Nawbany's ubiquitous used cars? They're "a symptom of having such a high concentration of poverty."

Earlier this week:

Traffic Cluster, Part One: Mt Tabor Road? It's the design. You know, the design we just paid millions ... to design.

Traffic Cluster, Part Two: We'll never resolve traffic issues until "leadership" is willing to lead, not pander.

But just before them, I wrote in reference to statue rectification: "Give 'em time, and we'll have statues of automobiles. I volunteer to be first in line when it comes to bringing those symbols down."

Taken together, these thoughts of pervasive and unaddressed automobile supremacy in Nawbany prompted reader John Q. Curmudgeon (no relation to T. Potable) to write this letter to the editor.

Don't worry. He's real.

Are you?

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We already have monuments to automobiles in New Albany. Plenty of them. It's doubtful anyone can find another 14.94 square miles in the U.S. that has more ratty little "car lots", car parts stores and other auto related businesses than New Albany, Indiana.

Cheap used cars are for sale, parked on every corner in the town - used “luxury”, “high-end cars” are offered across from a funeral home, on a highway masquerading as a residential street. Another “luxury” car lot is across the street from the YMCA.*

Not a single new car dealership in New Albany - just used cars.

It’s a symptom of having such a high concentration of poverty. Banks make good money on auto loans and lend for them freely (because the car is the loan’s collateral), but not a single new car dealership in New Albany. Not enough money in circulation, not enough people to justify the investment. Sellersburg has new car dealerships, with one-tenth of the number of households in New Albany.

Apparently, most automobiles in New Albany are used and apparently falling apart, barely kept running judging from the number of parts stores and garages.

Auto parts stores are everywhere within New Albany’s small 14 square miles - two auto glass and paint locations, two NAPA parts stores, two O’Reilly Autoparts stores, a hub cap and wheel store, AutoZone Auto Parts, Advance Auto Parts, Bennett's Auto Parts, New Albany Auto Parts & Machine Shop, Bumper to Bumper, Auto Warehouse Inc., Walmart Auto Care Center, Tire Discounters, Big O Tires - and more corner, shade tree mechanic shops.

We don’t notice New Albany’s many monuments to the automobile - because we’ve grown numb to them.

When parking four old cars with “$300 down” written in white shoe polish on their windshields is the “highest and best use” of a high-traffic downtown corner lot, it’s a glaring example that no one values retail and business opportunities in New Albany. Another symptom of having such a high concentration of poverty.

Every article I read regarding the growing restaurant business in New Albany usually includes the phrase “get people across the bridge from Louisville.” There’s a reason. When the little corner car lots go, maybe we’ll see more opportunity for everyone.

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* As to the lot across from the YMCA, reader NC writes: "I closed the lot about 3 years ago when my mom had a stroke. It sat empty for a couple years, the cars that were for sale on it were other lots parking them there or people we didn’t even know parking them there (every once in awhile the guys from the Firestone would sell a car off of it with permission ... it’s a mechanic shop for about the last year. So might want to edit that part, but yea Todd (Coleman) still owns it and rents it to the the owners of the shop. I’ve heard a couple rumors it could be for sale, but I’m not 100%. Could be just rumors."

NAC's New Albany "Person of the Year" for 2019 is Dear Leader's pervasive, relentless Automobile Supremacy.

It’s time once again for NA Confidential to select New Albany’s "Person of the Year." As in 2018, there'll be no run-ups and time-wasting teasers, although our basic definition remains intact, as gleaned so long ago from Time.

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States news magazine Time that features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Given the outcome of the 2019 municipal election, with the incumbent mayor Jeff Gahan winning a third consecutive term for the first time since C. Pralle Erni in the 1950s, the conventional wisdom suggests that Gahan -- currently an unchallenged, dominant figure in terms of accumulated power and authority -- would easily win the title of "Person of the Year."

Maybe in a milquetoast milieu awash in donor dollars, but all I can say to this is "Fuck a bunch o'that."

Rather, let's look at the prime beneficiary of the past eight years of pay-to-stewardship, Gahan-style. What do the following signature Gahan projects all have in common?

• River Run splash pad
• Silver Street pleasure dome
• Cannon Acres luxury doggie park
• Roadway corridor expenditures (Grant Line, Mt. Tabor, McDonald Lane, State Street)
• Summit Springs hilltop chain orgy
• Reisz Mahal opulent HQ
• Downtown grid "improvement" project

Answer: They all promote automobile centrism/supremacy at the expense of other users, whether those on foot, riding bicycles or preferring mobility options like public transportation.

They all came from Gahan with illusory promises to the contrary, which were little more than bait 'n' switch window dressing for the driver-fluffing floor show.

As traffic speeds increase, errant drivers go unpunished and sharrow symbols somehow fail to protect, Gahan has seen to it that the car stays king in Nawbany, and all other street and roadway users remain second-class citizens -- and he'll continue lying about it until the day comes when he finally goes away.

However, there is a certain irony to Gahan's love for our cars. The extended period of the Sherman Minton bridge's repairs and ensuing traffic disruptions will constitute the first serious challenges to the mayor's "Wizard of Bling" stewardship during eight years of cruise control, for which he'll be woefully unprepared and forced to cooperate with Republicans for any semblance of relief.

It will and it won't be hilarious, simultaneously.

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Previous winners:

• 2018 ... Jeff Gahan's Money Machine
• 2017 ... #MeToo -- the NA silence breakers
• 2016 ... Chloe Allen
• 2015 ... New Albany property tax payers
• 2014 ... Heroic Non-Incentivized Downtown Developers
• 2013 ... (tie) Houndmouth and "Quality of Life"
• 2012 ... Bill "Slumlord" Allen
• 2011 ... The Sherman Minton Bridge

Simply stated, "Cars Are Death Machines."

To repeat: Car-centrism, or if you will "automobile supremacy," not only is a form of imperialism. It is perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely absent social stigma.

When we get behind a steering wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumptions of acceptable behavior change every bit as radically as when we savage people on social media.

Imperialism? Very much so.

Space must be seized to accommodate cars to the expense of non-car users. We expect to warehouse cars on public ground at no cost to ourselves. We demand cheap fuel and will support limitless violence (foreign wars, domestic economic coercion) in order to get it. We'll go to any length to characterize this addiction as freedom. The list of destructive behavior is seemingly endless, and yet we've made automobile supremacy the basis of civilization at the present time.

And then there's that other factor, because cars are death machines, and we seem to like it that way. How "freedom" fits into this dichotomy remains a complete mystery to me.

Cars Are Death Machines. Self-Driving Tech Won’t Change That.

By Allison Arieff (New York Times)

Cars are death machines. Pedestrian fatalities in the United States have increased 41 percent since 2008; more than 6,000 pedestrians were killed in 2018 alone. More than 4,000 American kids are killed in car crashes every year – I am thankful every day my niece wasn’t one of them.

Straight to the conclusion.

I’m not so naïve to think we can get rid of cars altogether, but we have so many tools to eliminate traffic-related injuries and fatalities right now. Banning all passenger auto-driving vehicles above a certain weight and front grill height would be a great start. Other solutions run the gamut from the quick and easy fixes — like reducing speed limits, eliminating right turns on red, building protected bike lanes and instituting congestion pricing — to major and necessary commitments like funding new transit projects (upgrading, maintaining and expanding existing transit systems) and rethinking land use to encourage walkable development rather than sprawl.

We can all commit to driving less, which reduces both CO2 emissions and the potential for crashes. We need to be as defensive about crosswalks and bike lanes as drivers are about their cars (and where we believe we are entitled to park them).

Until then, the streets will belong to the death machines.

Here in "walkable" Nawbany, our grandiose Reisz Mahal won't even have a Main Street entry portal, so make sure and bring your car.

That's right, we're spending millions to remodel a building that won't have a Main Street entrance. Be sure and enter with your car, to the rear.

But please don't mention "public art," because it could get far worse.

ON THE AVENUES: Socialists for Seabrook, because we desperately need a new beginning in New Albany.

"The car is a very specifically American symbol of freedom, but like so many instruments and symbols of American freedom, it is a tool of domination and control."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Not only is car-centrism, or "automobile supremacy," a form of imperialism. It is perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely free from social stigma.

"The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives."

When we get behind a wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumption of acceptable behavior changes every bit as much as when we savage people on social media. We demand to be in control, and we insist the rest of you get the hell out of our way.

The headline is to be taken as sarcasm, by the way.

THE FUTURE IS FOUR WHEELS, CYCLISTS BE DAMNED, by Jacob Bacharach (The Outline)

Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.

 ... Nationally, pedestrian and cyclist deaths have spiked since 2009. The ubiquity of cell phones and the growing preponderance of integrated screens in vehicles is a major contributing factor, as is the American preference for trucks and SUVs, with which their taller front profile makes them far more deadly in collisions than the lower, slanting hoods of normal cars.

There is also the unrelenting, often murderous hostility of drivers toward pedestrians and people on bikes. No cyclist I know has not been menaced by an enraged driver — brushed past within inches, bumped at an intersection, run off the road — and most of us have been menaced more than once. No pedestrian who has to cross at a mid-block crosswalk is unfamiliar with the experience of a driver actually speeding up when they see you; no one who has crossed at a regular intersection is unfamiliar with a turning driver laying on the horn and waiting until the last second to jam on the breaks as you scurry out of the way.

The car is a very specifically American symbol of freedom, but like so many instruments and symbols of American freedom, it is a tool of domination and control. A car is a missile and a castle, a self-propelled, multi-ton fortress, hermetically sealed against the intrusions of weather, environment, and, of course, other people. Drivers view the world through the lenses of speed and convenience — most of the anger at cyclists, in my experience, is at having to drive at something resembling a normal urban speed limit because there’s a bike in front of them — but also through the lens of ownership. Streets belong to cars. The rest of us are interlopers, invaders, invasive species.

In fact, most Americans, and certainly most of our political leaders, seem to view our car-based infrastructure as essentially organic and inevitable, and anything that impedes, slows, reduces, or provides an alternative to the circulation and storage of internal combustion vehicles is an engineered scheme to alter an essentially natural order. Newspapers relentlessly editorialize about massive road and highway projects as absolute fundamentals of economic wellbeing and development, whereas rail and bike lanes and other multi-modal transit options are generally treated as luxe amenities at best, or public menaces at worst.

(snip)

But cars are not creatures and have not evolved to fit their environment; we have designed our environment around cars ...

 ... And here, curiously, we find a great undiagnosed cause at the root of our supposed cultural malaise. (Also, incidentally, a great undiagnosed source of national violence: cars kill as many people in America — around 40,000 a year — as guns.) These, too, are persistent bugaboos of op-ed writers and pundits: fragmentation and atomization; loneliness and disconnection; declines in communal values and an absence of interpersonal interaction.

Well, easy enough to blame it on the internet, but for a century now we have been putting things farther and farther apart and, more and more, traveling to and from everyplace in single occupancy vehicles, grimly zooming from garage to garage, interacting with no other humans along the way except for that fucking cyclist taking up the whole goddamn road! The interactions that presumably create the sorts of communities that conservatives and columnists so frequently lament losing require more than a front porch on which to sit; they require some strolling passersby as well.

Not super duper mayors at all, but "The Life-Saving Benefits of Superblocks."

"Fuck a bunch of Barcelona -- we're Mericans!"

Boy, aren't we.

The Life-Saving Benefits of Barcelona’s Car-Free ‘Superblocks’, by Laura Bliss (CityLab)

A new study estimates that a citywide plan to limit cars and capture nearly 70 percent of street space for bikes and pedestrians could save 667 lives per year.

When Barcelona officials installed a “superblock” in the working-class neighborhood of Poblenou in 2016, it was fiercely controversial. Closing off a three-square-block chunk of the city to vehicle traffic and reserving those streets for pedestrians and cyclists ticked off motorists, who felt attacked by the fast-and-cheap tactic to reduce car use.

But soon Poblenou residents appreciated the nearly doubled amount of space that they now had to walk, play, and socialize. The resistance soon faded, and five more superblocks have since been implemented around the city; Salvador Rueda, the head of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona, envisions creating 503 in total. The ultimate goal is to turn nearly 70 percent of Barcelona’s street space over to people. It’s a project that has attracted a lot of international attention, and some efforts in the United States to replicate the idea.

Fully executing the superblock vision in Barcelona will no doubt face more challenges aplenty. But a new study published in the journal Environment International offers some new evidence supporting the idea: It can deliver vast improvements in urban health. That’s according to a team of Spanish and American scientists who developed a statistical model to measure the potential outcomes of Rueda’s proposed project ...

"There have been 18 cyclist fatalities in New York so far this year. Perhaps drivers should face more serious consequences."

"But without a systemic rethinking of the primacy of cars in urban life and the implementation of more aggressive ways to de-incentivize driving and particularly careless driving, it is hard to imagine a new world emerging."

I can't recall a time since he was elected prosecutor that Keith Henderson has "held accountable" a driver who has killed a non-driver. Maybe I missed one, but I think the trend is clear. It isn't a very good trend, either.

We’ve Blamed Traffic Deaths on Bicyclists Since 1880. What About Drivers?, by Ginia Bellafante (New York Times)

There have been 18 cyclist fatalities in New York so far this year. Perhaps drivers should face more serious consequences.

 ... However much cyclists might need to heighten their awareness on the roads, cars and trucks kill people in far greater volume than cyclists kill people. Of the 711 pedestrians who have died in traffic collusions since 2014, only four have been killed by bicycles.

The law, however, protects some forms of human error more assiduously than others. In the same week that a driver was punished with a summons for opening a car door in such a way that it led to a young woman’s death, Juan Rodriguez, a social worker and the father of 1-year old twins, was charged with manslaughter for accidentally closing the door to his car, leaving his children in the back seat, where they died from the excessive heat. He believed that he had dropped them off at day care, in a scenario that has become tragically common among distracted parents since the late 1990s.

Just over a week ago, the mayor introduced a $58.4 million plan directed at promoting bike safety in the wake of the current crisis in fatalities. The plan calls for the installation of more bike lanes, the redesign of certain intersections and various traffic signaling adjustments ...

Automobile supremacy: "The machine that is the established “American Way” can commit countless legal and moral errors and be excused as an individual mistake."

"We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law."

But seriously, I won't bug you; go back to complaining about the traffic on State Street, all the while accepting the underlying premise that "mobility" requires each of us to drive a vehicle, generally all alone, for just about any trip.

We've Gotta Be Perfect, by Arian Horbovetz (Strong Towns)

... The truth is, there is almost no situation in American culture where 40,000 lives are lost each year without a serious debate about whether or not the context of these deaths should lead to drastic changes. Except when it comes to cars.

If electric scooter crashes caused by negligent piloting led to the death of the elderly pedestrian and the hospitalization of two young children in my community, the public would likely call for the end of these machines. But since negligent driving was the cause of both, we see these incidents as “tragic” but ultimately accept them as normalcy. In reality, if these pedestrians and children were hit by electric scooters, bikes, or skateboarders instead of cars and trucks, they would likely still all be alive and relatively healthy. The hypocrisy in the face of potential loss of life is staggering, and shows just how addicted to our cars, trucks and SUVs we truly are.

Some may believe that addiction is too harsh a term. But when we look at the terrors of addiction, we see the unquenchable need to repeatedly engage in an activity, even if the end result can easily be dangerous or deadly. We accept the risk based on an addiction to the high. We defend its potential to ruin our lives and the lives of others around us, especially our loved ones.

A friend and fellow bike commuter recently said something that stuck with me:

“We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law.”

Indeed, it’s a double standard with maddening predictability. In general, If it’s a car crash, we blame the negligent driver. If it’s a bike, scooter or skateboard, we often blame the machine itself, or the “culture” associated with said machine. For example, if there is a rash of car accidents on the news, one might say “people drive like idiots here!” But if there are a rash of electric scooter crashes, the reaction is typically an urgent call for these machines to be banned or limited ...

A reminder: Sherman Minton "Renewal" open house and spoon feeding by the elites occurs tonight at the Calumet Club, 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

Historically such "listening" meetings have been anything but. They're glitzy exercises in applying ephemeral lipstick to pre-determined outcomes.

The very appellation "Sherman Minton Renewal" summarizes the ticky-tacky ad man's propaganda-first approach typical of the governmental elites in this genre.

Let's face facts, please, because public input is a only a grudging necessity for them, not something they'd tolerate in their ideal world of top-down strangleholds.

BUT perhaps there might someday be an exception. 

Could this be the one? I'll be there, and it might be useful to gauge the attendance and functionality of our own New Albany elite cadres.

Sherman Minton Bridge refurbishment: "Construction is scheduled to start in early 2021 and take two to three years."

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.

In America, automobile supremacy means we walk less, but we die more. Evidently we want it that way.

Having been to Europe numerous times, and at the risk of generalizing, the basic difference is that most European countries put the brake on automobile supremacy. Driving remains more of a privilege, less of a right, and while there surely are tracts of the continent where cars are necessary, subsidized public transit in urban areas lessens the need to drive.

It's that simple -- and my guess would be that in Europe, every now and again a driver actually is prosecuted for killing a non-driver. Recall that when Matt Brewer was killed, the driver who hit him was exonerated by police within minutes, and later the prosecutor yawningly followed suit.

June 19, 2019 photo.

And those Williams Plumbing sight line impediments are right back where they were, on the street, blocking fields of vision for all users even as ordinance enforcement personnel pluck the low-hanging fruit by ticketing street sweeping violations.

Why is the city obligated to provide commercial parking for four, five and maybe six vehicles?

Didn't rogue elements in the Street Department only recently ask Williams not to continue parking these vehicles on Spring Street?

Did someone over-turn the surprising edict?

(When parked in a line on 9th Street, they also block handicap accessibility on the sidewalk, but first things first).

Why are drivers killing so many pedestrians?

Because, like Williams Plumbing's fleet of vision blockers, drivers are coddled, everywhere and always. BOW should be embarrassed; unfortunately too few of the city's Democratic "leaders" are capable of feeling shame.

Why Are U.S. Drivers Killing So Many Pedestrians? by Joe Cortright (Strong Towns)

If anything else—a disease, terrorists, gun-wielding crazies—killed as many Americans as cars do, we’d regard it as a national emergency. Especially if the death rate had grown by 50 percent in less than a decade. But as new data from the Governor’s Highway Safety Association (via Streetsblog) show, that’s exactly what’s happened with the pedestrian death toll in the U.S. In the nine years from 2009 to 2018, pedestrian deaths increased 51 percent from 4,109 to 6,227.

There are lots of reasons given for the increase: distracted driving due to smart phone use, a decline in gas prices that has prompted even more driving, poor road design, a culture that privileges car travel and denigrates walking, and the increasing prevalence of more lethal sport utility vehicles. Undoubtedly, all of these factors contribute.

While some may regard a pedestrian death toll as somehow unavoidable, the recent experience of European countries as a group suggests that there’s nothing about modern life (Europeans have high rates of car ownership and as many smart phones as Americans) that means the pedestrian death toll must be high and rising. In fact, at the same time pedestrian deaths have been soaring in the U.S., they’ve been dropping steadily in Europe. In the latest nine year period for which European data are available, pedestrian deaths decreased from 8,342 to 5,320, a decline of 36 percent ...

Sherman Minton Bridge refurbishment: "Construction is scheduled to start in early 2021 and take two to three years."

All we can do at this point is humbly beseech Horseshoe/Caesar/Whatever the multi-national gaming entity is calling itself this decade to help save us from a total shutdown.

Sherman Minton Bridge project public meetings set for next week, by Marcus Green (WDRB)

There are two public meetings scheduled next week for the major rehabilitation of the Sherman Minton Bridge, according to the project’s website. The $92 million work involves replacing both roadways of the Sherman Minton, a double-decked bridge that carries Interstate 64 eastbound traffic below and westbound traffic above, and resurfacing work in New Albany.

Next week’s meetings will include options for managing traffic during construction and getting public input, among other topics.

All we really want to know is the price, as opposed to the cost.

“A full closure of the bridge would provide full access for construction and reduce the timeline and costs, but would force vehicles onto another route. A combination of maintenance of traffic options is likely to be used,” according to a post on the project’s website Monday. A spokeswoman did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

But of course. Meanwhile here's the reality check.

Construction is scheduled to start in early 2021 and take two to three years.

The meetings are 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, July 23 at the Chestnut Street Family YMCA (930 W. Chestnut St., Louisville) and 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m., Thursday, July 25 at the The Calumet Club (1614 East Spring Street, New Albany).

"The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: car-centrism, or "automobile supremacy," as the author refers to it, not only is a form of imperialism. It's perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely absent social stigma.

When we get behind a wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumption of acceptable behavior changes every bit as much as when we savage people on social media.

Single-family-only zoning, parking requirements, the mortgage-interest tax deduction ("the deduction primarily subsidizes large houses in car-centric areas"), prioritization of motorists' convenience over public safety, insurance inadequacies, tort law, criminal law ... the list of ways that the legal system institutionalizes this mode of imperialism is lengthy and daunting.

What's it going to take to make improvements, or do we continue to shrug and say nothing can be done?

Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It, by Gregory Shill (The Atlantic)

The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives.

 ... As I detail in a forthcoming journal article, over the course of several generations lawmakers rewrote the rules of American life to conform to the interests of Big Oil, the auto barons, and the car-loving 1 percenters of the Roaring Twenties. They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year and seriously injures more than 4 million more. Include all those harmed by emissions and climate change, and the damage is even greater. As a teenager growing up in the shadow of Detroit, I had no reason to feel this was unjust, much less encouraged by law. It is both.

It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency on the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it.

Let’s begin at the state and local levels ...

Especially this.

In other words, the very fact that car crashes cause so much social damage makes it hard for those who are injured or killed by reckless drivers to receive justice.

In a similar spirit, criminal law has carved out a lesser category uniquely for vehicular manslaughter. Deep down, all of us who drive are afraid of accidentally killing someone and going to jail; this lesser charge was originally envisioned to persuade juries to convict reckless drivers. Yet this accommodation reflects a pattern. Even when a motorist kills someone and is found to have been violating the law while doing so (for example, by running a red light), criminal charges are rarely brought and judges go light. So often do police officers in New York fail to enforce road-safety rules—and illegally park their own vehicles on sidewalks and bike facilities—that specific Twitter accounts are dedicated to each type of misbehavior. Given New York’s lax enforcement record, the Freakonomics podcast described running over pedestrians there as “the perfect crime.”

And the conclusion.

Americans customarily describe motor-vehicle crashes as accidents. But the harms that come to so many of our loved ones are the predictable output of a broken system of laws. No struggle for justice in America has been successful without changing the law. The struggle against automobile supremacy is no different.

The narcissism of car-centrism, part 3: "How Lazy Coverage of Pedestrian Deaths Obscures Why Streets Are So Dangerous."

Paging Bill Hanson and Susan Duncan.

Apart from lazy coverage, I'm trying to remember the last time Louisville metro police and prosecutors took longer than ten grudging minutes to absolve drivers from blame when non-vehicular human beings have been killed by drivers.

It is exceedingly rare, isn't it?

Ever wonder why it's always the car that kills and not the person piloting it?

How Lazy Coverage of Pedestrian Deaths Obscures Why Streets Are So Dangerous, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

When a driver kills someone on foot, is it an act of God, beyond anyone’s power to prevent? Or is it the result of a broken system in desperate need of reform?

To read the coverage of the May 31 killing of 80-year-old Arnulfo Salazar in Charlotte, North Carolina, you’d think it was a random, unpreventable tragedy. Or that Salazar could have saved himself if only he’d been more careful. The stories don’t convey any sense that Salazar was failed by a hostile and unforgiving system.

Let's skip to the conclusion.

One thing that’s certain, however, is that journalists should be more skeptical of police accounts of pedestrian deaths.

Far too often, police rely exclusively on the testimony of the driver — the victim can no longer tell his or her story. And when the only version of events that gets reported is a story that absolves the driver while blaming the victim, the public discussion of street design and driver behavior won’t even mention possibilities for reform. And that means more people will lose their lives.

The narcissism of car-centrism, part 2: "Why U.S. pedestrian deaths are at their highest level in almost 30 years."

It's actually possible to reduce the narcissism of car-centrism: "Unlike the U.S., the E.U. has found ways to redesign vehicles and roads to reduce pedestrian deaths."

Just not in America, evidently.

Why U.S. pedestrian deaths are at their highest level in almost 30 years (PBS)

U.S. pedestrian deaths are at their highest level since 1990. Possible explanations include wider roads, sprawling cities, heavier traffic in residential areas due to navigation apps and increasing distractions from digital devices. And according to victims’ families and safety advocates, the problem is a crisis state and local governments have been slow to address. Arren Kimbel-Sannit reports.

snip

The Hubanks apartment complex is half-a-mile away from the signal crosswalks on Central and Seventh avenues. That's a long way to walk for people who need to catch a bus to school or work.

snip

National advocacy groups say deaths like Keshawn's are more common in low-income areas. It's evident in Southern California, where residents in underserved neighborhoods are waiting for safer streets.

snip

The couple wants safer roads and safer drivers. They know changing laws and minds is a challenge. But it's not impossible. The European Union has seen a 36 percent decline in pedestrian deaths between 2007 and 2016. Experts say it's because, unlike the U.S., the E.U. has found ways to redesign vehicles and roads to reduce pedestrian deaths.

The narcissism of car-centrism, part 1: "Synchronizing Traffic Lights May Not Reduce Emissions."

The narcissism of car-centrism is like a narcotic. Once we get behind the wheel, it's all about our individual need for a fix -- and if you're not WITH drivers, you're AGAINST them.

Sorry, Los Angeles: Synchronizing Traffic Lights May Not Reduce Emissions, by Robinson Meyer (The Atlantic)

What makes one car more efficient may not work when you apply it to a city.

For years, progressive urbanists and environmentalists have advocated for synchronized traffic lights. Syncing lights, theoretically, makes everyone's lives easier: They promote a sense of flow and easiness on the road, and they reduce pollution, because a car running smoothly runs cleaner than a car stopping-and-starting.

So, the need to sync traffic lights has become somewhat well-known. The Baltimore Sun's transportation reporter wrote in 2010 that the "most common source of complaints" he heard from readers was out-of-sync lights. In 2011, a libertarian think tank praised Georgia's effort to syncronize lights, citing statistics about reduced drive times and gasoline usage. And sometime this year, according to an LA Daily News report, Los Angeles will complete its three decade-long effort to syncronize traffic signals across the city.

Except synchronizing traffic lights may not actually work. Todd Litman, of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, writes in a recent post that efforts which increase flow, like signal-syncing or expanding-road-capacity, only theoretically reduce emissions:

[R]esearch suggests that at best these provide short-term reductions in energy use and emissions which are offset over the long-run due to Induced Travel. Field tests indicate that shifting from congested to uncongested traffic conditions significantly reduces pollution emissions, but traffic signal synchronization on congested roads provides little measurable benefit, and can increase emissions in some situations.

"Getting people out of cars and rebuilding our main streets is not going to be easy, and cannot be oversimplified."

I appreciate the author's candor in this short but unsparing look at the realities of striving toward walkability. The bullet points in the excerpt ideally would be grasped by all local candidates for office; I wouldn't expect them all to agree, although it would be nice to think they'd at least been exposed to them.

Is there a "fundamental logic of walkability"? by Lloyd Alter (Treehugger)

 ... It is so complex, building a walkable city that works.

• We need higher average densities to have enough people to actually support small shops.
• We need a fairer tax structure that doesn't shift so much of property tax burden onto the commercial sector, making Main Street stores so expensive.
• We need better pedestrian infrastructure so that people in wheelchairs, with buggies and with strollers can actually all get down the street.
• We need to stop the subsidies on highways and fuel that support the suburban big box economic models.
• We have to charge car owners the true economic costs of maintaining the roads, police, ambulances and parking because even when the store is less than a mile away, it is still often easier to drive. If the car is there, people are going to use it.

Then there will be some logic to walkability. Right now, for many, it makes more sense to drive.

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 ...

Neighborhood revitalization: "Our city streets should be designed as a platform for wealth creation, not to speed traffic along."

I've italicized two sections below. The first serves as post header and states broad goals.

The second indirectly points to the disconnect amid New Albany's faux leadership cadres, in that Jeff Speck's original outline for street grid reform in New Albany addressed walking and biking infrastructure to help connect nearby neighborhoods to downtown. These were precisely the bits stripped away by the forever car-centric Team Gahan, which did not fathom what Speck was saying and will gaze upon Marohn's words as tantamount to impenetrable Swahili.

It is unfortunate that elected officials like Greg Phipps sanctioned the gutting of Speck. Maybe Phipps should be reading Strong Towns.

So, You'd Like a Neighborhood Grocery Store..., by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... So, what would it take to make a grocery store viable in this location? If we wanted that to happen, what would it take? As with all complex systems, the answer to that question prompts an endless succession of questions, but let’s follow a couple because they illustrate how much power we have at the local level.

First, to be viable, a neighborhood grocery would need plenty of patrons. There are thousands of people living within a few blocks of this location, but I suspect that few would get their groceries here. Most would get in their car and, once driving, travel the extra mile to the big box store. So, to convert enough residents of the neighborhood into patrons, we’d need to get more people out of their cars and get them walking.

There’s a push/pull strategy to making this shift. The push is that we need to stop equating local mobility with economic development. In short, while it needs to be easy to get to the next regional center on a road, it doesn’t need to be quick and easy to take city streets to get to the edge of town. Our city streets should be designed as a platform for wealth creation, not to speed traffic along.

This push would also help with the pull strategy of making it easier to walk. Right now, we have a working definition for “walkable” as “able to be walked.” If one can physically walk from one place to another, we tend to consider that walkable, despite the relative safety, comfort or utility of the walk. If we want a grocery here to be viable, we must have a deeper commitment to walkability.

In his book, The Walkable City, architect and planner Jeff Speck explains that great streets have four essential elements. Great streets are useful, safe, comfortable and interesting.

Useful. There must be places to go that are worth going to.
Safe. People need to feel safe visiting the street.
Comfortable. Time spent in the street needs to be pleasant and enjoyable.
Interesting. The street can't be monotonous but instead needs to have some life to it.

Going to the grocery would make the walk useful, but going to an accountant’s office, a coffee shop, a bakery and then the grocery would make it even more useful. A grocery store in isolation might be a pull, but a grocery has a better change of thriving within an ecosystem of other enterprises. Converting the parking lots to other neighborhood-scaled businesses, and inviting more in throughout the neighborhood, would not only improve the tax base at little cost, it would go a long way towards creating that ecosystem.

Slowing traffic on our streets and shifting our emphasis from traffic flow to wealth creation would not only cost less, it would make walking safer and—in time—even comfortable. Not allowing more surface lots—especially when on street parking is barely used—would also help a lot, eventually making a walk interesting as well. The more people that walk, the more inviting walking will become, a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

If we really want to accelerate things, we need more people living in the neighborhood. Today, the neighborhood experiences stagnation and—along Kingwood—even decline. That makes investment more of the slum-lord version than the “convert a single-family home to a duplex” version. To make the latter a reality, we not only need to update our codes, we need underlying land values—the driver of positive redevelopment—to gradually increase.

What would make the land in this neighborhood gradually increase in value? One obvious answer is to improve the experience of living in the neighborhood and to do it in a way that gives the neighborhood some kind of exclusivity not available to the edge of town. For example, improvements to the neighborhood park add to the quality of life, but expanding parking in the park —converting greenspace to asphalt—shifts the value of those improvements from the neighborhood to the region, diluting that value in the process.

Another example would be to not build a multi-million-dollar parking ramp in the downtown but to instead focus on improving walkability between the neighborhood and the downtown. Game-changing walkability improvements can be done for pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of a ramp. Without an excess supply of parking, and with easy walking access, the land within ten blocks of downtown is going to become dramatically more valuable simply because of its exclusivity.

I could go on here and iterate like this for a long time, but there is one overriding insight that should be obvious by now: The more this neighborhood—and the more this city—evolves to function like it did prior to the Suburban Experiment, the more successful it will be ...

Sense and sensibility: "Free public transport in Estonia."

Estonia is mentioned fairly often in these pages. Our trip there in 2016 was a profound experience, and there'll be a return visit some day. We found Tallinn's trams and buses exemplary. Next time, I hope we make it into the countryside. As tourists, we'll be paying to ride, but the advantages of Estonians having free transit options are clear, and discussed herein.

In myriad ways, America subsidizes cars. It doesn't have to be this way.

In the fast lane: Free public transport in Estonia, at The Economist

Expensive, but worth it

The buses are on time, the trams are shiny and new, and passengers usually get a seat. In many cities that would be remarkable enough. But in Tallinn locals are also not required to buy a ticket. In 2013 it became the world’s first capital city to offer residents free public transport. Estonia as a whole has been following suit, and last year set the ambition of becoming the first country with free public transport nationwide. Buses are now free of charge in 11 of its 15 counties.

If the objective is curtailing ultimately unsustainable car-centrism, then a few eggs are required to be broken.

Free public transport on its own is not enough to stop people driving, though the evidence is that it helps. In Tallinn higher parking fees and reduced space for cars also played a part in cutting city-centre traffic: on-street parking now costs €6 an hour, and some parking spaces and car lanes have been replaced by bus lanes. Officials say providing a free alternative allowed them to avoid a backlash when driving in the capital was made more expensive and less convenient.