Beginnings: Origin Park plans are revealed.

The build-out of Origin Park is beginning in earnest. Last Thursday the plans were revealed.

The presentation by Guillermo (Gil) Penalosa, who began his career designing and developing parks in Bogotá, Colombia, is especially impressive. Watch the video and beware of the CAVE people.

Is it just me, or is a certain locale missing? We're included, but we're not inclusive.

Please don't tell me that our grand old Irritability City isn't playing ball on this laudable project.

Learn more here.

$130 million master plan unveiled for 600-acre Ohio River Park, by Marty Finley (Louisville Business First)

A 600-acre park planned along the Ohio River in Southern Indiana has been named Origin Park.

A new park that would transform part of the Ohio Riverfront in Southern Indiana is slated to cost $130 million and feature a series of high-quality amenities for the Louisville region.

The River Heritage Conservancy on Thursday evening unveiled a detailed plan for Origin Park, a 600-acre project that is expected to be noticeably larger than Louisville's Cherokee Park once completed. The site is near the Falls of the Ohio, where the Ohio River, Silver Creek and the Ohio River Greenway intersect.

Design Justice seeks to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture as a tool of oppression and sees it as an opportunity to envision radically just spaces centered on the liberation of disinherited communities.

Greg Fischer stopped reading after the first paragraph and went back to pretending he actually matters.

Do better than Fischer. Read the entire essay, and think about it.

America’s Cities Were Designed to Oppress, by Bryan Lee Jr. (City Lab)

Architects and planners have an obligation to protect health, safety and welfare through the spaces we design. As the George Floyd protests reveal, we’ve failed.

This moment is heartbreaking. Again. It is emotionally exhausting. Again. It is enraging to watch yet another black body plead not to be executed in public. Again.

There is nothing more representative of the state of and abuse of power in America than the scene that transpired in Washington, D.C. on Monday night: After watching U.S. cities erupt for days with pain and grief in response the police murder of George Floyd, President Donald Trump emerged from his White House bunker to forcibly remove clergy and tear-gas Black Lives Matter protesters — all in order to pose with a Bible in front of D.C.’s St. John’s Church. The Episcopal diocese oversees the 1815 structure and has expressed outrage at the action. It’s important to understand his intentions, as the president did all of this to marshal the physical architectural symbolism of the church to buttress his claims of moral, political, and racial authority. It was an escalation on the highest level, from the highest office.

For nearly every injustice in the world, there is an architecture that has been planned and designed to perpetuate it. That’s a key principle of the Design Justice movement, upon which I base my practice. Design Justice seeks to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture as a tool of oppression and sees it as an opportunity to envision radically just spaces centered on the liberation of disinherited communities ...

A book to look for this summer: "Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America."

If anyone cocooned within the bunker-bound Team Gahan inner ruling circle would like to read this book, I'll buy it for them.

It limits my potential monetary exposure to what, three or four people? I'll even buy a copy for the hall of fame automobile supremacist Jim Rice of HWC Campaign Engineering.

But no matter.

New Albany's power brokers in municipal government don't read books, do they? Least of all the monetizer at the top.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, by Angie Schmitt (Kirkus)

A surprising study of anti-pedestrian urban planning in America.

Most readers will be unaware that pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed since the 1970s; in 2018 alone, 6,283 pedestrians were killed trying to cross the street. Former Streetsblog editor Schmitt takes us for an uncomfortable ride into the hard realities of why pedestrians are more unsafe now than they've been in decades.

In a book that will sit comfortably on the shelf next to Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, Schmitt provides an exhaustively researched study of the intersection of automobiles and pedestrians. The author uncovers a car-obsessed America whose civic planning is designed to discriminate against walkers while accommodating motorists. Unlike, for example, many European countries, the motorist has more rights than the pedestrian in the U.S.

Even worse, as Schmitt explains, thinly veiled racism and classism are at the heart of many of the traffic laws that essentially treat pedestrians as second-class citizens. Pedestrians hurt or killed by cars are often blamed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the problem, Schmitt shows convincingly, is often the flawed road systems themselves. And it’s not just the engineers who design these systems, but also the politicians who allow poor urban planning to go unchecked.

The narrative is a deft balance of anecdotal and informational content, emphasizing the real-life human tragedies caused by anti-pedestrian bias but also backing it up with statistical research. Most importantly, Schmitt debunks common assumptions that pedestrian deaths are either blameless random accidents or, more often, the result of laziness or inattentiveness on the part of the walker.

In reality, the culprit is a sometimes-lethal combination of badly designed streets, increasingly larger vehicles on the road, poorly estimated speed limits, and a lack of crosswalks, among other infrastructural failures.

Bravely exposes the human cost of public and political indifference toward pedestrian safety.

A potpourri of the cringeworthy: "Urban Dinosaurs: It's Time These 8 Things Went Extinct In Our Cities."

This sounds familiar.

A lot of suburban chain retailers have been wrangled by city regulations into moving their parking to the side or back of the store, but they've moved the "front" of the store to the back right along with the parking lot, surmising (probably correctly) that that's how most of their customers will be entering. The problem is it creates a dead street that's hostile to human activity. Like this gem of an example of malicious compliance, in which a transformer box and some landscaping send a clear message: "Okay, they told us we had to have a door facing the sidewalk. They didn't tell us we had to make one our customers would ever want to use!"

In other words, Jeff Gahan's $15 million Reisz Mahal, which won't have an entrance from Main Street.

Urban Dinosaurs: It's Time These 8 Things Went Extinct In Our Cities, by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

 ... I hit up the Strong Towns Community site—our dedicated platform for Strong Towns members to meet each other and ask questions, offer advice and spark discussion—to crowd-source some ideas for a list of design features that should go the way of the dinosaur, lest the next generation be forced to cringe 25 years from now at our hard-to-reverse bad choices. And our brilliant members obliged with some good ones.

Some of these pertain to the public realm—the streets, the sidewalks, things the government itself ought to permanently stop doing. Some of them are about the private realm: things we might consider prohibiting developers from ever doing on their own land, because it harms and degrades the public realm when they do.

Either way, as a Strong Towns advocate, I'd be happy if I never saw another one of these urban design mistakes again in my city. How about you?

Here's the list. To read the reasons why, click through to Strong Towns.

• Sloped parking.
• Snout houses.
• Ultra-wide residential streets.
• Four-lane death roads.
• Retail that turns its back on the street.
• "Pod" subdivisions.
• Reeeeeeeally long blocks.
• Huge curb radii.

ON THE AVENUES: On patience, grieving, puzzles and a necessary sabbatical.

How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
Thou know'st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
And wit depends on dilatory time.

-- Iago, in William Shakespeare's Othello

I seldom pay attention to inspirational platitudes, seeing as the vast majority are rubbish, but if there's any single one I can embrace, it's this: "Be patient and trust the process."

Recently when I confided this sentiment on social media, some readers interpreted “the process” as something tainted by the political, and an evil to which I was surrendering: Roger, the process is a nasty tyrannical burden emanating from the communist/fascist enemy, with “we the people” as pathetic victims, and so of course we must resist!

(Note the proper use of an exclamation mark.)

Phooey.

This is not my intent.

To me “the process” summarizes time-honored best practices as they pertain to who we are and what we do in our daily lives. It’s a Zen phenomenon, at least for me. Our lives are short, and they won’t get any longer by coming and going in a heated rush. Develop your process and trust it. Avoid sugar highs and shortcuts; rather, build for what lasts.

In turn, this leads to a second useful tactic: "Stop dumbing down; start smartening up."

Obviously plenty of people have become rich and famous by trading in low common denominators, and to such a pervasive extent that blithering idiocy 24-7-365 is the norm in L’America.

However, because intelligence has been rendered a battered and under-valued attribute, it is precisely the one I’m delighted to espouse, both as a perennial contrarian and from the common sense perspective that best practices and lasting values cannot be accrued from the short-term whims of pure escapist dipshittedness.

There is one more: "Don't just do something -- stand there."

Yes, it is undeniable that occasions regularly arise when fast, direct action is needed. However when short attention spans borne of spasmodic, kaleidoscopic knee-jerking become institutionalized, the steady progress of the long haul falls victim to ephemeral expedients, which usually aren’t necessary and too often are plainly harmful.

There’s a kicker to all this, of course. One must be in a position to have sufficient opportunities for self-improvement, which the hypocritical American robber baron capitalist system regularly denies significant portions of the populace. Without equality of opportunity, my musings are null and void, and I know it.

What’s more, even in the best possible scenario, the individual must possess the self-confidence to excel, which usually requires the steady reinforcement of patience and fortitude if the goal is to ensure lasting achievement.

Speaking only for myself, as a white male afforded every conceivable opportunity, self-confidence still can be sorely lacking. What I do possess of it was gained over a long period of time by incremental steps, always seeking to smarten up, generally refusing to dumb down, playing those contrarian percentages, carving out niches, developing a better work ethic, and embracing the art of the obtuse.

But hey -- whatever works for you. I’m just the village iconoclast. In fact, the missus says my best and worst qualities are exactly the same: patience, stubbornness and an enduring refusal to tolerate fools.

There is nowhere to hide when your wife is a social worker, and surely her analysis is correct.

---

All this being said, my 2020 is going to be about important decisions; not the overcooked folderol of the presidential election, but whether I’m willing to concede defeat here in Nawbany and admit I'm licked -- and no, this has nothing whatever to do with politics.

Contrary to legend, which of course I’ve written and cultivated myself, it actually is possible for me on widely scattered occasions to acknowledge mistakes, cut bait and shift supply lines ever so cautiously, although only after I've played every last card and exhausted all avenues of potential redress.

Here's the problem: What do you do when nothing can be done?

That's the question, and if I had an easy answer, I'd inform you and start pursuing it. I’m disappointed and frustrated, and it’s going to take a clear and orderly process to deal with these emotions.

Allow me to vigorously stress that anger or bitterness isn't any part of it, just an ongoing inability to compel the pieces of various puzzles to fit into place. I can see the pieces, and fathom the broad contours, but I can't get them together. Can these puzzles ever be completed to my satisfaction? That's another good question without a glib response.

If I’m to be completely honest, my mood during the past two weeks already has provided ample clues to the source of the friction, because my subconscious evidently decided unilaterally that year’s end in 2019 was the ideal time for me to indulge in some serious grieving on the general theme of endings -- not in the sense of deaths, illnesses, breakups or any other real-world crises, but the “just learn to deal with it” decommissioning of ideas, expectations, hopes and dreams resting inside my own damn head.

These modalities likely won't come to pass. They have proven obsolete or impossible, and as such must be contextualized, filed away and put to rest. If I'm to finish grieving, this is exactly what must happen. Verily, it will be tough to accept realities I've fought so long and hard to change, but largely failed to wrestle to the ground.

Perhaps I’m making progress with acceptance, because as 2020 dawns, there is considerable optimism.

---

In an unrelated note …

For a very long time I’ve been threatening to alter my terms of engagement and involvement with local affairs. Admittedly, these previous resolutions have been miserable failures. As with the fictional mobster Michael Corleone, just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

More accurately, I willfully pull myself back in, but not this time.

After 15 years, it’s time for a real sabbatical, at least six months to start and then with various options for renewal. True, I’ll never cease commenting entirely about the Chronicles of New Gahania, primarily because I’m far too opinionated to achieve total abstinence -- and besides, you’re entitled to my opinion.

However, taking into consideration the incredible diversity of the world beyond the city limits of this small burg, there are other ways to use creative time at my disposal than continue out-performing the News and Tribune on a pro bono basis.

Let’s be blunt. As currently constituted the newspaper isn’t going to improve, not ever. New Albany’s incumbent ruling class luminaries and prevailing social elites aren’t going to become more open and inclusive, either. The newspaper’s ownership would have to change, the politicians be voted out, and the self-anointed beautiful people compelled to ingest a few doses of long overdue humility.

It’s never completely hopeless, but the immediate future looks challenging, and as I’ve noted oft times before, a new generation must step forward and relegate the likes of me to smaller, supporting, character-driven roles.

In fact they are. As I write, they’re stepping up. Accordingly I’m eager to do what I can to help them, and hope yet to someday giddily toast their success in achieving what I could not.

In the meantime, for me 2020 will be dedicated to scraping barnacles from the hull in preparation for my next (and in all actuarial likelihood, final) quarter-century on Planet Earth. This means catching up on long-deferred projects, taming several paperwork jungles, and earning a few dollars more with my writing.

Accordingly, the NA Confidential blog is being scaled back. Writing for pay as I'm doing now takes time, and the blogging quota will fall to two posts per day, down from four in 2017. If a news item takes more than 20 minutes to write and format, it won't be posted. I'll be riffing off the rising generation of dissidents, and doing longer-form commentary less often. I no longer have 25 hours a week to devote to research.

I won’t be attending many meetings apart from the first city council soiree in January. I need to witness those 1st and 5th district council seats, with fresh new faces seated in them, in order to revive my waning interest in residing here.

Those of us working and living downtown have a year to prepare for the existential micro-crisis of a lifetime, namely Sherman Minton bridge repairs. Pardon the scatology, but we’ll have to get our shit together -- and I’m not convinced we’ll manage.

However as I move into the final reel, it is absolutely clear to me that those persons best placed to make it through the coming madness will be ones who exercise patience, trust their processes, reject dumbing down, embrace smartening up, and avoid doing something rash, all because they have the foresight to stand there and think about it before pushing any buttons.

Good luck to you all, and let me know if you need anything. I’ll happily consult for a beer or two, and this column isn’t going anywhere. You’re going to rock this. See you in July.

---

Recent columns:

December 26: ON THE AVENUES: Four more years? Heaven help us all, but there are five reasons to be optimistic.

December 21: ON THE AVENUES HOLIDAY SPECIAL: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2019 Remix).

December 19: ON THE AVENUES: These parents oppose their children's exposure to the PURE Initiative as part of the NA-FC Schools curriculum. Here's why.

December 12: ON THE AVENUES: He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day.

Council district survey results are in, and Bob Caesar remains abjectly clueless about street and road issues.

Who gets quoted the most? The one who comprehends the least. Welcome to governance, New Gahanian Style.

DESIGN DESIGN DESIGN, you blithering idiot.

He hasn't learned a single damn thing, has he?

New Albany City Council compiles list of top public priorities, by John Boyle (Hanson's Journal of Misplaced Priorities)

 ... With the growth of the population along with work being done on roads in different sections of the city, overall traffic has increased. Caesar pointed out two types of traffic — commuter and consumer.

Commuter traffic consists of drivers coming to and from work, while consumer traffic is due to people running assorted errands. The latter is affected by and, perhaps, affects the traffic situation the most, Caesar said.

Unlike commutes, trips out on the town can't always be planned out well.

"When you run around picking up different things, you don’t know how long it's going to take," Caesar said. "A lot of times, people don’t want to have to wait at stop lights, and sometimes you can kind of get yourself in a rush.”

In order to trim time off of their trips, Caesar said drivers will cut through residential neighborhoods that wouldn't otherwise see thru traffic, often doing so at dangerous speeds. Solving the situation will be tough, he said.

Speed limits have been lowered in many neighborhoods, but other things like increased police presence, signage, speed bumps and prominent lines marking stop signs could help.

"It’s a sticky wicket to really discourage people from taking all of these cut-throughs around town," Caesar said. "It’s something we need to convince people to not do. Most of the time, you’re not really cutting down time, even though you think you are.”

Abbey Road on the River illustrates the value of purposeful park design.

As usual, I had a good time volunteering to help populate the SoIn tourism bureau booth at Abbey Road on the River. I was there Thursday and Friday during the day.

A glance at the map reveals Jeffersonville's savvy approach to the design of Big Four Park. Streets on four sides are easily fenced to suit ticket control and alcohol sales; it also makes food trucks and vending easy. There are restrooms and utilities on the middle, and plenty of room elsewhere for port-a-lets.

Unfortunately in New Albany we have two festival sites (Riverfront Amphitheater and Bicentennial Park), neither of which have it all quite the way Big Four Park does.

The finest musical act I heard during my brief time on site was the genuine Liverpudlian Gavin Pring (George Harry's Son) performing as George Harrison, playing deep album cuts from the concert for Bangladesh with the assistance of a crack international band.

I enjoy the feel of this festival. It wasn't always evident to me, but this year the vibe came together. Roughly half the total attendees travel to AROTR from elsewhere each year, and it reminded me of the spirit at beer fests like Great Taste of the Midwest in Madison WI.

Routine traffic stops? "Let's stop using the terrible design of our cities as a random pretext and, instead, be proactive about fixing the design."

I'm having trouble finding the extract from this essay that best conveys the central point, so I've chosen two.

Routine Traffic Stops Should Not Be Used to Fight Violent Crime, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

“I’ll bet we can watch him drive for five minutes and pick out a traffic infraction.”

Those were the words of a Louisville police officer speaking to a resident about her son. The young man had been pulled over for an improper turn, which led to a lengthy episode in which he was ordered from his car, frisked, and then handcuffed while his (turned out to be mom’s) car was searched and, to a degree, dismantled.

There is a lot of outrage about this video. It’s a case study in psychology, and not a flattering one. But I’m not going to focus on that. Instead, I want to return to a topic I’ve written and spoken extensively about: the routine traffic stop.

Back in 2016, I wrote a column calling for an end to the routine traffic stop. My arguments were simple. First, routine traffic stops are very dangerous for police officers. Second, they have little to do with traffic safety. And, third, the pretext for most routine traffic stops—that someone has committed a traffic infraction—is arbitrary, disingenuous, and ripe for all the worst kinds of abuse.

As I wrote in a follow up piece, also from 2016:

Randomly enforcing traffic laws that are routinely ignored in other times and places (because they are not well-correlated to actual safety) as a pretext to initiate contact with high crime populations is unnecessarily dangerous for all involved. In addition to breeding resentment, I also strongly suspect it does not reduce crime, although it creates the illusion of fighting crime.

If we're worried about traffic safety, let's deal with that. If we're worried about catching bad guys, let's deal with that. Let's stop using the terrible design of our cities as a random pretext and, instead, be proactive about fixing the design.

There is a breakdown of the Louisville incident, then several conclusions.

And because I care about traffic safety, when the GPS coordinates associated with traffic infractions show a cluster of violations in the same spot, we need to get our engineers and urban designers out there to make some changes to the site. Our streets should be designed to be intuitively safe. If people are repeatedly doing unsafe things in a specific place, that indicates a design issue. The answer is to fix the design.

And because tens of thousands of people die in automobile collisions each year, and many more people—inside and outside of vehicles—are maimed and crippled through auto crashes, I want traffic enforcement taken seriously. I want it to focus on serious deviants: those operating a vehicle in ways that are threatening. And I want it done by traffic police, not by a violent crimes unit using traffic law as a pretext for a fishing expedition.

---

Democratic mayoral candidate David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing, and NA Confidential advocates just such a deep civic cleansing. 

After eight years on the job, Mayor Jeff Gahan's list of stunning "achievements" is long, indeed: tax increases, budgetary hide 'n' seek, self-deification, daily hypocrisy, public housing takeover, non-transparency, pay-to-play for no-bid contracts, bullying city residents and bullying city employees. Eight years is enough. It's time to drain Gahan's swamp, flush his ruling clique and take this city back from Gahan's Indy-based special interest donors. 

NA Confidential supports David White for Mayor in the Democratic Party primary, with voting now through May 7. 

#SlowTheCars: "We need to design our streets so that drivers feel unsafe driving at speeds that are unsafe."

Our urban streets will not be safe until we slow cars. We won't make a significant dent in slowing cars if our toolbox is a combination of signage, more enforcement and driver education. Those are all nice, but the primary hurdle we need to overcome is our propensity to over-engineer, to apply highway thinking to local streets.
-- Charles Marohn

An oldie (2015) but a goodie. Last week while walking to work down the south side of Spring Street at around 10:00 a.m., I paused to watch the digital display by Williams Plumbing, situated just after the horrendous curve at 10th Street. For almost five minutes the sign continuously read "too fast, slow down," or whatever the words.

Gahan botched the two-way reversion, and now, beginning next year with a different mayor and a new council, it will be time at last to find ways to repair the short-sighted damage. 

---

Slow the cars, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Yield in the crosswalk, sure. Outside of the crosswalk....well, good luck mate.

For those of you that drive, I’d like you to start taking note of something. I’d like you to mentally document the way that pedestrians act at crosswalks. When you approach a crosswalk and there is a pedestrian walking across the street, look at how they respond to your presence.

If they are like most people, they will do something to pick up their pace and clear the intersection more quickly. They’ll walk faster. They might even run. I’ve even seen people retreat back to the side of the road then wave me – the driver – through.

Now think of approaching that same intersection except, instead of a pedestrian crossing, there is someone in another car. What does that other driver do? Do they pick up their pace to clear the intersection for you? Do they retreat whence they came and wave you through? Of course not.

Why the difference?

The obvious answer would be the asymmetry of danger between the pedestrian and the automobile driver, the former being far more vulnerable. That might be the case in some instances, but you can observe pedestrians rushing across the street even when the car is fully stopped, the driver has made eye contact and there is no real risk.

I think a more pernicious reason for this behavior is that many – perhaps most – Americans today have accepted the notion that streets are for cars. Period. Anyone not in a car might be allowed in this space as a courtesy, but the paved street is – first and foremost – the dominion of cars.

Last week someone sent me this video on pedestrian safety from the Des Moines police department. While very well-intentioned, especially considering (insert your own crass SWAT team and/or militarization reference), I found the premise to be incredibly disturbing. First, they state that there is confusion over who has the right-of-way at “intersections and at crosswalks.” Okay, but then they add this (0:48):

The biggest problem drivers face is being able to understand all the different types of pedestrian signs.

Say what?

Now, to cut the police a little slack, their role in this crazy system is to maintain order. There is nothing more orderly than a bunch of signs and a plethora of laws telling us where each type is to be deployed and how everyone is legally required to act at said deployment. I’m not shocked that the Des Moines police department might view this as a regulatory problem.

Still….drivers are having trouble understanding the signs? So, if every driver clearly saw and understood the signs but pedestrians were still getting mowed down – or, more likely, people were simply choosing not to walk because they did not feel safe or comfortable doing so – that would be okay? It would be orderly, but that is clearly not the optimum outcome.

One of my twin hometowns – Baxter, the fully suburban one – took this thinking to the next illogical step in a recent project they completed. Along their expanded stroad are not only signs for a pedestrian crossing just in case one encounters that sub-variant species rarely found in suburbia, Homo Sapian Carless, but they actually each have a preceding sign telling you there is a sign coming up. Very orderly. Very dumb.

Just the Federal Highway Administration
defining a street as a highway.

This is all to be expected, however, for a centralized system like ours. While there are many local projects that don’t get state or federal funding – the small ones – the outside resources for the rest is what drives the mission and focus of all these local street departments. For instance, the bible for placing signage is a book known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The Federal Highway Administration version of the MUTCD – think of it as Patient Zero – defines a street as “see Highway” (no joke). It then defines a highway as:

Highway—a general term for denoting a public way for purposes of vehicular travel, including the entire area within the right-of-way.

Is it any wonder people don’t feel safe crossing a street outside of car? The mentality of our entire system – and subsequently everything we communicate to driver and pedestrian alike – is that the street is the sole dominion of the automobile. Everything and everyone else is an interloper to be tolerated, at best.

And if you think that is too harsh, consider this paradox: When we design for fast-moving traffic, we go to great lengths to remove obstacles from the clear zone; anything that won’t give like a tree or a wall. Anything we have to place in this clear zone we then design to be “breakaway” so that it gives way when a car collides with it. I’ve even seen state DOT’s demand that retailers remove sandwich board signs on the sidewalk, not because it was distracting but because the signs could damage a vehicle if the vehicle went off the stroad and hit them (note the sign was four feet from the actual building, which might also cause some damage if struck).

We go through all this trouble to make things safe for vehicles and their drivers, but then we allow – and sometimes even design for – pedestrians to be in this space. We put sidewalks right on the edge of roadways that we post at 45 mph, even knowing that most people will drive 55 mph. Regardless, a pedestrian struck at 45 mph is just as dead. Perhaps traffic engineers are not offended by this as pedestrians are technically “breakaway” as well.

So we tolerate pedestrians, essentially at their own risk. If we wanted to build streets to not just tolerate pedestrians but to actually accommodate people – who, by the way, are the main indicator species of a financially productive place – what would we do differently?

Last week someone sent me one of those articles that details the history of automobile/pedestrian interaction. This one was in Collector’s Weekly and, despite the unnecessarily provocative title, was a great read. The most amazing part – and the answer to making streets that are financially productive once more – is the different attitude towards pedestrians. From the article:

Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play. “Common law tended to pin responsibility on the person operating the heavier or more dangerous vehicle,” says [Peter] Norton, “so there was a bias in favor of the pedestrian.” Since people on foot ruled the road, collisions weren’t a major issue: Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages yielded right of way to pedestrians and slowed to a human pace. The fastest traffic went around 10 to 12 miles per hour, and few vehicles even had the capacity to reach higher speeds.

As the article went on, it detailed things such as “silent policeman” and “traffic turtles” that essentially thwarted the speed ambitions of drivers so as to keep the public realm safe for everyone. The expectations were different:

“If a kid is hit in a street in 2014, I think our first reaction would be to ask, ‘What parent is so neglectful that they let their child play in the street?,’” says Norton.

“In 1914, it was pretty much the opposite. It was more like, ‘What evil bastard would drive their speeding car where a kid might be playing?’ That tells us how much our outlook on the public street has changed—blaming the driver was really automatic then. It didn’t help if they said something like, ‘The kid darted out into the street!,’ because the answer would’ve been, ‘That’s what kids do. By choosing to operate this dangerous machine, it’s your job to watch out for others.’ It would be like if you drove a motorcycle in a hallway today and hit somebody—you couldn’t say, ‘Oh, well, they just jumped out in front of me,’ because the response would be that you shouldn’t operate a motorcycle in a hallway.”

Forgiving design principles that traffic engineers employ have replaced the “that’s what kids do” burden on the driver with a “that’s what drivers do” burden on all of society. If we want to make our cities prosperous again, we have to return that burden to the driver. Not just at intersections. Not just where there are properly specified signs. It is their burden, their responsibility, everywhere, all the time. Period.

Now here’s the catch: we need to design our streets to reflect that reality. We need to design our streets so that drivers feel unsafe driving at speeds that are unsafe. That’s an entirely different America than the one we live in now, but one that’s actually less expensive to build and more financially successful once completed.

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: The curious case of the speeding ticket, the honest cop, his fuming chief and the city's abject failure to calm downtown traffic.

The Green Mouse leaned back and drank deeply from his gunmetal flask, the one with the engraved inscription by Gilby Clarke, former guitarist for Guns 'n' Roses.

"You know, Rog, maybe this one's so bizarre even by New Albanian standards that you tell the story straight, with the minimum of embellishment."

Well, I'll give it the good ol' college try.

As with so many modern morality tales, it begins on Facebook. The post, since deleted for reasons which are about to be discussed, became known to the NA Confidential newsroom when I was brought into the ensuing conversation by a mutual friend.

Good thing I had the presence of mind to make a screenshot.

Here's the text:

I never do this, but I can’t help myself.

As I was driving down Spring Street in New Albany, a cop pulls out behind me and turns on his lights. I pulled over to get out of his way. He pulls over behind me. I thought maybe I had a tail light out or something because I wasn’t speeding. He comes to the window and says “Ma’am, you were going 36.” After I said ok, he said he has to give me a ticket because the chief of police for Floyd County told him he had to write 5 tickets in that spot tonight. He said others were driving the same speed in front of me, but there was space for him to pull out and pull me over. The officer proceeds to tell me that the Mayor of New Albany is up for re-election and there are tons of political reasons why they do things like this. He said he never gives tickets, but had no choice tonight per the chief. AND for 36mph, my ticket was $165 !!!!

Folks, this is a joke!!!!! If these are the people running the county I live in, I don’t want them to have their positions any longer!!!

So frustrating ......

Shocking, although it makes perfect sense in a demented, distinctly New Gahanian way.

Having failed to implement a panoply of traffic calming measures over and beyond two-way traffic, as suggested by Jeff Speck and others, and with increasing numbers of neighborhood residents along Spring Street beginning to grasp the sheer extent of the engineering debacle, City Hall's improvised damage control is to do what not one street grid reform advocate ever wanted done, which is use police officers better deployed elsewhere to operate speed traps to facilitate the enforcement that might have been achieved with better results through design -- had city officials not been so woefully ignorant of the design principles involved, and determined not to learn anything from the many studies they'd commissioned.

It didn't take long for the post on social media to rouse the ire of Todd Bailey, chief of police.

DO NOT under any circumstances tell a violator I have directed you to write citations. It is YOUR job and to enforce statutes and I will not tolerate any officer giving violators excuses that it is my order that they are getting citations. It is simple to determine who is doing this and in the event you do so you WILL face severe disciplinary action. You enforce traffic laws because it’s your job, not because you have been directed to do so. I have no idea what insanity has led to telling people this but it stops today.

Wow. The pre-election panic by the Democrats may already have started.

The Green Mouse was told that Bailey called the aggrieved party, apologized, trashed the speeding ticket in return for the original post being deleted from Facebook, then had pointed words with the ticketing officer. The memo reprinted above soon followed. 

Let's hope the officer in question, whose inadvertent honesty is appreciated in dissident circles, isn't cashiered. We're already short on police man (and woman) staffing, aren't we? It's a shame available officers are used at speed traps when properly implemented street design might have turned the trick.

Here's another thought.

Gahan's City Hall famously placed Speck's street study in the hands of favored contractor (and huge mayoral campaign donor) HWC Engineering, which fed the report into a nearby sausage grinder and emerged with a plan that has failed to slow traffic, failed to make streets safer for non-automotive users, and failed to enhance walkability.

As such, when the necessary changes eventually must be made, whether during the current occupant's tenure or by whomever follows, will taxpayers foot the bill -- or HWC?

"The mere existence of a park does not ensure that a community benefits from it."

Imagine having public discussion and community input before city government borrows millions of dollars, to be repaid by your grandchildren, to construct a parks system via the same old network of special interests.

Not here in New Albany, mind you.

Just imagine.

Are public parks an unalloyed good? Not always, by Thaisa Way (Fast Company)

Cities need parks, but not just any parks will do. How they’re designed plays a crucial role in determining whether they benefit surrounding communities.

In cities, access to parks is strongly linked with better health for both people and neighborhoods.

Children suffer higher rates of obesity when they grow up in urban areas without a park in easy reach. Because low-income neighborhoods have fewer green spaces, poorer children are most likely to face other health problems, too, including asthma due to poor air quality.

But access to green space is not the only ingredient in creating healthy communities, my research on urban landscapes shows. Parks are good for people only if people use them.

And that’s a question of design.

"If we continue to absolve our urban design of any wrongdoing with these deaths, how are we ever going to make positive changes?"

No matter your station in in life, here's a reminder that if you fancy yourself "progressive," but believe city streets are meant for the convenience of high-speed, pass-through traffic, and not to serve the needs of a healthy neighborhood occupied by humans, then I've got jarring news.

Turns out you're not very progressive at all. That's because street grid design is a social justice issue, too.

Another Metro Atlanta pedestrian blamed for his own death, when urban design looks like the guilty party, by Darin Givens (Medium)

It’s important to improve the way our news outlets report pedestrian deaths and collisions. It’s about respect for the dead, who can’t speak for themselves, but it’s also about the need for change. If we continue to absolve our urban design of any wrongdoing with these deaths, how are we ever going to make positive changes?

"Carmel, Indiana, is showing suburbs how to go big on biking."

Holy Caesar!

A councilman who rides a bike?

Meanwhile, it's almost as if Carmel has a plan. Just imagine if Jeff Gahan had coherent, organized plans pertaining to bicycling, walkability, street trees and other vital matters -- apart from luxury dog parks and public housing putsches.

Gahan only knows monetization ... but a boy can dream of better things.

CARMEL, INDIANA, IS SHOWING SUBURBS HOW TO GO BIG ON BIKING (People for Bikes)

You’ll sometimes hear that it’s almost impossible to make biking truly desirable in American suburbs. Carmel, Indiana, is proving every day how wrong that is.

The booming city of 90,000, immediately north of Indianapolis but with a distinct and dense downtown of its own, is actually evidence of the opposite idea: The country’s newer, faster-growing cities are where connecting great biking networks has the most potential to transform American life.

As explained in the video above, released Monday by the City of Carmel, the scale of Carmel’s investment in better biking since Mayor Jim Brainard first took office in 1996 can almost be hard for an outsider to believe. The city currently has 190 miles of off-street bike paths, with 20 more miles on the way in the next two years ...

Louisville "Streets for People" series is worth a read by New Albanians, because two-way traffic is only the end of the beginning.

We covered the first in Chris Glasser's informative Insider Louisville series here:

Us, too: "Louisville’s roads need to be designed for citizens, not cars."

 ... To take (Louisville mayor Greg) Fischer at his word and judge him by his own standard, our city is falling well short of the administration’s stated top goal. Fischer’s annual budgets speak volumes on this matter — they’re his defining action, louder than his words. Yes, there is a small amount allocated to build a bike network — a pittance that Metro Council undercuts every year during the budget review period — but beyond that, there is virtually nothing that will begin to push us toward achieving Fischer’s goal of 25 percent of trips occurring on foot, bike or bus by 2030.

Glasser's second installment offers an interesting twist on downtown Louisville's "9th Street Divide."

... Much has been made of the city’s “9th Street Divide” — the supposed invisible racial line that separates black Louisville to the west from white Louisville to the east. The city’s segregation (and inequality) is a matter of fact, but the “9th Street Divide” is a fallacy — or at least, a simplification of a broader, more complex idea. What we have, actually, is a crater of surface parking lots in our western downtown, creating a void in what could be a thriving city center.

Yesterday's third and final essay raises a point critical to Jeff Gahan's program of road reworkings in New Albany (in general) and the soon-to-be-finished Downtown Grid Modernization Project (specifically).

The central point is enhanced and in bold.

Streets for People: A missed opportunity on Lexington Road

This month and next, Metro Government will be completing work on the Lexington Road Safety Project — a repaving and redesign of the corridor between Grinstead Drive and Payne Street.

As stated in the city’s press release, the “new configuration is intended to improve traffic flow and reduce accidents as previously demonstrated by similar projects across Louisville.” Bike lanes will be added, and the project will improve drainage along the roadway, which neighbors Beargrass Creek and sits partially in a floodplain.

The colloquial term for a project like this is a “road diet.” It will look like this:

Road diet for Lexington Road.

While a project like this is progress to a certain degree, it’s also a huge missed opportunity — one that falls short of the original goals of the plan and fails to keep pace with what’s being implemented throughout the country. With “progress” like this, we can simultaneously be moving forward and falling behind.

The last sentence neatly summarizes the issue for New Albany. Judging from their past exploits, we can rely on our leadership cadre to declare victory and erect self-congratulatory plaques, but the fact is that the long overdue implementation of two-way streets is only a partial victory. It is the end of the beginning, and there is far more to be done.

There are walking issues, biking issues and connectivity issues. Dan Coffey will disagree, but he's an irrelevant anachronism, a sort of ideological love child spawned by Strom Thurmond and David Duke, to be breast-fed by the Thoreau Institute.

Does Jeff Gahan have a plan for the next phase of street modernity?

If so, let's see it. This whole thing about waiting to reveal designs until the milling begins is so very Ceausescu, isn't it?

ASK THE BORED: "Design Is Better Than Enforcement To Make Cities Safer For Everyone."

Last week, there was a rear-guard action. I'm not here to pick on Mr. Peterson. As you can see from the minutes of Valentine's Day, the board itself spent ample time scratching their heads.

Mr. Peterson's point, as offered last week as well as an October 2016 letter to the News and Tribune, is that we can have arterial streets designed for moving traffic at unsafe (and altogether anti-social) speeds, then easily reduce these speeds through constant enforcement -- though we wouldn't want to be a speed trap, would we?

In other news, I can have my cake and eat it, too. Yet again, for the umpteenth thousandth time ...

Design Is Better Than Enforcement To Make Cities Safer For Everyone, by Charlie Sorrel (fastcoexist)

Ticketing drivers isn't the answer to create streets that are friendly for pedestrians and cyclists.

Much as cyclists might like to see bad drivers punished for their distracted driving and their bike-harassing crimes, enforcement isn't the most effective way to make the streets safer. The best way to stop "accidents" is to design better roads.

Slower cars means safer roads, and while adding speed cameras and reducing speed limits can help, nothing beats a design that stops drivers from speeding in the first place. Also, slower cars mean less injury in the case of a collision, but again, avoiding the collision to begin with is even better ...

 ... Urban sprawl, and the unchecked ingress of the automobile into every area of our cities, is clearly the problem. And better infrastructure, designed to make driving more difficult in order to make cites better for everyone, is an obvious solution. But it requires bold decisions, like the Barcelona's controversial Super Block scheme, and those decisions require a political will that is often too weak in the face of bullying from car drivers. Design may be more important than enforcement, then, but it's strong politics that will make those changes.

Once again: "The design of a street, more so than any posted speed limit sign, invites drivers to go fast or slow."

You'll have to click through to see the photo, which contrasts an overbuilt street with a right-sized street. The photo was assembled by Wes Craiglow, a city planner in Arkansas.

Some 20-MPH Streets Are Safer Than Others ... Forget speed limits—the key to slower roads is design, by Eric Jaffe (City Lab)

 ... Craiglow's point is that the design of a street, more so than any posted speed limit sign, invites drivers to go fast or slow. It’s a critical message at a time when cities around the U.S. and the world are turning to Vision Zero and 20’s Plenty campaigns that stress the safety advantages of slower traffic. As the Strong Towns blog noted in picking up the meme: “We can't regulate our way to safety.”

By regulation, we're referring to the oft-heard suggestion to enforce speed limits by writing more tickets.

“Regulation may not be the best means to the end. In fact design—the actual framework—is probably a more responsible, cost-effective, and meaningful method to get the same end.”

Try telling that to New Albany's Bored with Works or Safety, and strain to imagine one of our city planner's describing these matters to a national web site. You can't do it, can you?

He says that for too long now urban planners have provided only one choice, and that it’s time for them to show city residents the full “buffet” of living options. Some people will choose to live in the top photo, sure. But many will choose to live in the bottom photo. Still others will prefer a dense, mixed-use environment downtown. “We need to create that,” he says. “And everything in between.”

Arkansas, folks. Not Indiana. ARKANSAS.

Craiglow suggests it’s time for traffic engineers, who tend to put car movement above all else, to share the stage with smart designers. “We have to drive home design, and what design means to our community,” he says. “We have to tell the engineers: You have to ride shotgun for a little while. You’re still in the front seat. You’re going to navigate. We’re going to do it together. But you can’t drive all the time.”

Revolution? What a thrill.

Why not here?

Ask Jeff Gahan.

"Protected bike lanes are now official federal policy."

Photo credit: People for Bikes

Recognize these "star-spangled" ideas?

They're integral to Jeff Speck's Downtown Street Network Proposal, which currently is consigned to oblivion or 2017, whichever comes (or mayor goes) first.

The feds jump on board: Protected bike lanes are now official federal policy, by Michael Andersen (People for Bikes)

Protected bike lanes are now officially star-spangled.

Eight years after New York City created a Netherlands-inspired bikeway on 9th Avenue by putting it on the curb side of a car parking lane, the physically separated designs once perceived as outlandish haven’t just become increasingly common from coast to coast—they’ve been detailed in a new design guide by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).

The FHWA guidance released Tuesday is the result of two years of research into numerous modern protected bike lanes around the country, in consultation with a team of national experts.

“Separated bike lanes have great potential to fill needs in creating low-stress bicycle networks,” the FHWA document says, citing last year’s study by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities. “Many potential cyclists (including children and the elderly) may avoid on-street cycling if no physical separation from vehicular traffic is provided.”

The "solution is density," in which small parks play a design role.

There is no room for creative design downtown? Red = blank urban fabric.

Once New Albany had a grand post office at the corner of Spring and Pearl. It was targeted by Suburban Think and bulldozed in the 1960s for conversion into a mundane parking lot.

So it remained until just a few years ago, when we spent far too much money, perhaps a million and counting, to transform the space into what's known now as Bicentennial Park, one bounded by a building, an alley, and two one-way streets, one of which is a high-speed arterial.

The appearance of Bicentennial Park undoubtedly is an improvement on the poorly maintained parking lot owned by notorious slumlords, but it was built without multi-modal use in mind -- and might mere beautification have been done less expensively?

Also, as with the farmers market build-out at Market and Bank, a crucial street corner is tied to an occasional use concept rather than soon-to-be possible infill construction. With all due respect to my friend David White, high rises never were as much the objective as achieving density by filling gaps downtown.

The overall "message" as conveyed by the city's design, and its periodic use of Bicentennial Park for organized events, is that it isn't really a public space meant for adaptation and impromptu use. Rather, it's for shows and for gigs it wasn't built to support, meaning that each such temporary use must be funded again, over and over. How does this make sense?

The planning and design of Bicentennial Park were decreed from the top-down, and they ignore inclusive principles of community and placemaking in favor of finding a spot to erect a self-congratulatory plaque.

Meanwhile, in DC ... a counter example.

Fairfax trades a parking lot for a new park, by Canaan Merchant (Greater Greater Washington)

Old Town Square in Fairfax used to be a park that nobody used because it was wedged between two parking lots in the middle of the city's small, historic core. Now it's bigger and more inviting, and it's helping Fairfax embrace its urban roots.

With Main Street's botched deforestation plan almost complete, soon we'll be turning our lonely eyes to Jeff Speck.

When this or any other mayoral administration trumpets its achievements, consider the notion of opportunity cost. Given that there never will be enough time and money to go around, what opportunities were ignored in order to implement those chosen?

Might the time and money have been expended for other more important opportunities?

Shouldn't weighing these pros and cons be a prime determinant in measuring job performance?

If you're wondering why this matters, see Jeff Speck's first of three announcements below. It has taken Lowell, Massachusetts four years to revert the city's one-way streets back to two ways.

In New Albany, we've been talking about this for at least a decade, as three successive mayors have elevated foot-dragging on city streets to the level of Olympic sport ... or, at the very least, to that of synchronized swimming, assuming the aquatic center allows it.

If one feels, as I do, that completed and calmed two-way streets are the single best coordinated grassroots strategy for encouraging the overall revival of downtown New Albany, then numerous other uncoordinated projects ostensibly intended to achieve the same end, while perhaps classifying as "wants", have not been "needs", and have cost us the opportunity to get our streets right following fifty years of suburban-inspired doltishness.

Among other reasons, this lot opportunity is why the Main Street project's Ceausescuesque, grandiose waste is so appalling, but trust me ... Main Street's epic fail goes much further.

Although it seems as though the release date for Jeff Speck's street study keeps being pushed back, some day it finally will land. Even if the current administration honors its understated pledges and agrees to implement Speck's findings, Lowell's experience shows that this might take many years.

And New Albany has wasted these same four years, three consecutive times.

OK, you know I only write when I've got some important news ...

Three neat things to report this time:

1. Well it took 4 years -- a blink of the eye in Planner Time -- but Lowell, MA, where we did our 2010 Downtown Evolution Plan, has reverted the majority of its one-way system back to two way.  The switch went off "without incident," and merchants are already seeing a difference.

Here's are some excerpts from my talk there this month:
http://www.lowellsun.com/todaysheadlines/ci_26655793/downtown-redevelopment-hailed-at-lowell-plan-breakfast

2. We submitted our Downtown West Palm Beach Walkability Study in September.  This is our best yet.  Read it here:
http://walkablewpb.com/reference-documents/downtown-walkability-study/

You can also see my full presentation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Rh_pmu7tE

3. Finally, just dropped this week, my first article in ages.  I wrote it because I had to:  Ten Not Twelve!  A design mantra we can all support.  It's gotten a lot of attention, but it needs more.  Please share it if you agree:
http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/10/why-12-foot-traffic-lanes-are-disastrous-for-safety-and-must-be-replaced-now/381117/

That's enough for now.  There's more good stuff on the website:
http://jeffspeck.com

Thanks for listening.  Let me know if you don't want any more of these emails.

Ten Not Twelve!
JBS

Delicious reading: "The Suburbs Made Us Fat."

Fat, but broke; Floyd County's skint again. Tell you what, Jim -- how 'bout us city folks keep paying double so you don't have to mention the "T" word to the tea drinkers?

Meanwhile ...

(thanks to K for the link)

The Suburbs Made Us Fat, by James Hamblin (Atlantic)

People in dense cities are thinner and have healthier hearts than people in sprawling subdivisions. New research says the secret is in the patterns of the streets.

... 68 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, which means that someone you know is overweight or obese. Most people don’t get the CDC’s minimum recommended amount of physical activity. Americans spend more time driving every year. So it is logical to conclude, as Garrick and Marshall do in their paper, “The role of the street network and how we put together the bones of our communities should not be overlooked as a potential contributing factor to health outcomes.”

They also found that wide streets with many lanes are associated with high rates of obesity and diabetes. That’s most likely indicative of, as Garrick and Marshall put it, “an inferior pedestrian environment.” Similarly, so-called “big box” stores in a neighborhood indicate poor walkability and are associated with 24.9 percent higher rates of diabetes and 13.7 percent higher rates of obesity.

Dense cities promote walking and biking, so the push for healthier cities fits with the vogue push for active lifestyles—as opposed to gym routines smattered across an indolent existence. Physical activity is not just concerted exercise time and deliberate recreation. It’s about ways of life. For some people, that’s best accomplished by making things inevitably more difficult on themselves in everyday life.