terminate quite abruptly at Vincennes Street.

Now, look at this photo, top right-hand quadrant.

The bike lanes stopping short of the intersection on the southwest side do not begin anew until Lincoln Avenue on the northeast side; they run a few hundred yards further to the Silver Street intersection, where they end yet again.

Clearly, while there are two pedestrian crosswalks built into the current Beechwood intersection, there are no delineated bike lanes drawn through it.

Recalling that John Rosenbarger regularly has hailed this situation as proof of his urban design prowess, read on as Chris Morris gives us the LOL punch line.

The city did not have to buy right-of-way to expand the intersection. Rosenbarger said the bike lanes through the intersection will be absorbed for the road expansion.

But as the photos show, there are no bike lanes through the intersection. Three miniature/a> bike lanes have dangled unconnected along Charlestown Road since being installed. In short, more (utter) bullshit, from the city's premier bullshit artist, who'll now point to the elimination of the non-existent as further evidence of his indispensable ability, even as he variously blames politicians, newspaper reporters, drivers, bicyclists, walkers, stupid commoners and the abominable snowmen for the nonsense -- just not that guy in the mirror.

Let's recap.

Useless bicycle lanes originally marked just a few years ago, which start and end nowhere, and that never were calibrated to guide a cyclist through an auto-centric intersection, now will be rendered even less useful than garden-variety useless ... with the compounded uselessness occurring just a few blocks from Monon Street, where there'll be a brand new park not connected in any way, shape or form to any non-automotive form of transport.

And, lest we forget, we're paying Jeff Speck $75,000 to explain just how useless this uselessness really is. Is it any wonder that few of us believe Speck's advice will be heeded?

It makes you wonder: Which Democratic central committee grandee lobbied for the automotive intersection to be made even more auto-centric?

Answer: Probably all of them.

Yes, a couple different ways at least.

Midday Traffic Time Collapsed and Reorganized by Color: San Diego Study #3 from Cy Kuckenbaker on Vimeo.

The attachment of the modern American to his automobile, and the symbolic role played by his car, with its aggressive and lubric design, its useless power, its otiose gadgetry, its consumption of fuel, which is advertised as having almost supernatural power … this is where the study of American mythology should begin.

Meditation on the automobile, what it is used for, what it stands for — the automobile as weapon, as self-advertisement, as brothel, as a means of suicide, etc. — might lead us at once right into the heart of all contemporary American problems: race, war, the crisis of marriage, the flight from reality into myth and fanaticism, the growing brutality and irrationality of American mores. 

- - from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, written sometime between 1956 and 1967 by Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky.

"Mythbusting: Exposing Half-Truths That Support Automobile Dependency."

Suggesting that one think outside the boundaries of self-imposed boxes can have the "teaching pigs to dance" effect. Contemplating the future of the street grid in the context of traffic altered by tolled bridges across the Ohio is such a case.

The default (boxed) reaction seems to be: How could we possibly limit street lanes and slow traffic through New Albany when more people will want to use our arterial streets to pass through New Albany?

The better and unboxed question: What can we do to reduce traffic seeking to use our streets for pass-throughs, thuMythbusting: Exposing Half-Truths That Support Automobile Dependencys lessening volume? The answer: By imposing a cost (added time) to use our streets for reasons that don't benefit city residents, thus taking cars off the streets, and leaving streets available for use by those who live here and wish to come here.

How do we get from here to there? Start thinking, and grow some balls.

, by Todd Litman (Planetizen)

Some commentators recently expressed outraged that governments spend money on cycling improvements. Examples include Christopher Cadwell’s Drivers Get Rolled: Bicyclists Are Making Unreasonable Claims To The Road—And Winning, in the Weekly Standard, and Bob Poole’s A U.S. Bicycle Route System? in Surface Transportation Innovations #121. You could call them cycling critics, because they assume that bicyclists have inferior rights to use public roads and that cycling facility investments are wasteful and unfair, or call them automobile dependency advocates because their general message is that transportation planning should focus on facilitating automobile travel with little consideration for other modes ...

... Critics' arguments that pedestrians and cyclists receive an excessive share of roadway resources is more evidence that automobile travel makes people selfish. Automobile travel requires expensive facilities and large amounts of energy, imposes significant risks on other travelers, and causes significant air and noise pollution, yet motorists only see the costs they bear, ignoring the costs they impose on others.