"In other words, making space for more drivers encourages drivers to drive more."

The Strong Towns feed at Twitter (@StrongTowns):

"Five years later, this $1 billion highway-widening project has seen drive times stay the same or even increase, at all hours of the day. Yeah, not shocked. Thanks to our old friend induced demand, the old adage holds true:

#MoreLanesEqualsMoreTraffic

It's never too late to begin learning about induced demand.

Stuck in traffic? Pay close attention: "Here’s how 'induced demand' works."

As in the San Fernando Valley -- but first, a number. A cappella, no less.

Nary an Auto-Tune in sight.

Five years after Sepulveda Pass widening, travel times on the 405 keep getting worse, by Elijah Chiland (LA Curbed)

Average drive times through the Sepulveda Pass have stayed the same or increased at all hours of the day

Five years ago this month, a northbound carpool lane opened on the 405 freeway, between the 10 and 101 freeways, widening 10 miles of the interstate. It took half a decade to construct and cost more than $1 billion.

Since then, average northbound drive times through the Sepulveda Pass have increased at all hours of the day, according to data from traffic analyst Inrix.

With more drivers on the road, it’s not surprising that delays have increased along the 405 since the carpool lane opened, but the numbers from Inrix highlight the potential for widening projects like the Sepulveda Pass project to deliver diminishing returns.

"Riding alone in a car is an increasingly unaffordable luxury."

"Car-related subsidies of all sorts are becoming harder to sustain. Their loss could reveal mass travel in single-occupancy cars to be a no-longer-affordable luxury."

Ostensibly about the non-profitability of Uber and Lyft, the article makes valuable points about the various ways we subsidize "vehicular solitude."

Riding alone in a car is an increasingly unaffordable luxury (at The Economist)

Whether you drive yourself or hail a ride, solitary splendour will become more expensive

 ... Until they turn profits, ride-hailing firms will be vulnerable to a loss of investors’ patience. But drivers of private vehicles also receive plenty of implicit support. Drivers impose environmental hazards on others at no financial cost to themselves, from the health effects of local air pollution to the climate change resulting from carbon emissions. And then there is congestion. The right to use scarce road space is valuable. When it is given away, drivers overuse available roads, and clog them. The waste is colossal. An estimate by INRIX, a consulting firm, suggests that the value of time lost to traffic in 2018 in America alone reached $87bn.

Which leads us to the "t" word.

Removing the subsidy to drivers means pricing road space by levying tolls that increase with traffic. That would deter driving, and reduce congestion and other social costs of automobile use. Such charges are rarely popular with drivers. But governments’ enthusiasm for new, untolled roads has dimmed. And they do not help much with traffic. Gilles Duranton of the University of Pennsylvania and Matthew Turner of Brown University posit a “fundamental law of road congestion”: unless road space is priced appropriately, new capacity reduces the cost of driving, thereby inducing more of it, leading, eventually, to renewed congestion.

Of course the fundamental premise remains that we must live in a dispersed manner that requires the use of a private vehicle.

Congestion pricing would reduce the delay associated with multiple stops. Indeed, in a subsidy-free world car-pooling of all sorts would increase. On a once congestion-clogged highway in Northern Virginia, for example, the number of cars with multiple occupants has risen by 15% since the introduction in 2017 of tolls that vary with the level of congestion.

For decades, the striving working class has dreamed of the freedom to commute in the splendid isolation of a private car. “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure,” Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have said. The real failure may be a widespread, persistent reluctance to grapple with the cost of travel in vehicular solitude—whether with or without the aid of an app.

Ponder the happiness of our State Street corridor while reading about "The Causes of Traffic and Congestion."

File under:

"Attempting to address congestion with solutions that make it easier to drive can make the problem worse by continuing to make the car the preferred way to get around."

Alternatives, anyone?

The Causes of Traffic and Congestion, by Andrew Price (Strong Towns)

There are many misconceptions in my local conversation about what does or does not induce motor traffic. Some of these misconceptions are:

• Single family homes do not increase traffic. If all we build are single-family homes, this will forever stay a quiet neighborhood.
• Commercial development does not increase traffic, because it does not add more residents.
• Congestion is bad, and we should treat avoiding it as a priority.

Let's dive into it: traffic, what causes it, and what we can do about it.

The Role of the Street Network
The largest contributor to congestion is the hierarchical road network. This is where you have local streets feed into collectors that feed into arterials that feed into highways.

The Strong Towns article on Dealing with Congestion explains why this is bad. We are funneling all traffic through a small number of streets, giving us a lower vehicle capacity as well as fewer redundancies for when things go wrong (creating a fragile road network where one clog can grind traffic to a halt), and artificially spaces things out by reducing what you can reach in a given distance (sometimes stupidly so as in the case where two houses share a backyard despite their front doors being 7 miles apart).

A highly connected street network (this can mean a grid, but can also take non-geometric forms such as the street network of a medieval city) is better because there are a ton of redundancies (a street closure does not matter if you have countless alternative routes from A to B) and distances are shorter as you can take a more direct route from A to B. Because the load is distributed over the many redundancies, we are no longer funneling all of the traffic over a small handful of collectors or arterials, so you are going to encounter less traffic along your way, even if all else (population density, amount of travel) remains equal.

Designating a main thoroughfare, with higher speed and greater capacity, to funnel traffic through is bad, even if it is part of a street grid. This thoroughfare will attract all of the traffic until it is so congested that it no longer offers a speed advantage over alternative routes (such as parallel side streets), and all people will do is complain how congested it is. This holds true any time we deal with funneling a flow: getting all cars to take the same road, asking all spectators to leave through the same stadium door after a sports game, making all travelers at the airport to go through a single security line, pushing all commuters onto a single transit line, getting all permit approvals to flow through a single queue, and so on. It does not take many people for it to feel crowded when everyone is concentrated in one place.

Snipping through to the conclusion.

Is congestion really a problem?
At the end of the day, we should not worry too much about congestion or traffic. Congestion is part of the solution, not the problem. Congestion is feedback that we have built a place people want to be. The response to congestion should be to allow that Mexican restaurant to open up 3 blocks away rather than 2 miles away. To create bus lines and bike lanes that give people alternative ways to get around. The incorrect response to congestion is to build faster and wider streets, because that just reinforces car dependency and all of the negative consequences that come with it.

To summarize:

Development can add traffic. However, development that brings amenities and people closer together and reduces the need to travel so far can actually reduce traffic. With a mixture of uses, you can achieve a high population density with very little motor traffic.

A highly-connected street network (either a street grid or organic) with many redundancies better distributes the load of traffic and is more resilient to disruptions.

Designated thoroughfares and bypasses create an illusion of traffic because they funnel the traffic through a single point (and with this comes the fragility of a single point of failure that can bring down the system).

Attempting to address congestion with solutions that make it easier to drive can make the problem worse by continuing to make the car the preferred way to get around.

We should not worry too much about congestion, because it creates demand for other modes of transportation and for amenities to be closer.

Befuddlement at the news as strange council bedfellows unite to defeat West Street Mews.

The News and Tribune's Chris Morris recorded the quote as 6th district council representative Scott Blair tried to explain his opposition to a townhouse development off West Street in New Albany.

(Councilman Scott) Blair had other concerns. "There are just too many units for two acres. Seems too congestive for me," Blair said.

Actually, normal usage of the adjective congestive lies in specialized medical applications, like congestive heart failure: "Involving or producing too much blood or other liquid in an organ."

We use congested to describe “clogged,” “overcrowded,” or “overfull,” as when a lifetime of eating fatty fried food leaves one with congested arteries. In like fashion, overpopulated cities and crowded roads are said to be congested.

Bankers. Can't live with 'em ... can't teach 'em the meaning of words like density and infill.

Meanwhile, "mews" might be trite and annoying developer-speak for townhouses in Coffeyville, but it jibes point by point with those same passages about infill and density included in the city's new comprehensive plan -- the one authored by Team Gahan to encourage housing precisely like this, and yet opposed last night by three of four councilman in Gahan's own sad party, plus Blair (huh?) and Dan Coffey himself.

Maybe the project's backers forgot to grease Dear Leader's re-election wheels.

We are reminded of a bedrock truth pertaining to city council politics in New Albany, which won't ever change for so long as Coffey remains a councilman, because the reason why the West End forever languishes is that Coffey himself opposes change in his own environs with clock-like regularity.

The Wizard simply cannot survive in a socio-economic habitat any different from the one he has cultivated (read: kept waaaay down) during more than two decades of underachievement. He can always get the votes he needs from absentee ballots collected at Riverview Tower; not so ironically, a building comprising public housing units slated for refurbishing rather than the guillotine.

Coffey is nothing if not consistent. Blair is nothing if not confused.

By the way, the Horseshoe Foundation non-binding resolution passed unanimously. Morris must have left the meeting before then. Ominously, with Elizabeth Beilman departed, New Albany's about to get it good and hard from Hanson's tone-deaf newspaper in terms of non-coverage -- again.

Council votes down plan for townhouses

PUDD defeated by 5-4 vote

NEW ALBANY — It's back to the drawing board for the proposed West Street Mews Development.

Thursday night, the New Albany City Council voted 5-4 to reject a PUDD request in an R-2 district at 1105-1109 West Street on third reading, which defeats the proposed ordinance. The proposal was to build 26 townhouses on the 1.9 acres of vacant property. Without a PUDD, only 12 units can be built there now under R-2 zoning laws.

"It's back to the drawing board. This puts an end to this process," said attorney Greg Fifer, who represented West Street Mews Development, after the meeting.

The development had already received approval from the New Albany Plan Commission. And one city councilman, Dr. Al Knable, said he thought it would be a great addition to the neighborhood.

"It would be nice to have this sort of dwelling in there," Knable said prior to the vote. "The key to this is owner occupied. We need more of that in town. I think it would be one of the better developments in that part of town since I was a kid."

However, after a long discussion, the change to a PUDD did not have enough support. Knable, Matt Nash, David Aebersold and David Barksdale voted for the PUDD while Scott Blair, Dan Coffey, Greg Phipps, Bob Caesar and Pat McLaughlin voted against.

Marohn: "The most successful places are full of congestion."

Not Wyoming.

Minnesota.

DEALING WITH CONGESTION, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... Most of Senator Murphy's conversation dealt with the chronic issue of congestion. Notice I did not call congestion a problem. It's clearly not. Within our places -- on our streets -- congestion is an indicator of success. As Yogi Berra reportedly said:

"Nobody goes there any more because it is too busy."

Indeed. The most successful places are full of congestion.

Between our places -- on our roads -- congestion signals many things but, for me anyway, it primarily indicates America's cultural -- and the engineering profession's technical -- misunderstanding of the systems we have built.

Consider the hierarchical road network. It's so commonplace today that we rarely stop to question it. Small, local streets empty into collector streets. Those collectors empty into arterials. The arterials empty into major arterials which eventually end up pouring into our highway systems. Small to big; it's the way things are done.

Stop a moment to examine a watershed. There you have ditches that flow into small creeks. Those creeks flow into larger brooks and streams. In turn these flow into larger rivers and, ultimately, these systems come together to form some of the world's major waterways.

We all intuitively understand that, when we experience rain or snow melt on the edges of a watershed, there is a compounding effect that occurs. We've become fairly competent at realizing that, by the time all this rain comes together, it very often produces a flood.

We've so grasped this concept that we've taken steps to address the problem at the source. We don't allow people to fill their wetlands. We require developers to retain their runoff on site. We build retention systems to hold back runoff and feed stormwater into the natural systems more slowly so flooding does not occur. We take these steps and others at the source to mitigate the cumulative, negative impacts of stormwater runoff. Namely: flooding.

Instead of a river network, examine a similar system of roadways during a typical commute. Here we have rain of a different sort: the automobiles that emanate forth from the development we induce, subsidize and cheer for out on the periphery of our cities.

Why are we so shocked when this produces a flood?

WE. CREATE. THE. FLOOD ...

On the errant notion of downtown two-way gridlock: The "I'll huff and puff and boycott a place I rarely go anyway, except to pass through" approach.

Just imagine if City Hall and captive non-profits like Develop New Albany had devoted just a bit of time educating the populace. Well, parties are more fun, I guess.

On the topic of impending two-way streets, our neighbor Jessica hits the center of the target and drops the mic:

"I'm sorry that this is going to slow down your commute and not allow you to speed down my neighborhood street. I'm sorry that two-way streets are going to make it safer for pedestrians. I'm sorry that this is going to cause less accidents to occur. I'm sorry this is going to make our city a walkable city. I'm sorry that this transition is going to continue to help our local businesses thrive. I'm sorry that this is going to make it safer for my family and all of the families with children that have begun to move to this area. Imagine if your subdivision/neighborhood streets were a speedway and think about how you would feel? Now think about downtown New Albany." 

Her hashtag: #sorrynotsorry

Right on, neighbor. Right on. Yesterday the social media-sphere was filled with the threats of flat-earthers to boycott downtown New Albany because the exact same number of traffic lanes will exist after the two-way reversion, just as they did before, but because the configuration is different, OMIGOD HOW WILL WE EVER MANAGE IT.

Maybe by paying attention?

There is a word that can't be repeated often enough to those who threaten to boycott downtown because two-way streets will require them to drive a tad more slowly and (heaven forbid) pay attention to the community outside their car windows:

Promise?

Even before the mayor has mounted his first self-congratulatory plaque, indignant pass-through drivers are screaming about gridlock, and as usual, Jeff Gillenwater provides the most devastating refutation of these spasms:

If people have to wait for more than a traffic light or two in downtown New Albany after having already sped through the neighborhood, traffic is "backed up" and that's usually just because too many drivers aren't smart enough to take alternate routes all of two blocks in either direction from Spring. It often takes me longer to exit the interstate via the 9th Street ramp in Louisville than it does to navigate the "traffic" in downtown New Albany. It's a lot like parking perception: There are typically so few problems with automobile congestion in Downtown New Albany, any seems like a lot. Those frustrated drivers, though, like to take it out on everybody else once they hit the ramps, driving 70-75 mph and weaving in and out of lanes because everybody knows that it's well worth risking multiple lives to keep them from being five minutes late to wherever they're going. I mean, they might not have time for a second cup of coffee at their destination before they have to get started with their work. If everybody driving a car was 1/3 as important as a lot of them seem to think they are, I could roll down my windows and chat with Nobel Prize winners every morning.

Perhaps my favorite of all was the man who said he'd be taking his business to all the wonderful restaurants on Veterans Parkway.

Dude: don't make promises that you can't keep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few links from the past ...

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

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

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

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

 ... and something a bit more recent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death to auto-centrism: "If widening roads worsens congestion then is it also true that narrowing or removing roads reduces congestion? Yes."

Undoubtedly one of the clearest explanations I've read.

Why Road-Widening Doesn’t Work ... And What Does, by Adam Greenfield (The Plaza Perspective)

 ... No longer can road widening be justified as a congestion-easing tool. Road widening lengthens commutes, increases household costs, worsens pollution, harms the economy, and, let us not forget, kills and injures millions of people globally every year. Transportation departments and politicians had the evidence decades ago and many continue to ignore it to this day. We need to make them understand.

The solution to congestion is compact development and multimodal (and sometimes pedestrian-only) streets. Wherever cars come into contact with well-designed human-scaled cities there’ll always be congestion; cars are extremely inefficient uses of space, after all, and are incompatible with great places. The question is: Do we want a lot of traffic congestion or a little?

ASK THE BORED: A 6-pack of BOW's top-scoring posts of the year at NA Confidential, as we try our best to forget them.

Of all posts this year tagged "Board of Public Works and Safety" or "Board of Public Works," these are the top six, according to Blogger's page view metric.

At its most basic, this board channels public financing of works. The chairman is Warren Nash, former Democratic Party tribal chieftain, who is there only because six decades of experience greasing wheels ensures that no campaign finance slush goes unslung. The abacus fairly sweats, and the rubber always meets the freshly paved road.

(The other two board members are Mickey Thompson, the street department commissioner, and Cheryl Cotner-Bailey, the mayor’s secretary and wife of the police chief.)

As for safety, yes, the word is mentioned every now and then, about as often as I concede to savoring the full, rich flavor of Bud Light.

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590
No decision has been reached on new Street Piano Project, says Board of Works and Public Safety.

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606
ASK THE BORED: Can we all have a banner atop the levee, or just the school corporation?

I've had several reader questions about the NAFC schools banner currently hanging on degraded remains of the structure atop the levee by the amphitheater. Because I'll be out of town, I cannot attend this week's BOW meeting and ask them. Perhaps someone else will.

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613
I asked about bicycle racks, and have been directed to CM Barksdale and the Redevelopment Commission.

"Will the Bored of Works be placing bicycle racks on sidewalks, and if so, will it finalize the bike racks before or after the results come back from HWC Engineering's two-way street design and engineering study?"

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617
ON THE AVENUES: Requiem for the bored.

It was another stellar day for auto-centrism in New Albany, and contrary to previous assurances, not a single egg was broken, Larry – just a random walker struck down, and never mentioned, not once, not by anyone in the room. She was probably too poor to afford a car -- right, Warren?

Tell me something.

Exactly how does any of this make any of you proud of your jobs?

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650
Two Way Streets now? Finally? Gahan sets the bar as low as humanly possible and somehow clears it, as BOW opts for a rational street grid.

In the worst kept secret since the Electoral College sucks, the Board of Works voted today to adopt Option B, which restores two-way traffic to Elm, Spring, Market, Bank and Pearl, though at the considerable and heart-rending expense of gutting most of consultant Jeff Speck's worthiest proposals for bicycling lanes and parking innovations on these and other subsequently omitted streets (State and Vincennes most glaringly).

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670
ON THE AVENUES: When the engineer uttered that scandalous word aloud, it was like Christmas in June.

There’ll be even more delays, snarls and slowdowns when toll evasion begins, even though INDOT predicts these disruptions will be brief (one month or less), and the overarching point everyone at BOW needs to grasp is this revamped section of Spring between Silver Creek and Vincennes is intended to be a check valve, to do exactly this – this process, this choking off … to willfully cause … CONGESTION.

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

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

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

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Interpreting streets as places only to move cars instead of people turns cities into uninviting places for people.
-- Janette Sadik-Khan, Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

On Tuesday, I had the rotten luck to find myself at a meeting of the Board of Public Works and Safety, but then an unprecedented bit of truthfulness broke out.

Now I’m worried – nay, terrified.

Was it the wrong teleprompter? Did someone spike my gin? Will we ever be the same again?

For those just tuning in, one consistent theme has emerged from four and a half years of Royal Attitudinal Gahanism (RAG): Appearances count for everything -- unless they count for nothing at all.

Nowhere is RAG better illustrated than in the city’s ongoing streets saga, otherwise known as “to complete, or not to complete.”

For two years, the mayor’s minions privately have insisted that even Jeff Speck himself doesn’t understand two-way walkability quite as well as Jeff Gahan, rube suburbanite turned urban savant.

They’ve also acted in concert with their perpetually bunkered boss to prevent any of this stunning expertise from being revealed publicly, where it might lead citizens to understand the stakes of street grid reform – and if information isn’t solely controlled by City Hall, then what?

Amid the ongoing stasis, we turn to the very end of Tuesday’s BOW session, when Pinocchio Rosenbarger bounded forward to inform the bored about what is generally being called the Spring Street/Silver Street intersection project, which includes a “reconfigured” traffic pattern from Beharrell to Vincennes.

After Speck’s plan was handed in 2015 to HWC Engineering's sawdust sausage makers, this Spring/Silver project suddenly was prioritized, becoming the focus of the city’s rice-paper-thin public relations outreach.

Unsurprisingly, talking points have been devoted exclusively to automotive safety issues, with scant mention of a suggested “bonus” for bicyclists in the form of yet another set of bike lanes beginning nowhere and leading to sharrows – surely the laziest concept in the checkered history of American traffic engineering.

But I digress.

On Tuesday the Gods were merciful, and the ever unctuous Rosenbarger quickly yielded the podium to Wes Christmas of Clark-Dietz for the project update.

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Verily, Christmas is neither Jeff Speck nor Janette Sadik-Khan. He’s a by-the-numbers engineer working for a by-the-numbers engineering firm, and both will continue to derive the greatest portion of their paychecks from the prevailing cancer of auto-centrism, as passed through a prism of by-the-numbers local campaign finance, with a dainty garnish of paving contractor slush for uniform beak wetting.

As Christmas began, there was nothing to suggest a departure from the same tired bromides. The engineer briefed the bored on the project’s July starting date (ending in October), and reiterated the reason for the largely federally-financed reconfiguration: Drivers and their vehicles.

It’s about wrestling this Four-Lane Crash-Generating Death Road to the mat, putting it on a diet, and making it safer for internal combustion, with a few negligible side benefits for those pathetic creatures too poor to own a car.

The yawns were palpable … then Christmas abruptly departed from the script, saying that he wanted to make sure everyone understood what was about to occur as this stretch of asphalt was altered. His tone of voice changed, as though a confession was about to be ventured.

Traffic will be snarled during construction, said Christmas.

(Nods and papers shuffling. Labored cell phones.)

What’s more, continued Christmas, no sooner than the work concludes, Ohio River Bridge tolling begins, and an expected inflow of traffic on Spring Street as drivers from far and wide seek a quick path through New Albany to the toll-free Sherman Minton Bridge.

And ...

There’ll be even more delays, snarls and slowdowns when toll evasion begins, even though INDOT predicts these disruptions will be brief (one month or less), and the overarching point everyone at BOW needs to grasp is this revamped section of Spring between Silver Creek and Vincennes is intended to be a check valve, to do exactly this – this process, this choking off … to willfully cause …

CONGESTION.

Boom, and out it came: CONGESTION, this glorious word finally liberated and unfettered, because as Christmas explained, CONGESTION is the key to coping with an unwanted proliferation of pass-through drivers seeking easy toll avoidance, because while we can do nothing to dissuade them from evading tolls, we can impose costs of added time and unease on those choosing to pass through New Albany.

Hallelujah. A concept, CONGESTION, free at last -- and me, without a hankie.

Christmas might as well have been reading Speck’s Downtown Street Network Proposal verbatim, and boy, it would have been appropriate had he done so, given that many city officials present haven’t ever heard (or read) Speck’s actual words.

It is essential that downtown street networks be designed based upon the amount of traffic that they experience rather than in anticipation of larger volumes. This is particularly the case when a community is threatened by an onslaught of new traffic as is feared from the new INDOT tolling regime. A street system that is designed around higher-volume and higher-speed traffic can be expected to quickly receive this traffic—especially trucks, whose drivers are keenly sensitive to the time and cost of travel.

In contrast, a street system that is designed to accept reasonable volumes at reasonable speeds is likely a city’s only defense against the noxious impacts of pass-through traffic.

CONGESTION. It’s our friend. At long last, this fact was conceded, publicly … by an engineer.

Jeff Gahan hasn’t referenced “CONGESTION” for attribution. Not one peep from the collective Board of Works. Redevelopment? Mum.

But the functionary from Clark Dietz did, and good for him. Now, I’m not sure why this happened. Perhaps Christmas is our Günter Schabowski, the East German media liaison whose confusion over hastily scribbled notes led to an inadvertent announcement that brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989.

So much for the good news. Now, for the bad.

--

With no imminent plan to tame the city’s one-way arterial streets downtown via Speck, and prior to tolling, the Spring/Silver project represents all available eggs of contingency deposited into one tiny basket of "preparation."

Maybe a start, but only minimal. It totally neglects the imperative of dispersing traffic in both directions on multiple reconverted two-way streets.

Obviously, imposed congestion between Beharrell and Vincennes does nothing to address traffic eastbound from the toll-free Sherman Minton Bridge, heading back to Clark County.

These are the helter-skelter, pass-through drivers of cars and trucks who’ll be racing down Market and Elm, making a mockery of what little walkability we enjoy at present and hurting, not helping, downtown businesses.

Does the rube suburban turned urban savant have an answer for this?

Maybe Wes Christmas can interpret Jeff Gahan’s perpetual silence, and do the community a second favor.

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Fortunately, not all of New Albany’s older white men are clueless, even if it usually seems that way. I bumped into one of the exceptions on Wednesday, and “Sid” asked me what I thought of the paper’s most recent two-way street spotlight article.

“Miserable bilge,” I replied. “Think of it as Chris Morris’s revenge, and it makes perfect sense.”

“That’s about right,” Sid said. “At the same time, it’s not like there's ever been any governing management at the ‘Bune. The article was embarrassing. All the new restaurants and shops, and they didn’t ask a single one of them what they thought about two-way streets.”

Sid smiled teasingly: “So, how’d you like ol’ Bobby Caesar’s testimony?”

My lips formed a sneer.

“Nothing unusual; lots of personal opinions about the lessons he learned, holed up on Pearl Street for 40 years, stewing with mall envy.  No facts from Bob, ever. The thing about Caesar is that he doesn’t even understand his own business career.”

“How so?”

I launched into a familiar rant.

“Bob still thinks his customers came to him only because one-way streets made it easy, but in reality, it never was fast and easy to get to Endris Jewelers. Ever. People always went out of their way to come to downtown New Albany, and still do.

“For all those years, his store was a destination business – and with destination businesses, speed and location don’t matter. People come to see you because you provide them with valued service, just like when we started the pub.

“Bob looks in the mirror, and he still can’t grasp that people went out of their way to see him not because a one-way street saved them 45 seconds of transit time, but because Bob was good at what he did.”

Sid rubbed the gray stubble on his chin.

“Well, his dad – maybe.”

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June 9: ON THE AVENUES: High atop Summit Springs with friends (and relatives) in low places.

June 2: ON THE AVENUES: A few beers at Vladimir’s local in Ostrava in June, 1989.

May 26: ON THE AVENUES: On the crass exploitation and politicization of tragedy.

May 19: ON THE AVENUES: Requiem for the bored.

May 12: ON THE AVENUES: A design for life.