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

We might blame it on the pandemic, but COVID-19 did not cause ongoing issues with New Albany's streets. It merely exposed the design flaws.

When there hasn't been congestion -- as on Mt. Tabor during construction-related diversions -- there has been mayhem, both there and amid the downtown street grid, with much speeding and bad driving behavior.

You see, it's the design. You know, the design we just paid millions ... to design, whether Mt. Tabor or the thoroughly botched two-way reversion: City Hall's "20% Of Two-Way Usefulness Solution."

But you see, anyone with a grounding in modernity always knew that speeding primarily owes to design. That's why the Mt. Tabor neighborhood protested from the start that modernizing the road would make things worse, because they reasoned correctly that the redesign would, in fact, lead to conditions making excessive speed more likely, and attracting more users.

The city pushed it through because it had the matching funds, because the pay-for-play already was transacted, and -- well -- because of sheer ego. Because it COULD. And now even the chief of police says that design is responsible for speeding.

The design.

You know, the design we just paid millions ... to design.

Engineer Summers speaks for City Hall; why, our powers that be are powerless to do anything about these annual traffic increases (which were invited by the speeding-friendly "new" design), and so they must continue forever adding even more lanes, roundabouts, and whatever else is deemed necessary -- by some of the mayor's principal campaign donors -- to make more work room for added traffic ... and by doing so, assuring there'll be even more traffic (induced demand, folks).

Don't look at me. YOU'RE the ones who keep voting for these people.

Mount Tabor Road traffic again a topic of discussion, by Daniel Suddeath (Tom May Insta-Pulpit)

 ... That project has been a contentious issue between the city and residents of the neighborhood. The roundabout idea was scrapped before the first phase of improvements were launched in 2019 by the city after a public meeting when several residents spoke out against the proposal.


Summers countered that the traffic congestion is a preview of what the road will look like in 10 years if nothing is done.

“This will present a problem for the intersection of Mount Tabor and Klerner as traffic continues to grow,” Summers said, citing a Kentucky Regional Planning and Development Agency study that suggests traffic will increase in the region by about 1 percent annually.

"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.

Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct, and why "predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand."

Not that I'd expect Warren Nash or the Bored with Works to read this, but you should.

Why Carmaggedon never comes (Seattle edition), by Joe Cortright (City Observatory)

Why predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand

Seattle has finally closed its aging Alaskan Way viaduct, a six-lane double-decker freeway that since the 1940s has been a concrete scar separating Seattle’s downtown from Elliott Bay. In a few weeks, much of this capacity will be replaced by a new 3 billion dollar highway tunnel under downtown Seattle, but until then, the city will have to simply do without a big chunk of the highway system that circulates cars around downtown Seattle.

Losing a major freeway that carries nearly hundred thousand vehicles a day through the heart of the city will certainly cause a major disruption to the traffic. The Seattle Times confidently told its readers in early January to prepare for a traffic cataclysm: “the region can’t absorb the viaduct’s 90,000 daily vehicle trips and 30,000 detoured bus riders without traffic jams that likely will ripple out as far as [distant suburbs] Woodinville or Auburn.” Our friends at CityLab echoed the ominous rhetoric with a story headlined “Viadoom: Time for the Seattle Squeeze Traffic Hell.”

That’s pretty scary stuff. But two days into Seattle’s brush with carmaggedon how are things looking?

Fairly good, actually.

It may seem like a stretch to suggest that closing the Alaskan Way viaduct actually made traffic conditions in Seattle better, but in some respects, thats likely to be the case. Worried about getting caught in a traffic jam, it’s likely that many travelers postponed or re-rerouted their trips. If closing the viaduct reduces the number of trips to downtown Seattle, it reduces traffic on other streets as well.

Consequently ...

What road closures teach us about travel demand

So what’s going on here? Arguably, our mental model of traffic is just wrong. We tend to think of traffic volumes, and trip-making generally as inexorable forces of nature. The diurnal flow of 100,000 vehicles a day on an urban freeway the Alaskan Way viaduct is just as regular and predictable as the tides. What this misses is that there’s a deep behavioral basis to travel. Human beings will shift their behavior in response to changing circumstances. If road capacity is impaired, many people can decide not to travel, change when they travel, change where they travel, or even change their mode of travel. The fact that Carmageddon almost never comes is powerful evidence of induced demand: people travel on roadways because the capacity is available for their trips, when when the capacity goes away, so does much of the trip making.

If we visualize travel demand as an fixed, irreducible quantity, it’s easy to imagine that there will be carmaggedon when a major link of the transportation system goes away. But in the face of changed transportation system, people change their behavior. And while we tend to believe that most people have no choice and when and where they travel, the truth is many people do, and that they respond quickly to changes in the transportation system. Its a corollary of induced demand: when we build new capacity in urban roadways, traffic grows quickly to fill it, resulting in more travel and continuing traffic jams. What we have here is “reduced demand”–when we cut the supply of urban road space, traffic volumes fall.

“When we add capacity, we induce more driving. So there’s sort of a vicious cycle: We widen roads, people drive more; we widen roads, people drive more.”

As one component of this blog's enduring commitment to public service, here's another of our periodic efforts to help readers understand induced demand.

Yes, we know it's impossible to stockpile campaign contributions by not awarding engineering, paving and road construction projects.

Right, Ed Jolliffe?

Here I go again.

Study calls for curbing congestion by building fewer roads, by Eric Hamilton (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Cities clamor for new development, with its promise of new housing or economic opportunities. Then comes the unwelcome side effect: congestion.

Popular new attractions or dozens of new apartments mean more travel in the neighborhood. To cope, cities typically require developers to add highway capacity for many new car trips, plus the parking those cars need, or pay a fee so the city can make those improvements in their stead.

The catch is, all those new roads might make things worse.

“When we add capacity, we induce more driving,” says Eric Sundquist, managing director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI), a transportation think tank housed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “So there’s sort of a vicious cycle: We widen roads, people drive more; we widen roads, people drive more.”

SSTI and the UW–Madison-based Mayors Innovation Project recently released a new report arguing for a different approach that incentivizes diverse ways to travel to and from new developments. By funding public transportation, limiting parking and preserving the walkability of neighborhoods, Sundquist’s team argues, cities and states can reduce congestion better than if they only plan for cars.

The same solutions can help cities meet their policy goals, such as reduced emissions or more equitable access to services for residents.

“We look at the gap between policy goals on the one hand and the way decisions are being made that actually make things happen in the real world,” says Sundquist. “Often you have great policy goals, and then you have a bunch of rules of thumb that are still basically what was set in the ’50s during the interstate era.”

The report is designed to help cities set requirements for developers on managing the transportation impacts of their projects, using a menu of measures designed to minimize the need for driving. The goal is to promote sound development, reduce regulatory burdens, keep cities livable and avoid gridlock. SSTI calls its approach “modern mitigation.”

“The idea is, let’s first try to reduce the amount of driving that we’re going to generate in the first place before we add supply, and only add supply if we absolutely need to,” says Sundquist.

For example, adding housing as part of a new hospital development could mean fewer car trips by staff, who might choose to live close to work. Another system might subsidize bus passes for employees of a new office park, so those living along bus lines skip the car more often.

Employers have long adopted such demand-reduction methods to ease rush hour. In recent years, some cities have begun codifying similar mitigation rules to promote fewer and shorter car trips, especially those taken by a solo driver.

The SSTI report takes as examples demand mitigation endeavors in cities like Cambridge, Massachusetts, where fewer than 40 percent of employees drive to work alone in certain areas. Cambridge promotes systems like subsidized transit passes and shuttle services.

The core of SSTI’s proposal has developers propose a set of measures to reduce the demand for solo car trips depending on the size and other characteristics of their planned project. Cities then agree to the set of measures, make sure they work as intended and, if need be, enforce any penalties for noncompliance.

Shifting from conventional mitigation to modern mitigation may not require changes to laws in many municipalities, says Sundquist, who served on the Madison Plan Commission for seven years. The guidance given by such committees to developers is often a codified set of policies, rather than laws, with considerable flexibility.

Perhaps harder, Sundquist says, is shifting the focus away from adding roads toward reducing the need for those roads. Car-centric policies have been in place for a half-century or more and have in many cases made alternative policies harder to implement. The first step, he says, is to change course.

“We’re dealing with problems set in motion decades ago. “When you’re in a hole, quit digging.

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

Graph courtesy of Vox.

They're calling it CityLab University for a reason. The linked article isn't a meme, and it probably can't be read in the time it takes to skim a News and Tribune article.

However, your diligence will be rewarded.

Along with the daily output at Strong Towns, CityLab is essential reading for those seeking to understand how these things work. All our public officials should be reading these essays and others like them.

Are they?

CityLab University: Induced Demand, by Benjamin Schneider (CityLab)

It’s time again for “CityLab University,” a resource for understanding some of the most important concepts related to cities and urban policy. If you like this feature, have constructive feedback, or would like to see a similar explainer on other topics, drop us a line at editors@citylab.com.

When traffic-clogged highways are expanded, new drivers quickly materialize to fill them. What gives? Here’s how “induced demand” works.

With 26 lanes at its widest point, the Katy Freeway in the Houston metro is the Mississippi River of car infrastructure. Its current girth, which by some measures makes it the widest freeway in North America, was the result of an expansion project that took place between 2008 and 2011 at a cost of $2.8 billion. The primary reason for this mega-project was to alleviate severe traffic congestion.

And yet, after the freeway was widened, congestion got worse. An analysis by Joe Cortright of City Observatory used data from Houston’s official traffic monitoring agency to find that travel times increased by 30 percent during the morning commute and 55 percent during the evening commute between 2011 and 2014. A local TV station found similar increases.

The Sisyphean saga of the Katy Freeway is a textbook example of a counterintuitive urban transportation phenomenon that has vexed drivers, planners, and politicians since the dawn of the automobile age: induced demand.

KEY POINTS

• In urbanism, “induced demand” refers to the idea that increasing roadway capacity encourages more people to drive, thus failing to improve congestion.
• Since the concept was introduced in the 1960s, numerous academic studies have demonstrated the existence of ID.
• But some economists argue that the effects of ID are overstated, or outweighed by the benefits of greater automobility.
• Few federal, state, and local departments of transportation are thought to adequately account for ID in their long-term planning.

SUMMARY

Nearly all freeway expansions and new highways are sold to the public as a means of reducing traffic congestion. It’s a logical enough proposition, one that certainly makes plenty of sense to anyone who’s stuck in traffic: Small communities served by small roads grow bigger, and their highways need to grow with them. More lanes creates more capacity, meaning cars should be able to pass through faster. But that’s not what always happens once these projects are completed.

Just as with the Katy Freeway expansion, adding new roadway capacity also creates new demand for those lanes or roads, maintaining a similar rate of congestion, if not worsening it. Economists call this phenomenon induced demand: When you provide more of something, or provide it for a cheaper price, people are more likely to use it. Rather than thinking of traffic as a liquid, which requires a certain volume of space to pass through at a given rate, induced demand demonstrates that traffic is more like a gas, expanding to fill up all the space it is allowed.

Transportation researchers have been observing induced demand since at least the 1960s, when the economist Anthony Downs coined his Law of Peak Hour Traffic Congestion, which states that “on urban commuter expressways, peak-hour traffic congestion rises to meet maximum capacity.”

This list is helpful, too.

Further Reading

“Highway Boondoggles 3”

“The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion”

“Increasing Highway Capacity Unlikely to Relieve Congestion”

“online.trb.org/doi/abs/10.3141/2653-02?journalCode=trr" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: black;">Closing the Induced Vehicle Travel Gap Between Research and Practice”

“Generated Traffic and Induced Travel: Implications for Transport Planning”

Stuck in Traffic: Coping With Peak Hour Traffic Congestion

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.

For Pinocchio Rosenbarger and the Bored: Synchronized traffic lights on State Street won't solve anything.

At last week's Bored of Works and Auto Safety meeting, Grandaddy Naps tried to wrap his arms around traffic problems on State Street.

At issue was the prospective acquisition of land to place signal boxes in preparation for a federally-funded project to make State Street more navigable for greater numbers of automobiles, without taking minor factors like walkability into mind, so as to approve whole new parcels of auto-centric retail development, presumably to be financed by Scott "Banker" Blair's firm.

It may help to recall that even before it began picking its collective nose, the very first thing the Bored of Works did upon receiving Jeff Speck's Downtown Street Network Proposal was to omit State Street from it.

Surely this was no coincidence.

One year later, the very same time-serving luminaries who brought you dainty sidewalk numbers for the motorcycle club ...

... will yet again pay no heed to the notion of induced demand, as explained here in relation to Los Angeles.

If you can find anything in any of this to inspire confidence that a gang perennially unable to plan straight will (a) begin two-way street reversions, and if lightning strikes and they actually do, (b) execute them according to spec ... let me know.

Do Synchronized Traffic Lights Really Solve Congestion Woes?

... Although many traffic experts agree that LA’s money was well spent on the synchronization, some are skeptical that the new system will reduce congestion in the long run. Statistics indicated an initial reduction in congestion … until people realized that the city’s roadways were less awful and a new population of previously avoidant motorists took to the roads.

It’s like loosening your belt after a particularly large meal — while it creates more room for your burgeoning belly, the space is quickly filled because you can finally relax (or eat dessert). The same thing is happening with LA traffic. By reducing average travel times, synchronized traffic lights allow more people to travel. The benefit may not necessarily be speedier traffic, but rather a greater number of cars passing through during the same amount of time. The level of congestion may stay the same simply because there are more cars on the road.

California concedes induced demand: Building roads encourages driving, hence MORE congestion.

Have an opinion about traffic congestion?

You're entitled, but henceforth, when you air it, I'll be asking you if you're familiar with induced demand.

It's going to be on the test, folks. Go back and reread your October reminder.

Induced demand" as necessary corrective to road-building lobbyists' Goebbelsian propaganda.

Here is November's.

California's DOT Admits That More Roads Mean More Traffic, by Eric Jaffe (City Lab)

Whenever a road project gets announced, the first thing officials talk about is how it’s going to reduce traffic ... (but) congestion relief itself is a dubious claim when it comes to road expansions.

Transportation experts have repeatedly found that building new roads inevitably encourages more people to drive, which in turn negates any congestion savings—a phenomenon known as “induced demand.”

There’s high-quality evidence for induced demand ...

Zurschmiede swings and misses as Padgett and pals sue the city of New Albany.

Narcissus gazes at his erection.

We've been following this story since the original April tort claim (here ... here ... and here, among others).

Whatever your political persuasion, it should be obvious that the lawsuit's timing has been determined according to the election calendar, and just as non-coincidentally, given Padgett & Pals' healthy monetary support of the GOP in the current voting cycle, Republican mayoral candidate Kevin Zurschmiede has made sure the C-J's reporter got this much in writing.

(Zurschmiede) does not consider turning one-way streets into two-way streets to be a top city priority. He wants to add an additional lane in each direction to Interstate 265 to help deal with traffic on the Sherman Minton bridge when the two metro area Ohio River bridges open and start tolling.

So, in his zeal to appease the trucking paymasters, KZ desperately wants us to know that (a) he does not at all understand induced demand, (b) he thinks it is necessary to rely on the state and feds to redesign an interstate on short notice, and (c) enough of that two-way stuff, 'cuz it makes his brain hurt.

If you're a two-way streets advocate, and in terms of casting a vote for mayor, I'm not guilty of hyperbole in suggesting to you that only one choice exists: Me.

But beyond that, a pinch of salt helps the lawsuit make better sense, because this much is true: When it comes to breathtaking duplicity, Jeff Gahan has exercised supreme arrogance and bad faith with two-way streets proponents and Padgett obstructionists alike, in equal measure.

He has lied to us all.

Boondoggles like the Main Street "improvement" project have poisoned potential resolution by making lawsuits like this inevitable, and Gahan's inept evasiveness ever since has made an ugly situation intolerable.

It's why he cannot be trusted, and it's why he has to go.

Period.

New Albany, others sued over street design, by Chris Morris (News and Tribune)

NEW ALBANY — Eight local manufacturers, service companies and trucking companies have filed suit against the city of New Albany, New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan, the Floyd County Commissioners, Indiana Department of Transportation and other government agencies alleging that a recent redesign of East Main Street has negatively affected their right to safely access the street.

The plaintiffs are: Padgett, Inc., Tiger Truck Lines, J&J Pallet Corporation, Kaiser Wholesale, Inc., E.M. Cummings Veneers, Inc., Maximum Fleet Service, LLC, Mr. “P” Express, Inc. and W-M Lumber & Wood Products, Inc.

According to their counsel, James Gary, these business owners were not consulted prior to the redesign, which has impaired the ability of their vehicles to travel the designated “Heavy Haul” route for New Albany.

Yes, please: "Induced demand" as necessary corrective to road-building lobbyists' Goebbelsian propaganda.

Wouldn't it be nice if perhaps once in a person's lifetime, a conventional local news outlet -- News and Tribune, Courier-Journal, Business First, WDRB, Insider Louisville -- would accompany the breathless transcribing of an equally breathless press conference or news release from an eternally breathless corporate-financed, road-building lobby group with a simple explanation of induced demand?

Which in these instances, would act as the antidote to the breathless propaganda being dispensed by the usual paid-up suspects?

Have an opinion about traffic? You're entitled, but henceforth, when you air it, I'll be asking you if you're familiar with induced demand.

It's going to be on the test, folks.

What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse, by Adam Mann (Wired)

... As a kid, I used to ask my parents why they couldn’t just build more lanes on the freeway. Maybe transform them all into double-decker highways with cars zooming on the upper and lower levels. Except, as it turns out, that wouldn’t work. Because if there’s anything that traffic engineers have discovered in the last few decades it’s that you can’t build your way out of congestion. It’s the roads themselves that cause traffic.

The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. Though some traffic engineers made note of this phenomenon at least as early as the 1960s, it is only in recent years that social scientists have collected enough data to show how this happens pretty much every time we build new roads. These findings imply that the ways we traditionally go about trying to mitigate jams are essentially fruitless, and that we’d all be spending a lot less time in traffic if we could just be a little more rational.

I'm not exactly certain why we should take seriously a trucking and logistics lobby group with key personnel that includes a former Clark County GOP party chairman, although it's obvious that the group's announcements have Ron "Fluff the Wealthy" Grooms billing and cooing like a teenager in love with a pin-up girl.

Perhaps we can expect Ron to introduce vital legislation: The Auto-centric Freedom Restoration Act, or some such drivel.

Let's do this drill one more time. When the talking point proposes laying asphalt to solve problems:

"A new report aimed at reducing transportation bottlenecks."

Remember induced demand:

"The fundamental law of road congestion: New roads will create new drivers, resulting in the intensity of traffic staying the same."

I'm not picking on the reporter Finley; his was the first link I copied. No area news outlet did itself any favors with coverage (see Riefenstahl, Leni for historical antecedents).

Plan calls for expanded I-65, I-64 and new Sherman Minton bridge, by Marty Finley (Louisville Business First)

A new report aimed at reducing transportation bottlenecks and improving logistics channels for business calls for the widening of Interstate 64 and I-65 in Indiana and the reconstruction of the Sherman Minton Bridge.

Those three major regional priorities were outlined among 63 needed infrastructure initiatives in "Regional Links: Global Connections," a strategic plan that has been under development for two years by the Southeast Regional Logistics Council. The plan was released during a news conference in Jeffersonville Tuesday morning.

A reminder: Jeff Speck's Walkable City as required reading for presumed "leaders."

Let's have a show of hands.

How many of New Albany's elected officials -- mayor and council seat holders -- have taken my advice and read Jeff Speck's Walkable City?

Tsk, tsk. That's what I thought. My guess would be Greg Phipps and John Gonder, and that's all.

How many appointed city planners, redevelopment and board of works members have taken it on themselves to learn a bit about the future?

Wow, that's even more depressing.

How many of them still believe that the sole function of a city street is as expressed by the county dweller:

Top speed when driving on 'em is why we have 'em, so get us through New Albany as fast as humanly possible.

Really? They might as well believe in the Tooth Fairy, compassionate conservatism or sewage disposal by open-air, street-side ditch.

How many of them harbor the delusion that handling the future onslaught of toll-evading, pass-through suggests ignoring induced demand, increasing speeds and adding traffic lanes, so that people with no plans of stopping in New Albany can cause congestion for those who do, while compromising walkability for ever more?

You'd be surprised ... and depressed.

Give the gift of thinking to your elected official this holiday season. Give him or her a copy of this book, and lock 'em in their rooms until they actually read it.

Congestion Pricing: Walkable City, by Jeff Speck ... reviewed by Jeff Turrentine at On Earth

 ... Planners felt compelled to choose between the vibrant, pedestrian-scale cities we have been inhabiting for millennia and those that could accommodate heavy streams of automobile traffic. They chose cars.

Speck sorrowfully describes how traffic engineers have often inadvertently compounded the very problems they were trying to solve by basing their plans on specious theories that deny human nature. He cites, for example, the phenomenon of induced demand, in which "increasing the supply of roadways lowers the time cost of driving, causing more people to drive and obliterating any reductions in congestion." This, he says, explains why so many road expansion and improvement projects end up increasing traffic jams, commute times, and general human misery ...

 ... Walkable City synthesizes a number of ideas into a system with the potential to reshape our cities by reshaping our behavior. A century of top-down urban planning has brought us sprawl and desolate downtowns that no one wants to be in after work hours. Maybe it's time to turn citizens in a slightly new direction, and then let them vote -- this time with their feet.