A survey of America's mayors finds that many "aren’t eager to challenge the status quo."

"If they don’t adjust their priorities to match the urgency of the crises they’ve identified, mayors might have no one to blame for stalled progress but themselves."

I attended yesterday's DNA-sponsored merchant meeting, the first such gathering of 2020.

The meeting lasted an hour, during which there was no mention whatever of the impending (2021) Sherman Minton Bridge repair-mandated adjustments -- lane and ramp closures and the like -- that stand to have a disruptive impact on downtown specifically, and in more general terms the city as a whole.

Does Team Gahan have a secret plan for the 11th Hour?

If not, or even if so, shouldn't this be something we're planning for? Or is participatory "infrastructure" of this sort simply not a priority in Nawbany?

U.S. Mayors Say Infrastructure Is a Priority. But What Kind?

The Menino Survey of Mayors identifies priorities like infrastructure, traffic safety, and climate change. But many mayors aren’t eager to challenge the status quo.

... Generally, pedestrian and cyclist safety was prioritized by many mayors—a reflection, perhaps, of the limited progress most U.S. cities are making on their efforts to reduce traffic-related injuries. New research shows that even as being a car passenger is getting safer, being a pedestrian is becoming more dangerous. Still, “majorities of mayors rate travel in their city as safe for all of the groups we asked about,” and only 22 percent of mayors ranked “pedestrian friendliness” as a top infrastructure priority, while 66 percent listed “roads.” Democratic mayors did full-throatedly commit to sacrificing car lanes and parking spaces to bike lanes, with 92 percent on board compared to Republicans’ 34 percent—a partisan divide that’s ballooned 30 points since the survey’s 2015 edition.

Vision Zero, the global movement to dramatically reduce pedestrian fatalities, may be a hot topic in transportation circles but it’s not exactly a national priority in America’s city halls: It’s tied for seventh place (with “lighting”) on a list of what’s been most important for pedestrian safety improvements. Based on CityLab research showing that Vision Zero efforts aren’t paying off fast enough in some of the U.S.’s largest participants, perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. As for other traffic safety measures, most mayors think their cities are doing enough. Despite global efforts to drop vehicle speeds inside cities, nearly three-quarters of mayors surveyed thought their speed limits were set at the “right level,” while only 15 percent thought they were set too high.

Particularly in Nawbany: "Why We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes."

"We can’t let car companies again shape the vision for our future; if we don’t dream big now, we may never get the chance again. Let’s let’s elevate a different kind of transportation infrastructure that recognizes universal basic mobility as a human right and brings it to every man, woman, and child. If we don’t think of micromobility as the serious solution to a whole host of societal and environmental problems, then who will?"

I'll never forget, back when we were asking only that City Hall implement the entirety of Jeff Speck's street grid network proposals -- which in addition to calling for a reversion to two-way traffic prioritized a state-of-the-art downtown bicycle network -- these potentially transformative improvements were blithely characterized as outlandish by Greg Phipps (councilman) and Greg Roberts (ESNA). Modernity was cackled out of the room as going way too far for primeval New Gahanians, not just by these two, but by other "progressives" who seldom are.

By their unwillingness to do the homework, to try to understand exactly what Speck was aiming at, and to do battle ... with their abject eagerness to stroke Dear Leader's ego ... community "leaders" like these abetted Jeff Gahan's whopper of a bait 'n' switch on the street grid. Promises abandoned, Gahan commissioned HWC Engineering to gut a wonderful walkability and biking enhancement program, recasting it into yet another re-election omnibus paving project, retaining the basic two-way reversion but rendering it almost useless through timidity and incomprehension.

Then again, when's the last time you've seen Gahan or any of his sycophants walking or biking?

Yes, Dear Leader gifted us with two-way streets, and they've been mildly effective, albeit neutered by constraints into insensibility. Perhaps that's why the drivers are still treating downtown streets like race tracks.

But that's fine. Just push that button and the drivers from elsewhere will let you cross the street, just so long as it doesn't add seconds to their cross-town commute. 

Why We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes, by Terenig Topjian (CityLab)

In the 1930s big auto dreamed up freeways and demanded massive car infrastructure. Micromobility needs its own Futurama—one where cars are marginalized.

There’s a quote that’s stuck with me for some time from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom: “You know why people don't like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so f***ing smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?”

American urbanists and bike advocates are smart, or at least well informed. We know how important cycling is. We are educated about cycling cities in other parts of the world and how they are so much better for health, well-being, economics, traffic, pollution, climate, equity, personal freedom, and on and on.

But if we’re so smart how come we lose so goddamn always?

Why is the best we seem to be able to accomplish just a few miles of striped asphalt bike “lanes,” or if we’re lucky, a few blocks of plastic pylons—“protected” bike lanes?

Our current model is to beg for twigs
More often than not, bike infrastructure is created reactively. Typically in response to a collision or near collision with a car, an individual or advocacy group identifies a single route that needs better infrastructure. We gather community support and lobby local officials for the desired change, trying as hard as we can to ask for the cheapest, smallest changes so that our requests will be seen as realistic.

What’s the problem with this model?

It’s like imagining a bridge and asking for twigs—useless, unable to bear any meaningful weight, easily broken. And it’s treating bike infrastructure like a hopeless charity case.

This makes bike infrastructure seem like a small, special-interest demand that produces no real results in terms of shifting to sustainable transportation, and it makes those giving up road space and tax dollars feel as though they are supporting a hopeless charity.

But when roads, highways, and bridges are designed and built, they aren’t done one neighborhood at a time, one city-council approval at a time. We don’t build a few miles of track, or lay down some asphalt wherever there is “local support” and then leave 10-mile gaps in between.

And yet this is exactly how we “plan” bike infrastructure.

Bike lanes are intermittent at best in most North American cities, and since they are usually paint jobs that put cyclists between fast-moving traffic and parked cars with doors that capriciously swing open, only experienced riders brave them. The lanes are easily blocked anyway, by police, delivery trucks, and film crews, if not random cars banking on the low likelihood of being ticketed.

This kind of bike “infrastructure” doesn’t actually do very much to protect existing cyclists, let alone encourage and inspire the general population to start cycling.

Why are we settling for easily broken twigs? The total number of people on bikes and other micromobility modes like scooters and skateboards is large and growing. An enormous force has been divided and conquered, splintered among thousands of neighborhoods ...

Divided is the way we're kept by the country's Gahans. It is purposeful. If you intend to insist on being characterized as a "progressive," maybe a good place to start is to progress past the insipid lies and self-aggrandizing campaign finance schemes of the local C-minus students, and start standing up for grassroots solutions calculated to improve the place where you live.

More topics local candidates don't talk about: Shifting from building MORE infrastructure to making BETTER use of what we already have.

As usual, Marohn locates the center of the target. One important question voters should be asking the Gahanites: Exactly how are we going to pay future maintenance costs for all these bright, shiny (and in so many instances, unnecessary) objects?

The Strong Towns Approach to Public Investment, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

We’re done building infrastructure. The idea that any city in North America will, in the future, have appreciably more roads or streets, more sidewalks and curbs, more pipes or pumps or valves or meters, is absurd. Some may add a bit here or there, but for the most part we’re done. What we’ve built is what we’ve got. That’s it.

In fact, I suspect that many cities will have less infrastructure in a decade than they do now. Two decades from now, I suspect contraction of infrastructure will be a common and shared experience across our cities.

This means that the task of city-building must shift dramatically, from building more to making better use of what we already have. For over seven decades, we’ve culturally viewed expansion as our pathway to success. Now we must develop strategies for thickening up our places, for going back and wringing more return out of the trillions in existing investment.

An Obsession with Maintenance
In my book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, I outline how local governments must use two complementary – but very different – approaches for making capital investments: maintenance and little bets ...

"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.

Beak wetting 101: "Why Does Infrastructure Cost So Much?"

You're advised to click through and read Marohn's essay in its entirety. In the interim, the points below are significant. I've underlined a key passage from the standpoint of our experience in Pay to Play City.

Why Does Infrastructure Cost So Much?, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

... There are many technical reasons why infrastructure is so expensive—pick your favorite as they are all elusive to broadly discern—but it's clear that there are two underlying drivers that are not merely technical.

The first underlying driver of U.S. infrastructure costs is that the U.S. has felt so rich as a country that, for decades, we spent freely on infrastructure and never asked serious questions about the return on that investment. Never. As I’ve suggested many times, a study of human behavior in complex environments suggests that, with an abundance of resources, complex feedback loops break down. At this point, it’s difficult to identify one underlying cause because the real cause is systematic. And worse, the players involved work in single-discipline silos where a standard way of operating has become normalized; they don’t even know which questions to ask.

Do we really need a third interchange or can we get by with the two we have? (Traffic counts justify a third and we have two big box stores ready to build.) Do we really need to acquire that five feet of right-of-way so we can have 12-foot lanes when 11.5 foot lanes would be just fine? (Of course we do because that’s our standard.) Do we really need to pay a premium price for that five feet of land, as if it were valuable real estate in Manhattan and not the edge of some parking lot buffer? (Of course, unless you want the project delayed for years and for every case to end up in court.) Do we need ten signs or can we get by with eight? (Remember that one time we were threatened with a lawsuit—don’t want any chance of that happening.)

Individually, these are all reasonable reactions, especially when viewed from within a professional bubble that focuses on one or two metrics for success. Collectively, they are disastrous. The richer you are, the more you can throw money at solving your problems. The more money you can throw at a problem, the less you are confronted with the nuances of that problem and the less pressure there is to be creative. The complex becomes merely complicated. Painful feedback and uncomfortable balancing of priorities are avoided. Costs go up and nobody understands just why.

It’s also important to note that technical professions within the engineering and construction fields have a lot of built-in incentives to not think too critically about this problem. Compensation schedules are often written as a percent of project costs (the more things cost, the more the compensation). When public agencies prioritize fewer, larger projects, it means fewer players making cost decisions, spawning a kind of informal collusion even within a system of competitive bidding. It’s way more rewarding—especially among your peers within a profession—to complain about cheap taxpayers and politicians than to systematically question your own industry practices (trust me, I know).

It’s a little like asking teachers why the cost of public education is so high or asking doctors why medical costs keep going up. Both professions have their preferred scapegoat—administrators and insurance companies, respectively—but neither is in a real position to objectively evaluate their own contribution to the problem. That makes them human, not corrupt. But being human is nonetheless deeply flawed in this regard.

The second underlying driver of U.S. infrastructure costs is how deeply embedded infrastructure spending is within our model of economic growth. We have to spend on infrastructure because we don’t have a mechanism to experience broad economic growth without it, and we must have broad economic growth or everything in our Ponzi-bubble economy will collapse. It’s really that simple.

Stop building new infrastructure: "One Iconoclast’s Blunt Message on Transportation Funding."

This one's from 2015, but worth repeating.

Our recent experience in New Albany illustrates Charles Marohn's basic point. We're overbuilding local infrastructure wants while calling them needs; and Jeff Gahan has affixed his personal campaign finance needs to the profuse kickbacks from these wants.

One Iconoclast’s Blunt Message on Transportation Funding, by Alan Ehrenhalt (Governing)

After advising municipalities on how to construct roads for years, Charles Marohn now believes America needs to stop building new highways. Will his new way of thinking catch on?

... (Charles Marohn) reiterated his view that the country can survive a while longer without a sweeping new federal transportation bill. Doing nothing, he said, “is preferable to throwing a lot of money at the current approach.”

The gospel according to Marohn is simple enough to put into a few words: We have built too many highways. We have built them in places that didn’t need them. We have built them in places that can’t afford to maintain them. That’s why the federal Transportation Trust Fund is going broke. And if Congress approves a new transportation bill under the old rules, we’ll just build more unneeded roads and force the communities that host them into a further cycle of debt.

Marohn isn’t against spending federal dollars to repair the infrastructure we have. He’s against handing more money over to transportation planners who will always be able to find an excuse to build something new. “The present system is overbuilt and is going to contract,” Marohn recently wrote. “We have so much transportation infrastructure that every level of government is now choking on maintenance costs. I’m tired of seeing bridges fall down and expensive roads go bad while we spend billions on new stuff we will never be able to maintain” ...

"10 Steps to Fix a City," including axing anyone on staff who believes the fixes are unworkable.

Imagine you attend a meeting of City Council, the Redevelopment Commission or the Board of Public Works and Safety, and as you're sitting there, expecting the same ol' same ol', an elected representative or appointed official begins explaining what he or she read at Strong Towns.

It's an old link, one worth viewing again.

It's also a list for comparing platforms in 2019. I've included explanations for some, though not all of the precepts. Give the website a click, and by doing so, pole vault to the head of the queue.

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10 STEPS TO FIX A CITY, by Andrew Burleson (Strong Towns)

1. Don't issue any new bonds until the city's current debts are fully paid off.

2. Don't accept unfunded maintenance obligations.

3. Throw out your parking ordinances.

No parking ordinance is better than no parking ordinances. Allow on-street parking everywhere, and use parking meters as needed to limit on-street congestion in high-demand areas. Let the market figure out the off-street supply and demand balance.

4. Don't permit greenfield development when existing infrastructure is highly underutilized.

Almost every city has a section of town with streets and sewers surrounded by vacant lots or abandoned buildings. As long as there are big chunks of your town like this, there’s no reason to issue building permits for new infrastructure. 

5. Require buildings to front the street.

That means no parking lots in front of buildings. The ground floor has to be inhabitable, parking can be beside or behind the building, but there has to be a “front door” that lets pedestrians enter the building directly from the street / sidewalk. 

6. Dramatically simplify your zoning.

First, just throw out your entire zoning ordinance because it’s surely horrible. Then try replacing it with just four zones: Heavy Industrial, Mixed-Use, Restricted Residential, and Restricted Agricultural / Natural. Read more about zoning.

7. Dramatically simplify your traffic hierarchy.

8. Stop building stroads.

In fact, it would be ideal if you could stop building any new roads until we, as a nation, came up with a better system for funding them. 

9. Set a maximum block perimeter of 2000' and enforce it.

10. Fire anyone on staff who believes the above is unworkable.

In today’s municipal world the professionals are a big part of the problem. There are plenty of good people out there who could work well within the constraints above. If the people in your city staff don’t think that’s possible, then the city needs new staff.

Why is infrastructure so expensive? “Our infrastructure incentives are all wrong. Until we fix them ... throwing more money at this system is simply pouring good money after bad.”

Thanks, Clint.

Here in New Albany, the whole fucking city is under construction. Some of the work is necessary. Other bits, not as much. A cynic like me lumps all of it into a Two year Plan (2016 - 2017) meant to coincide with election cycles.

Either Jeff Gahan will run for State Senate in 2018, or he'll seek a third term as mayor in 2019. He might end up doing both if the first effort fails. In any event, he'll campaign on the basis of massive infrastructure changes in New Albany, which wouldn't have occurred absent his divinely-inspired perfection of leadership.

As well as millions upon millions of dollars.

Apart from other pressing matters like transparency and top-down decrees, all we've wanted to know is why these construction projects are so expensive.

In this essay, Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn discusses a few possible answers, beginning with a parallel example in Catastrophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know about Health Care is Wrong, a book by David Goldhill.

From a brief survey of Goldhill's "Healthcare Island," Marohn shifts the scene to Infrastructure Island. His relentlessly sensible points are something to consider while navigating streets currently being repaved by perennial low bidder MAC Construction, as remunerated with money largely procured from the feds.

I've chosen a few sections to make the overall point, but you'll want to click through and read the entire essay.

THIS IS WHY INFRASTRUCTURE IS SO EXPENSIVE, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... Last week, Bloomberg's Noah Smith wrote an article titled "The U.S. Has Forgotten How To Do Infrastructure" that asked a lot of questions that would get us to a Goldhill like analysis of our infrastructure approach. Just like on Healthcare Island, on Infrastructure Island we have our own way of talking about things. And we never talk about prices, only about costs. And as Smith suggests, costs go up and nobody seems to understand why.

He goes through and dismisses all of the usual suspects. Union wages drive up infrastructure costs (yet not true in countries paying equivalent wages). It's expensive to acquire land in the property-rights-obsessed United States (yet countries with weaker eminent domain laws have cheaper land acquisition costs). America's too spread out or our cities are too dense (arguments that cancel each other out). Our environmental review processes are too extensive (yet other advanced countries do extensive environmental reviews with far less delay). I concur with all these points, by the way.

Smith concludes with this:

That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency -- inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking U.S. construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.

Much like health care, our infrastructure incentives are all wrong. Until we fix them -- until we go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch -- throwing more money at this system is simply pouring good money after bad.

Beak-wetting incentives ... to wet more beaks.

The more lane miles a state has, the more federal transportation dollars that state qualifies for. What is the incentive? It is, of course, to build more lane miles. Add to this the fact that federal transportation programs generally pay 90%+ for new construction, but only ~50% for maintenance, and we have a system that encourages states to build more than they can ever maintain.

That's okay. When we put together our appropriation request, is it better to show a catastrophic level of need or is it better to prudently ask for only what is absolutely necessary? It's an altogether silly question; the more desperate we can make ourselves and the more miserable we can make taxpayers, the more they will demand that governments pay more for infrastructure.

Open checkbook -- open TIF books?

In addition, the longer the project takes, the more everyone gets paid. Change orders -- because of weather, redesign, special requests, etc... -- often add to project costs and, even when they don't, take time ($$) to administer. Once a government commits to a project, they are committing to an open checkbook. That check will be written in a system where nearly everyone involved will be compensated more the longer the project takes and the more expensive it becomes.

Minnesota, meet New Albany: "Incentives for all kinds of shenanigans."

In Minnesota where I live, public contracts are required to always take the lowest bid price. This creates incentives for all kinds of shenanigans. I worked on one state paving project where the low bidder bid most every item far below cost except for bituminous, where they were the highest price by many multiples. The strategy for executing the contract was then clear: Do the least amount necessary to fulfill the contract agreement and overrun the bituminous as much as possible. An extra 1/8 of one inch of pavement over a 40 mile project -- an amount hardly perceptible -- caused a massive cost overrun.

I could go on, but here's the crazy thing: On Infrastructure Island, this all makes sense. Nobody there is really unethical, it's just that the incentives have perverted what, in other realms, would be seen as normal and acceptable. Make the project big. Make it take a long time. Create a lot of overruns. Don't maintain it until it falls apart catastrophically. Few on Infrastructure Island set out to do these things, but they happen and nobody loses a lot of sleep over it. That's because, for the players involved, there is little negative feedback and lots of positive feedback associated with these perverse outcomes.

Marohn's proposed solutions follow, so go to Strong Towns and read them.

Green infrastructure? Light imprint? Low asphalt? Tell it to Summit Springs, pal.

As for green, the only relevance it has to New Gahania in Year Six is the color of money.

Great idea: Light Imprint for walkable green infrastructure, by Robert Steuteville (Public Square: A CNU Journal)

A leaner, lighter approach to infrastucture is more cost-effective, sustainable, and livable—an idea worth considering for America in National Infrastructure Week.

In the public realm, the greenery to impervious pavement ratio—and how that relates to urban context—has an impact on quality of life and experience. Conventional suburban design tends toward heavy use of asphalt, with wide roads lined by parking lots, in relatively low-density areas. This engineering approach requires large and expensive stormwater mitigation. New urbanists have countered with techniques that lay far lighter on the land, an approach that could be called "Light Imprint," "lean," or simply "green infrastructure." This light approach to engineering the land, combined with good urban design, makes for appealing streets and public spaces while providing effective rainwater management ...

 ... Public Square editor Robert Steuteville interviewed architect and planner Tom Low, founder of Civic By Design and author of the influential Light Imprint Handbook, and Paul Crabtree of the Crabtree Group, a specialist in civil engineering for urban places, on the the subject of Light Imprint and green infrastructure.

"Not all development is fiscally productive. Urbanization, or more accurately, sub-urbanization, is not necessarily prosperity."

File under "Things that occur to me as I listen to the mayor brag about Breakwater and Summit Springs."

Or, "Things that I know local media won't ask when the mayor brags about Breakwater and Summit Springs."

Now, can we talk about the extreme degree to which "Summit Springs" sucks as a name for a development?

PLAYING “MONEYBALL” WITH YOUR CITY - AN APPEAL TO FELLOW CITY MANAGERS (AND OTHER STRONG CITIZENS), by Michael Kovacs (Strong Towns)

If you’re a sports fan, especially a baseball fan, you’ve probably seen the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt. It's the true-to-life story of the Oakland A’s and how manager Billy Beane, with a small budget to pay salaries, uses the expertise of his assistant’s math and statistics to figure out that players who get on base can make a big determination of whether a team will win or lose. They go on to win their first playoff series in years and made the playoffs for four consecutive years on their low budget. It's a great movie. I highly recommend it.

Cities are a lot like a sports team, and what we do is similar to what Billy had to do. He had salary money and used it to get players for a value, who could get on base. As City Managers, we help set the direction of our cities with our planners and councils, and as we build out, we have a finite amount of land along with our finite ability to maintain and replace (ideally) the infrastructure we accept. We use up land in our respective city limits/extraterritorial jurisdictions, and accept infrastructure dedicated from developers in order to create tax base from the value of private investments made.

SNIP

It’s time to start deploying tactical planning, growing slow and steady, building on our existing grids, getting denser while creating place, and showing the real costs of developments to our policy makers. Let’s start going for walks and base hits. Get on base, and our cities will start winning.

Marohn to POTUS: "We're going to make investments in infrastructure with the systems we have, not the ones we wish we had. There are ways to get better results now."

The excerpt here is intended as a tease only. You'll want to read Marohn's statement at the point of origin, because the links included provide a wealth of information as well as opportunities for further study.

Forget POTUS.

This letter needs to be read by all public officials in New Albany and Floyd County, and they also should consider visiting Strong Towns on a regular basis. Something solid is on display there every day.

A Letter to POTUS on Infrastructure, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... What do we do today? To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, we're going to make investments in infrastructure with the systems we have, not the ones we wish we had. There are ways to get better results now.

• We need to prioritize maintenance over new capacity. With so many non-performing assets, it's irresponsible to build additional capacity. Project proposers will try to add additional capacity with their maintenance projects. If it is truly warranted, it can and should be funded locally. Cities need to discover ways to turn such investments into positive ROI projects, a process the federal government can only impede.
• We must prioritize small projects over large. Small projects not only spread the wealth, they have much greater potential for positive returns with far lower risk. Large projects exceed their budgets more often and with greater severity -- dollars and percentage -- than smaller projects. A thousand projects of a million dollars or less have far more financial upside than a single billion-dollar project ever will. It's administratively easier to do fewer, big projects, but that is a bureaucratic temptation we need to overcome.
• We should spend far more below ground than above. Many of our sewer and water systems are approaching 100 years old. When these core pipes fail, the problems cascade throughout the system. Technology may soon dramatically change how we use our roads and streets making investments in expansion there obsolete, but water and sewer will still flow through pipes as it has for thousands of years. We should spend at least $5 below ground for every $1 we spend above.
• We should prioritize neighborhoods more than 75 years old. We've modeled hundreds of cities across the country and in every one the neighborhoods with the highest investment potential are the ones that existed before World War II. These are established places where small investments have a huge impact. Most investments in neighborhoods built after World War II are simply bailouts, pouring good money after bad.

Kunstler: "The condition of the country is pretty awful as we turn the corner onto 2017."

It's been a while since we checked in with Clusterfuck Nation, where James Howard Kunstler chronicles precisely that.

Here are a few of Kunstler's observations in vastly truncated form. Set aside 25 minutes, pour a nice coffee or stiff drink, and enjoy the ride.

Spoiler alert: We're doomed, folks.

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Forecast 2017: The Wheels Finally Come Off

American Notes

If by some magic any new industrial capacity were built, much of the work in it would be performed by robotics, not brawny men in blue shirts, and certainly not at the equivalent of the old United Auto Workers $35-an-hour assembly line wage. We have not faced the fact that the manufacturing fiesta based on fossil fuels was a one-time thing due to special historical circumstances and will not be repeated. The future of manufacturing in America is frighteningly modest. We’ll actually be lucky if we can make a few vital necessities by means of hydro-electric or direct water power, and that will be about the extent of it. Some of you may recognize this as the World Made By Hand scenario. I’ll stick by that.

Similarly for “infrastructure” spending touted by the forces of Trump as the coming panacea for economic malaise. I suspect most people assume this means a trillion-dollar stimulus spend on highways and their accessories. Well, that also assumes that we expect another fifty years of Happy Motoring and suburban living. Fuggeddabowdit. We’re in the twilight of motoring anyway you cut it, despite all the chatter about electric cars and “driverless” cars. We won’t have the electric capacity to switch over the Happy Motoring fleet from gasoline. The oil industry itself is already headed for collapse on its sinking energy-return-on-investment. And our problems with money and debt are so severe that the motoring paradigm is more prone to fail on the basis of car loan scarcity and unworthy borrowers before the fueling issues even kick in. Every year, fewer Americans can afford to buy any kind of car — the way they’re used to buying them, on installment loans. The industry has gone the limit to help them — seven-year loans for used cars! — but they have no more room to maneuver. The car financing system is broken. Bear in mind the original suburbanization of America back in the 20th century — along with its accessory automobiles — must be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. So, a rebuild of all this stuff would represent more and possibly even greater malinvestment. We could have applied our post-WW2 treasure to building beautiful walkable towns and cities with some capacity for adaptive re-use, but we blew it in order to enjoy life in a one-time demolition derby. Life is tragic. Societies make poor choices sometimes, and then there are consequences.

Designated Bag-Holder

The American people have been punked by their own government and their central bank, the Federal Reserve, for years and the jig is now up. In 2017 both will lose their authority and legitimacy, a very grave matter for the survival of this republic ... had Hillary Clinton won the election, at least the right gang would have had to take the blame — the people in charge for the past twenty years. Instead, Donald Trump has been elected Designated Bag-Holder.

About That “Big Fat Ugly Bubble” and its Consequences, Part 1: History Lesson

The USA ran out of growth capacity around the turn of the millennium because we ran out of affordable energy to run our techno-industrial economy. It was hard to see this with seemingly plenty of oil available. And, of course, the computer tech fiesta was blossoming, but for all that glitzy stuff to attract dwindling real capital, other old stuff had to go, and did go, and when all was said and done the computers did not generate much wealth or social value. In fact, the diminishing returns and blowback of computer tech were arguably more damaging than beneficial to society and its economy. Look at where the middle class is today. Computer tech gave the magical appearance of growth while actually undermining it. By affordable energy I mean energy with a greater-than 30-to-one energy-return-on-investment, which is the ratio you need for the kind of life we lead.

Debt was the meat-and-potatoes of the Fed’s wizardry, but the “secret sauce” of Fed magic was fraud, in the form of market interventions, manipulations, regulatory negligence, and just plain systematic lying about the numbers that defined the economy. It amounted to nationalized financial racketeering. Under the consecutive Grand Vizierships of Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, control fraud (using official authority to cover up misconduct) was perfected by banking executives, eventuating in the mortgage securities fiasco of 2008, which took down the housing market and the economy. (That housing market, by the way, was made up mainly of suburban houses, the sine qua non of the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.)

About That “Big Fat Ugly Bubble” and its Consequences, Part 2: 2017, the Year of Living Anxiously

Get this: the Fed is completely full of shit. It is terrified of the conditions it has set up and it has no idea what to do next. The “data” that it claims to be so dependent on is arrantly fake. The government’s official unemployment number at Christmas 2016 was 4.6 percent. It’s a compound lie. The 4.6 percent does not include the 95 million people out of the workforce, most of them able-bodied, who have simply run through their unemployment benefits and given up looking for work. Nor does it figure in the fact that roughly 90 percent of the new jobs created are part time jobs, many of them held by people working several jobs (because they have to, to pay the bills). Nor does it detail the quality of the jobs created (minimum wage shit jobs.)

Why Trump Can’t Pull a Reagan

Today, the US is in a box and Trump comes on the scene with nowhere to move. Too much debt can only be managed if interest rates are kept low. Everybody and his mother around the world is dumping US Treasuries. With a bear market in bonds on, the Fed as buyer of last resort will have to sop up whatever comes on the market to keep the interest rate from rising above three percent on the ten-year, and even that may not prevent it. Trump’s vaunted infrastructure stimulus plan will be impossible to carry out without the Fed monetizing the necessary debt. So stimulus implies bigger deficits, which means more bonded debt that nobody wants to buy. The result will be inflation and accordingly further upward pressure on interest rates. Higher interest rates, in turn, will negatively impact economic activity, lowering tax revenue, inducing larger fiscal imbalances and greater instability.

Trump may never even get the stimulus he seeks. The Republican controlled-congress has vowed not to increase the national debt. How can Trump fulfill his pledge to cut taxes and bring on stimulus without hugely increasing the debt? If there is war over spending between Trump and Congress, Congress is likely to win, since they control the fiscal purse strings. Of course, Donald Trump cannot abide not winning. Hostilities between them may become permanent early in Trump’s term and bring on even more dangerous paralysis of governance.

Desperate Measures

One of the other big and dark trends of the past year has been the move of governments around the world — and among the economist / necromancers who advise them — to ban cash from the scene in order to herd all citizens into a digital banking system that will allow the authorities to track all financial transactions and suck every possible cent of taxes into national coffers. It would also be an opportunity for the bank-and government cabal to impose negative interest rates (NIRP) on bank accounts so that money herded into the digital system could be surreptitiously “taxed” by charging account holders just for being there (against their will). It’s a little hard to see how that might happen just now in a broad rising rate environment, but it would be the natural accompaniment to banning cash — and renewed aggressive QE (QE forever!) might do the trick.

It’s hard to see the US government banning cash as clumsily as India did, but they have other ways to herd the multitudes into the black box of all-digital banking.

Wild in the Streets

The public is just plain pissed off, and remains pissed off after the Trump Victory. Their anger has been fermenting for decades as their economic prospects dwindled and they began to understand how it all worked against them. The battered middle class might have gotten a temporary thrill from the election, but an awful lot of them are still out of work, or working at the humiliating shit-jobs that replaced their old lost jobs in the old real stuff economy. Worse is coming their way in 2017. Theirs is a true existential crisis.

That may be the moment when President Trump and his militarily-weighted cabinet appointees opt for martial law. What a goddamned mess that will be. There is no civilized country on earth with as many small arms per capita than the USA, and despite the fearsome appearance of militarized police forces, you cannot overstate how much deadly mischief a small number of pissed-off people can make with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled-grenades, Semtex plastic explosive, and other fun stuff. It could morph easily to a literal war on bankers and Wall Street in particular, especially if Ice-Nine goes into effect. Bear in mind that a lot of veterans of the endless Middle East wars belong to this suffering economic class, and they actually have some training in the warrior arts.

Their political counterparts in the Democrat / Prog coastal elite, hardcore Hillary, PC-and-unicorn crowd are moving through their post-election Kubler-Ross Transect-of-Grief from denial to anger too. So both sides are quite pissed off and primed for conflict. The Left will certainly do everything possible to oppose Trump and try to make him look bad, whether it’s in the public interest to do so or not. They will throw every monkey-wrench possible into the machinery of governance, up to and including the (mostly Democratic Party weighted) Federal Reserve hierarchy, whose interest rate “dot plot” could be truly a plot to exact revenge on Trump. Of course, that would blow up in their faces since proportionately the coastal elites own much more stock than the Trumpenlumpenprole red-staters, and they could be wiped out in a significant market crash triggered by rising interest rates. But that’s the thing about political rage: it’s the opposite of rational.

There’s no sign that the Democrat / Progs have recognized that their poisonous identity politics played a significant role in their electoral defeat. They will not abandon that endeavor in 2017. They will double-down on it. And as that happens, the Democratic Party will go the way of the Whigs in 1856 — with a whimper, not a bang. God knows who or what will replace them as a credible opposition to Trumpist crypto-Republicanism, although Trump himself stands a good chance of leading that party to oblivion, too, if my forecast of a big financial blow-up comes to pass.

The Oil Quandary

The pattern nicely describes the dynamic advanced by Joseph Tainter in his seminal work, The Collapse of Complex Societies: namely that over-investments in complexity lead to diminishing returns. That is, as you keep making your systems extra-hyper-complex, you get less value back for doing it, until you get to the point where there’s no benefit whatsoever, and then the system implodes. And that is exactly what has happened with oil and the economy that was engineered to run on it, and the financial system that evolved to manage the wealth it used to produce.

Vagrant Thoughts on Geopolitics

As I write just before New Year’s Eve, President Obama is trying to start World War Three with Russia as a parting gift to the voting public. I’m among the skeptics who think that the “Russia Hacks Election story” is a ruse to divert the public’s attention from the stupendous failure of the Democratic Party to win, as expected. Rather, Wikileaks should get the Pulitzer Prize for revealing so much about the nefarious workings of the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic National Committee.

Regular readers know I didn’t vote for Trump, that I heaped considerable abuse on him in the campaign commentaries. But I didn’t take any comfort in the nostrum about being “better off with the Devil you know (Hillary) than the one you don’t know (Trump).” Both candidates were awful, and the condition of the country is pretty awful as we turn the corner onto 2017.

If you’ve gotten this far, I commend and admire you hugely for your remarkable patience. Have a happy 2017 everybody, and don’t let our Trumpadelic president get you down.

Next, connectivity for all? "We are not only building bridges, we are biking bridges."

The late Kevin Richards, bridging the Czech Republic, 2006.

My old friend John (original designer of the NABC keg-aloft logo) recently has been writing about bicycling for LEO. His thoughts about bikes crossing bridges bring to mind my own merry band's experiences in Europe from 2000 - 2008.

Once you've seen what a rational bicycling infrastructure network looks like, the situation on the new East End Long Dead Overused White Guys Bridge (what, we ran out of assassinated presidents to name it?) is cast in sharp and sad relief. There, a multi-use path essentially leads to nothing on either side, a far cry from what I've observed in places like the Netherlands and Germany.

In these countries, transportation is far less of a zero-sum game, where anything "given" to a cyclist or walker is viewed by the intemperate among us as being "taken away" from autos.  Rather, especially in the Netherlands, space for cars, bikers and walkers exists side by side.

The horror!

Given that the most widely reported controversy on the new bridge to date has been complaints from walkers over lack of parking spaces (think about that), I feel like screaming that whatever the idiocy of the financing, we shouldn't build this or any other bridge solely as a means of carrying cars as they move back and forth to ultimate destinations. This notion of connectivity should apply to cyclists and walkers, too.

Where and how does one continue the journey, having reached the other side?

Why We Ride: Biking Bridges, by John Mahorney (LEO Weekly)

Unless you’re spinning away in your pain cave, or you’ve been riding out of town for the holidays, then you may have heard about the opening of the brand-new Lewis and Clark Bridge on Dec. 18. This beautiful piece of multi-modal infrastructure is the most-inclusive, publicly-funded road project I’ve seen in our area. It is the first highway and bridge project to receive an Envision Platinum Award from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. Among its sustainable construction practices is a wide, two-way bicycle and pedestrian path connecting Prospect to Utica, Indiana.

When I think about cycling to and from Kentucky and Indiana, I can’t help but remember all the other bridges we’ve crossed over the years. Adventurous, perilous, crowded, abandoned, remote and downright dangerous for the commuter and recreational cyclist alike. They are necessary. They are convenient. Some could be better. Some can go to hell. Some could just finally open someday.

"The town is broke because there’s a structural gap between revenue and expenses due to a suburban land use pattern that can never pay for its own obligations or maintenance."

From the article.

What is a talisman?

1. a stone, ring, or other object, engraved with figures or characters supposed to possess occult powers and worn as an amulet or charm.

2. any amulet or charm.

3. anything whose presence exercises a remarkable or powerful influence on human feelings or actions.

That guy trying to cross the stroad (above) is a talisman of sorts, though most drivers wouldn't give him a second thought, at least until the point of impact.

The Talisman of Colerain, by Johnny Sanphillippo (Strong Towns)

As perhaps the world’s most lapsed Catholic I still instantly recognized this rusty bit of iron for what it is. It’s a relic. A talisman. It’s a distant cousin three times removed from a splinter from the Cross or a tiny fragment from a Saint’s robe. It’s meant to have special healing powers that will bring health and prosperity to the town. It’s a shield to protect the innocent and vanquish evil. All you have to do is believe and its blessings will be revealed. I’ll get back to that in a moment. But first, there’s that other image ...

The talismanic influence of certain objects can reflect the surroundings.

The town is broke because there’s a structural gap between revenue and expenses due to a suburban land use pattern that can never pay for its own obligations or maintenance. The memorial park is sitting in a sea of low-value surface parking lots, empty buildings, and buildings that are only occupied because they were bribed into existence with subsidies and tax abatements to keep up appearances. Meanwhile millions of dollars worth of public infrastructure sit underutilized.

And the verdict isn't pleasant (bold type mine).

I doubt the good people of Colerain are interested in transforming their old parking lots and dead strip malls into a thick Main Street downtown full of mixed-use buildings with shops on the ground floor and offices and apartments upstairs. I don’t think they’d even know how to build that sort of thing if they tried. They’re too obsessed with parking ratios and flower beds that look like the prosperous suburbs they no longer are. I’m not even sure there’s even a market for that kind of thing in this location. So I see continued decline and more desperate attempts at resurrection by pure faith. So be it.

But remember, kiddies -- we've got hospital sale money to make it all right.

Apocalypse WOW: Pat McLaughlin thinks toll evaders will stop to shop in New Albany. Jeff Gahan doesn't return calls. Welcome to tolling preparedness, New Albany-style.

Imagine how a local newspaper might be functioning as tolling approaches. Imagine the hard questions a reporter might be asking of local officials. Imagine the dialogue that might be engendered.

Keep imagining, because we have no newspaper in New Albany.

Meanwhile, it still isn't clear what the city of New Albany's official position will be with respect to the issues discussed in Green's piece. We suspect servile silence, but only because it's what we've been conditioned to expect from Jeff Gahan, but note that if the council president's uninformed opinion is any indication, we might be better off with no opinion at all.

SUNDAY EDITION | Old overpasses to get more wear and tear as Kentuckiana drivers avoid bridge tolls, by Marcus Green (WDRB)

... “Talking to a lot of people that I know, they said they’re going to change their route of going to Indiana and coming around the Sherman Minton and ride all the way around to avoid paying a toll,” said Natalie Neil, who lives in the Shawnee/Chickasaw neighborhood in western Louisville.

Neil said she uses the Minton twice a day for trips to New Albany. More traffic on the bridge is troubling, she said, because there’s “a lot of increase already.”

And:

Traffic on those structures in Floyd County is expected to increase by as much as 118 percent in the coming decades. Indiana plans maintenance and repair work on four of the overpasses before 2018, according to the state.

The state also aims to paint and maintain the Sherman Minton Bridge within the next four years, said Will Wingfield, spokesman for the Indiana Department of Transportation. The Minton was closed for about five months in 2011 and 2012 to fix a crack in a load-bearing beam.

This means that very soon, we'll either lose the Sherman Minton for an extended period, and/or see it tolled. But here's the important part (emphasis mine).

Opponents of tolling interstates often cite traffic diversion as a side effect of tolls and rate hikes.

“Tolls are often easily evaded, usually by motorists who are using an alternative route that unfortunately was not built to handle the level and type of traffic experienced due to that toll evasion,” said Stephanie Kane, spokeswoman for the Alliance for Toll-Free Interstates.

After reviewing projections showing increased traffic on the Minton, she said ambulances and other first responders could face delays getting across the river on I-64.

With the Minton remaining toll-free, traffic passing through New Albany is expected to double in the decades to come. Mayor Jeff Gahan did not return a phone message seeking comment, but council president Patrick McLaughlin said “it’s something that’s been constantly on our radar.”

McLaughlin stopped short of agreeing that traffic will rise at the levels predicted by INDOT, but he said any increase could give the city an economic boost.

“When trying to judge human nature,” he said, “no one really knows how that’s going to pan out.”

Irv Stumler aghast at the prospect of "A New Life for Urban Alleys."

Irv Stumler dozed off and dreamed of artists painting alley walls. He woke up in a cold sweat.

How can Padgett's erectiles navigate high-speed, one-way alleys when people are standing there gawking at ART?

A New Life for Urban Alleys, by Eillie Anzilotti (City Lab)

Once blighted and overlooked, these small streets are transforming into community and sustainability hotspots.

Bicycle Infrastructure Fail(s): "The primary problem is that traffic engineering ... still has influence on planning and urban design."

Which is why, when you remark to an engineer that your city won't ever get the streets right until it decides that one really must break eggs to make an omelette, and the engineer replies that "every day I break more eggs than Waffle House," it's perfectly clear just how big of a broom will be needed for the toxic clean-up.

Or maybe a scythe and a few pitchforks wouldn't hurt, either.

If we design cities for humans, with respect for the human experience, safety, logic and ease-of-use, you wouldn’t see stuff like a bike lane in the middle of a street, or sharrows, in any city.

Ding ding ding -- that magic word, sharrows, which is the invariable "do nothing and declare victory" tactic of the Rosenbarger sect.

To paraphrase Stonewall Jackson: "Fire 'em. Fire 'em all."

Bicycle Infrastructure Fail(s), by Mikael Colville-Andersen (Cities of the Future)

... Best Practice in bicycle infrastructure is basically a century old. Dedicated bike paths date from 1892 when an equestrian path was turned over to bikes on Esplanade in Copenhagen. In 1915, the first on-street, curb-separated cycle track was installed on Strandboulevarden. From there, protected bike infrastructure spread out around the world.

Over 100 years, the infrastructure has been tested by easily hundreds of millions of daily cyclists. Planners have tweaked and experimented, made mistakes and fixed them and ended up with a Best Practice that is simple, effective, safe and cost-efficient. Generations of planners and engineers have done an amazing job and just handed us everything we need on a silver platter. There are only four types of infrastructure in Danish Best Practice. One of the designs fits any street in the nation and any street in any city in the world. Copy-paste, baby.

Why, then, do we see crap like in the photo, above, showing up on city streets? Who, in their right mind, would ACTUALLY choose to put cyclists in the middle of a street with speeding cars on either side? Certainly not anyone with an understanding of the bicycle’s role in urban life as transport or a sincere desire to encourage cycling and keep people safe. As I suggested on Twitter, find the person who is responsible and fire them. A flippant remark – but still a serious one.

The primary problem is that traffic engineering, in certain countries, still has influence on planning and urban design. In America, where this infrastructure was put in, bicycles are placed in the same category as motorized vehicles. In countries that GET the bicycle’s role in cities, they are regarded as fast-moving pedestrians and we’ve been planning for them for a century.

Infrastructure is "the foundation for our economy, for our social and cultural life."

It's been nearly 13 years since we moved downtown, and during that time the refrain most often heard goes something like this:

"Can't we make this (fill in blank) look better?"

Hence, constant discussions about beautification, clean-ups, porch appliances and facades, and almost no consideration of fundamental reality, i.e., how did it get to be (not look) that way in the first place -- and how much of objectionable appearance is quantifiable versus subjective?

If "physical manifestation of our preferred lifestyle" goes no further than theme parks and a coat of paint on a dilapidated building, I'm not sure it can be termed progress. Yet that's the way it's constantly phrased.

Does the local leadership class merely parrot these phrases out of  failed consciousness, or does it do so owing to resignation that nothing substantive can be done, hence the importance of grotesque "ooh, that's nice" Potemkin villages designed by Oz and Mr. Disney?

I don't know the answer. All I know is that quite a lot of evidence points to matters like streets as basic determinants of these fundamentals, and yet fixing them is the very last thing we'll do, if at all. That's either intellectual atrophy, moral cowardice, or both.

But it's the local political default.

Building Infrastructure for More Inclusive Communities: A conversation with Ryan Gravel, creator of the Atlanta BeltLine, on his new book Where We Want to Live, by Richard Florida (City Lab)

Your book touches on a critical aspect of city planning that is often overshadowed. In addition to important considerations like income, education, and public works, you argue that what city residents really want is “infra-culture,” or “the physical manifestation of our preferred lifestyle.” What does this infra-culture look like in our current and future cities?

I try to make the case that infrastructure is not only a tool for moving people, water, or information around. It’s the foundation for our economy, for our social and cultural life. It matters what kind of infrastructure we build. It affects how we live our lives. Instead of addressing culture—or even our local economy—directly, too much of our dialogue about city planning today revolves around large, abstract concepts. People have a hard time translating how they affect their day-to-day lives. Perhaps out of sheer frustration, however, that’s changing. In every city I go to, people are reclaiming obsolete infrastructure—from old railroads to degraded waterways and obsolete roadways—as new conduits for urban life. When these efforts embrace a broad, inclusive vision for what this infrastructure might mean for their lives, they are tapping into the real opportunity for infra-culture.

Yo, Warren: "Unless a city prioritizes basic service, people will not want to build roots in it."

In a perfect world, political functionaries charged with basic infrastructure would be delighted to learn of eyesores ripe for cleaning, as with mattresses dumped within eyesight of Break Wind's intended upscale millennial pizzazz, but when informed of this on social media, Warren Nash advised against encouraging the sort of person who would bring this to his attention -- after two weeks of it moldering there.

Imagine the immediate reaction had it been suggested that the mattress was a public art installation.

If the notion of human rights embraced health and safety, then basic infrastructure is one guarantor of rights and freedoms. Have you ever heard Nash, Adam Dickey or other local paragons of "democratic" propriety talk about such a topic, even once?

The Not-So-Secret Secret About Growing a Healthy City, by Anna Clark (Next City)

It may not have as much placemaking pizzazz as a new bike-share or downtown arts district, but unless a city prioritizes basic service, people will not want to build roots in it. From safe drinking water to solid public schools, brass-tacks urbanism is the not-so-secret secret about growing a healthy city ...

... Reese and Sands are not arguing against all the innovations in today’s urbanism, per se, but they do suggest that projects like riverwalks and casinos are isolated initiatives that can’t make up for a city’s inconsistent trash pickup or broken street lights. Compare it to an old house: New windows and a fresh coat of paint are great, but it won’t compensate for a sinking foundation and ragged roof.

There's nothing on the city council's Thursday agenda. Imagine if they were talking about fiber optic, since City Hall won't.

Photo credit

And no, not just at an upscale apartment complex, but in the sense of infrastructure.

You know ... economic development.

Louisville has an innovation chief. Jeff Gahan has a media company. Can someone let him know that those propaganda videos travel faster by fiber optic?

‘New Currency’: Louisville Innovation Chief On Why Fiber Internet Matters, by Jacob Ryan (WFPL)

What type of economic development could this spark?

Ted Smith: Increasingly, when companies are looking at locating here, they are asking “well, tell me about your city and do you have the stuff I’m looking for.” The good news about Louisville is we’ve always been able to answer the question about cultural amenities, a great public media station, all these kinds of things. But new to the list is “tell me about your Internet pricing, are you a fiber city.” That’s new, it’s new currency. Nobody should underestimate the importance of all the items on the list, and there are usually a lot of items on the list. When people talk about infrastructure and how infrastructure drives economies, this is a type of infrastructure.