Democrat John Gilkey reveals himself to be a drooling automobile-centric Luddite. That's just too bad, isn't it?

Stay strong, Clarksville. Redesign Brown's Station Way for safety and modernity, and implement this street grid reform plan.

See, here's a positive comment to add to John Gilkey's purportedly universal negative reactions. But don't expect me to help you grease your knob, John. Can't say I like your stick shift quite that much.

The onetime journalist Gilkey well knows how to work a crowd of mouth-breathing car fetishists. Heroically making love to both your vehicles and his, John has opted for the high-speed populism of the eight-cylinder gas-guzzler, while still ridiculously posturing as a "liberal" in matters of state and national importance.

Don't we deserve the same consistency locally, John, not easy potshots at roundabouts, which you know will sell like Mountain Dew to the motorists whose sole consideration is to pass through your town quickly?



Gilkey displays not only ignorance as it pertains to street grid modernity, but political hypocrisy; then again, we already knew hypocrisy isn't restricted to Republicans.

A Biden guy, eh? Or maybe Bloomberg.

Let's just hope those in Clarksville who get it will do it.

GILKEY OP-ED: Road project takes wrong turn in the News&Bune

Clarksville has taken a wrong turn with its Brown’s Station Way road project. Spending just under $17 million to solve problems that don’t exist is the wrong course of action in my opinion.

I represent Clarksville’s 2nd District on the Town Council and serve on the town’s Redevelopment Commission in addition to the Plan Commission and the town’s Technical Review Committee, so I have a reasonably good idea of what is happening in town. Since the proposed road project was first unveiled last year, I have heard nothing but negative comments about the venture. To paraphrase a colloquialism, I could count the number of positive comments I have received on one hand and have enough fingers left to open a greased doorknob.

The project proposes turning a major traffic artery through town into a residential 2-lane street with a 35 mile-an-hour speed limit, interjecting two roundabouts, removing the overpass at Brown’s Station Way and Lewis and Clark Parkway and replacing it with an at-grade traffic light-controlled intersection, and replacing the pedestrian overpass near Randolph Avenue with a profoundly upscaled crossing.

In my mind, the project is an absurd expenditure of money to solve problems that mostly do not exist ...

ASK THE BORED: Heavy truck traffic banned in Ybor City, fetishized in New Albany.

I had intended skip a turn for our weekly stroll down the civic boredwalk, because after all, this post three days ago would have sufficed.

But do I really look like a guy with a plan?

Invariably, when faced with a question they can't or won't answer, there is silence like snow falling on the earth.

As last night's council rubber-stamping should clearly attest, whatever plan I possess usually requires me to be a glutton for punishment, but then again so are they, so let's take a look at an expression of municipal principle so amazing that it might be happening on Jupiter, such are the chances of New Albany's ruling elite ever grasping it.

YBOR CITY BANS TRUCK TRAFFIC, EYES A BALANCED FUTURE

As heavy truck traffic is removed from the streets of Ybor City, efforts to return the area to its place as one of West Florida's most vibrant urban neighborhoods receive a major boost.

As 2016 came to an end, merchants, residents and developers in Tampa's Ybor City could look forward to a future that they themselves would define rather than a future that has been forced upon them for the greater part of 50 years by an interstate highway system.

More than 6,000 tractor trailers would cut through the neighborhood along 21st and 22nd Streets, the main exit off I-4 into Ybor City, carrying cargo to and from the Port of Tampa. A trail of destruction that crippled buildings, clogged otherwise residential roadways and thwarted redevelopment efforts followed in the wake of this heavy truck traffic.

Now, heavy truck traffic has been banned in Ybor City and redirected to a $426 million connector between Interstate 4 and Lee Roy Selmon Expressway in order to efficiently serve the port and bypass the neighborhood all together.

Removing 21st and 22nd Streets from Tampa's list of approved truck routes represented a culmination of infrastructure enhancements throughout Ybor City that are all designed to return the neighborhood into a less auto-centric, mixed-use neighborhood. On 21st and 22nd Streets alone, over $9.5 million was spent on infrastructure improvements that have included slimming down the streets from three lanes to two, widening sidewalks, adding features such as bike lanes, on-street parking and lamp posts, as well as upgrading stormwater systems and water and sewer pipes.

On the first day the official truck traffic ban went into affect, Ybor City was no longer merely an industrial area that housed the last vestiges of a legacy population too stubborn to relocate. At once, the building-shaking sounds of heavy truck traffic that once ripped right through the heart of the community went silent. Instead, the sounds of wild chickens crowing, conversations among people enjoying espressos in outdoor café spaces and children playing on playground equipment filled the air.

New Albany's new slogan: "Truck Through City" ... Part 101: An election changes nothing in Downlowburg.

Now you see our city's potential ...

... and now you don't.

Back on September 8, I left off with Part 100, and might have snapped another few hundred views of diesel mayhem, but things were a bit hectic. Welcome to the continuation -- of the "truck through" series, and New Albany's cold steel ecstasy.

New Albany's new slogan: "Truck Through City" ... Part 100: Mister Padgett's coal train has hauled it away.

As in the preceding 99 episodes of this depressing series, we present diesel-powered visuals, the essence of which vividly contradict the original design and best present use of multi-modal streets running through densely populated urban areas -- streets once redesigned to interstate highway specifications, for reasons that were bad then and worse now, and which are in desperate need of reversion to their original aim as routes for people, not fast-moving machines.

All other expenditures and efforts we undertake to "revitalize" neighborhoods are flatly contradicted, and often cruelly usurped, by our arterial, one-way street design -- and yet, the political response in New Albany has been consistent in only one way: Ongoing, unprincipled and sniveling cowardice.

This needs to change.

Every one of  600+ trucks pictured in this series over a period of almost two years WOULD STILL BE ABLE TO USE city streets completed and calmed according to Jeff Speck's plan -- not to be confused with the idiotic Main Street beautification aberration -- and so would everyone else.

We'd all use the streets more slowly, and more safely. Walkability and bicycle use would be enhanced.

The "ripple effect" so often mistakenly cited by dime store time-servers to describe the mythical fallout from bonded capital projects actually would have the chance to occur, in both reality and real neighborhoods, as manifested by greater quality of life and heightened property values; as we've pointed out on numerous occasions, these two-way benefits are being objectively charted and are the subject of steadily amassing fact, not fiction.

Trucking interests and heavy industrial operators belong in an industrial park near the actual interstate, not in downtown areas more suited for human habitation and use, and we have the as yet unused acreage on the north side.

Let's make a deal, because multiple positive outcomes occur when business is being done where it should, and people are living their lives where they should.

Making it happen will require thinking outside matchbook-sized "economic development as usual" boxes, and a fair dollop of political courage.

See any of these qualities in candidates standing for office this November? Then vote for those who have them, and as for those who don't ...

 ... sorry, Jeff. We'll have to let you go, but maybe Mr. Padgett can hire you to run one of his coal trains.

You DO have a CDL, right?

New Albany's new slogan: "Truck Through City" ... Part 99: Trucks, institutional cowardice and another Bored to Tears of Works Tuesday!

The months roll past like the heavy haulers, equipment and machinery, and the bored?

They do nothing.

Some day, preferably when the current occupant has returned to selling veneer, perhaps this scenario will change, and we'll realize that the logic of the interstate is the illogic of densely populated urban areas.

But not just yet.

Institutional cowardice and anti-intellectualism make for a toxic mix. Diesel fetishists, enjoy the weekly collection of Things the Mighty Oz Doesn't Acknowledge from Behind That Curtain.

New Albany's new slogan: "Truck Through City" ... Part 98: Diesel-fueled postcard vistas of downtown on a Bored to Death of Works Tuesday!

Oops -- they can't all be scenic vistas.