Grid Control, Vol. 2: Southsiders get six more parking inches, but you gotta love those 10-foot traffic lanes on Spring.

On Spring Street from Vincennes Street to 4th Street, the parking spaces on the south side of the street vary hardly at all in depth. They're consistently an inch or two shy of 7 feet deep from curb to white stripe.

By the way, the white stripes themselves are 4 inches wide.

On this same stretch of Spring, from Vincennes to 4th, the parking spaces on the north side of the street consistently run 6 and 1/2 feet, curb to stripe, give or take an inch.

At 4th Street, the bike lanes end so as to facilitate the Great Padgett Compromise, wherein the 24-hours-a-day interests of downtown must yield to the necessity of one company having a major street to use for its vehicles during working hours.

In fairness, and perhaps even more annoyingly, the lane pattern must change so it will take a few minutes less for drivers to reach the interstate during one morning and one afternoon hour each day. Meanwhile, value is extracted from downtown the other 22 hours, though this isn't the point right now.

As such, without bike lanes or buffers, from 4th to State on Spring, there remains one eastbound traffic lane, with a second one added for westbound traffic. At this point, the parking lanes on the south side of Spring expand to a consistent 8 feet, while the ones on the north side again fluctuate at around 7 to 7 and 1/2 feet.

Conclusion: From Vincennes to State on Spring, if you park on the north side of the street, you get 6 to 8 inches less in terms of parking depth. Expect to see tires on curbs.

But here's the kicker.

After being told last year that the downtown two-way grid would have 11-foot traffic lanes, only the ones between 4th and State are 11 feet.

Between Vincennes and 4th, the lanes are 10 feet.

Not that I'm complaining. It appears that in the final analysis, grid designer HWC Engineering (favored city contractor and employer of the public housing authority's completely unqualified interim director's spouse) both giveth AND taketh away.

Or maybe it was MAC Construction. And now, to taketh more gin, but don't worry.

I'm not driving, just dodging errant trucks while walking.

Grid Control, Vol. 1: You people drive so freaking horribly that someone's going to die at Spring and 10th.

11-ft traffic lanes: Speck's not talking about NA's lane width cave-in, but he might as well be.

In fact, I've no idea which city or town Jeff Speck is referring to in this tweet. It doesn't matter, because the statement applies to HWC Engineering's "recommendations," which have been devised to mirror City Hall's timidity.

And that's too bad.

Speck's bicycling plan for NA has been unceremoniously jettisoned.

The stated aim of two-way streets to address pass-through toll evaders is null and void, given the timing of bridge toll introduction.

Useful aspects of two-way streets ranging from property values to small business enhancement to walkability are being predictably downplayed (as always) to stress instead auto-centric safety rationales.

Jeff Gahan -- heroic reformer, or chickenshit to the very last?

Speck's tweet refers to this:

Padgett don't mind: "Streets That Encourage Speeding Are Streets That Encourage Drag Racing."

Upon seeing the article's reference to "lanes as wide as 16 feet," Padgett's management had a company-wide monstrous-wide-load-trucking orgasm. After all, size matters when it comes to industrial quality of life.

Meanwhile, folks on Elm, Spring and Market shook their heads and sighed, but that's okay, because Mayor Gahan's going to save us ... some day.

ON THE AVENUES: Complete ventriloquism, or the stagecraft of "throwing" your two-way streets.

Streets That Encourage Speeding Are Streets That Encourage Drag Racing, by David Sachs (Streetsblog)

An unidentified 17-year-old kid without a drivers license killed Nicholas Richling, 26, because he wanted to drive as fast as possible — faster than his drag-racing opponent — on Alameda Boulevard on Sunday evening.

Afterward, Denver PD Sgt. Mike Farr, a crash investigator, pointed to a street design that encourages speeding. “Alameda is a straight shot, a fairly wide boulevard,” Farr told the Denver Post. “These spots exist all over the city.”

Yes, they do. In 2014 David Felan killed 26-year-old Rachel Neiman and injured seven people on Federal Boulevard, a notorious street for drag racing. Alameda and Federal (both urban streets that double as state highways) have incredibly wide lanes — often 12 feet wide, sometimes roomier. Federal has lanes as wide as 16 feet, an alarming width for an urban street ...

More unread Gahan reading at CityLab: "10 Tired Traffic Myths That Didn't Get a Rest in 2015."

As Jeff Gahan and his crack team of form-over-content suburbanites prepare to butcher Jeff Speck's Downtown Street Network Proposal into political monetization kicks and Main Street licks, here is a useful list of flatulent bubbles in need of bursting.

(Need help with any of these words, Shane? Consult this useful tool: That Wordbook Thingy) 

Click through to read them all in detail. I have placed our spotlight on the myth most likely to be ignored as Speck is rendered into gibberish: "A wider road is a safer road."

---

10 Tired Traffic Myths That Didn't Get a Rest in 2015, by Eric Jaffe (CityLab)

The common traffic misperception I submitted for the CityLab staff post on stubborn myths we’d like to retire was just one of many encountered, yet again, during 2015. Here’s a full list for your reading-while-not-driving pleasure. Safe travels this New Year’s, and all those to come.

1. More roads mean less traffic
2. More transit means less traffic
3. Bike lanes make traffic worse

4. A wider road is a safer road
Speaking of 12-foot lanes versus 10-foot lanes, the common perception holds that the wider option is a safer design, since it gives drivers a bit more room to maneuver. But what some new research published in 2015 showed quite clearly was that wider lanes also invite cars to drive faster—erasing whatever safety benefits might be gained by additional space, and actually leading to more dangerous streets.

An evaluation of intersections in Toronto and Tokyo found lower crash rates in lanes that were closer to 10 feet, compared with those that were wider than 12 feet. “Given the empirical evidence that favours ‘narrower is safer’, the ‘wider is safer’ approach based on intuition should be discarded once and for all,” wrote the researcher who conducted the study. Oh, and the 10-foot lanes still moved plenty of traffic.

5. The next lane over is moving faster
6. Everyone else’s bad driving is the reason for traffic
7. You need to get lots of cars off the road to reduce traffic
8. Removing an urban highway would be a traffic nightmare
9. There’s no downside to cheap gas
10. Drivers pay the full cost of road maintenance

Lane widths prominent as "FHWA prepares to knock down complete street barrier."

It cannot be repeated often enough: Spring Street runs through a densely populated downtown urban area, and a revitalizing downtown business district, and has traffic lanes the width of interstate lanes.

Until we do something about these widths, traffic will not slow, and walker/biker safety will continue to be compromised.

It is a public safety issue, and it is an issue of political morality.

Why must public safety be contingent on Jeff Gahan's re-election?

He may be able to sleep at night, but this doesn't mean the remainder of us should rest easily.

FHWA prepares to knock down complete street barrier, by Robert Steuteville (Better Cities & Towns)

A significant barrier to human-scale, complete streets appears ready to fall. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is proposing to drop 11 of 13 mandatory standards for streets under 50 miles per hour, which will help in the design of federally owned urban streets.

“It is definitely a step in the right direction that FHWA is finally responding to the overwhelming amount of research showing little safety benefit to most of their controlling criteria,” says Wes Marshall, associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado.

Wider lane width is one of the crucial criteria for urban streets that has been shown to have no safety benefit. A series of studies have shown that in urban places 12-foot lanes—which have been used on arterial streets since the middle of the 20th century, are less safe than narrower lanes because they encourage speeding. For comparison, Interstate lanes are 12 feet wide.

Something for the Bored of Works to nap on: "Nine foot travel lanes in practice."

Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes are Disastrous for Safety and Must Be Replaced Now

As we've noted oft times before, speed kills in densely populated urban areas, and if a city is serious about reducing traffic speeds and increasing safety for all users of its streets, its streets will be reconverted to two-way traffic with narrower lane widths.

Speed traps are not the answer. They're Band-Aids at best. If one wishes to address fundamentals and not just prattle about them, then basics begin with basics -- not propaganda.

This essay is geeky, but highly relevant to the ongoing situation in New Albany, as Jeff Gahan continues to delay the implementation of safety for political expedience. We're highlighting four passages.

Nine foot travel lanes in practice, by Baron Haussmann (Walkable West Palm Beach)

When it comes to lane width, less is more.

This post explores a state highway section with 9 foot travel lanes, and will demonstrate that in spite of transportation agency misgivings about narrow lanes, Forest Hill Boulevard performs better on crash statistics than FDOT guidance for similar roadways, while offering advantages in the form of reduced construction costs, less negative impacts to adjacent properties, and decreased stormwater runoff, among other positive benefits.

The argument for narrower lanes is summarized.

Livable streets advocates often recommend the use of 9′ to 10′ wide travel lanes instead of wider 11′ to 12′ lanes for several reasons, including:

• Lower construction costs
• Less right of way acquisition required
• Decreased stormwater runoff
• Lower maintenance costs
• Lower travel speeds and less injurious crashes
• Smaller footprint which can allow limited right of way to be reallocated to other uses such as on-street parking, bike lanes, or landscaping.

The author returns to Jeff Speck's article from October, 2014, which should be waiting on the night stand to slap Gahan in the face each each time he rises to resume building his cult of personality at the expense of public safety.

Jeff Speck’s article, “Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes are Disastrous for Safety and Must Be Replaced Now“, provides a strong case for why reduced free-flow speeds are desirous and how narrower lanes help to achieve lower speeds and safer streets:

When lanes are built too wide, pedestrians are forced to walk further across streets on which cars are moving too fast and bikes don’t fit…

All of the above data, studies, and pronouncements, collected and disseminated by the mainstream traffic engineering establishment, point to the following conclusion: 10-foot lanes cause no more accidents than 12-foot lanes, and they may cause fewer. These accidents can be expected to be slower, and thus less deadly. Therefore, 10-foot lanes are safer than 12-foot lanes.

The article closes with a reminder to fiscal conservatives of both political parties: What we're talking about here embraces both sides of the aisle.

If you’re interested in changing things, Strong Towns is an organization working hard to get us back on a path of a fiscally sound development pattern and sustainable transportation funding. Here’s a great place to start the conversation.

Still confused about "road diets" and street redesign, Irv? Take a video tour and LEARN.

What? You mean just like in this document? Wow!

Even your grandchildren can watch a video ... and comprehend facts.

A Wonderfully Clear Explanation of How Road Diets Work: Planner Jeff Speck leads a video tour of four different street redesigns, by Eric Jaffe (City Lab)

A road diet is a great way for cities to reclaim some of the excess street space they’ve dedicated to cars—generally preserving traffic flows while improving safety and expanding mobility to other modes. But just as food dieters have Atkins, South Beach, vegan, and any number of options, road diets come in many flavors, too. Urban planner and Walkable City author Jeff Speck, in collaboration with graphic artist Spencer Boomhower, takes us on a tour of four types of street diets in a deliciously clear new video series.

Mr. Padgett's Blues: "10-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Safer—and Still Move Plenty of Cars."

Narrow lanes are safer

Cars in wider lanes tend to go faster

Narrow lanes still carry lots of traffic

Evidence and factual research keep piling up. Jeff Gahan remains aloof, refusing to publicly embrace evidence and factual research.

Remember: You are invited to listen as Dr. John Gilderbloom preaches his "gospel of things urban" on Tuesday, August 4, at the library.

The smart money says that City Hall will boycott this meeting. It's what you do when you're completely out of touch, but hey -- let's all go swimming.

10-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Safer—and Still Move Plenty of Cars: The case against 12-foot lanes in cities, in 3 charts, by Eric Jaffe (City Lab)

... a new study by civil engineer Dewan Masud Karim (spotted by Chris McCahill at the State Smart Transportation Initiative) ... evaluating dozens of intersections in Toronto and Tokyo, Karim linked lower crash rates to narrower lanes—those closer to 10- or 10.5-feet wide than to 12-feet. Sure enough, wider lanes meant speedier cars, and yet narrower lanes were perfectly capable of moving high volumes of traffic.

He concludes:

Given the empirical evidence that favours ‘narrower is safer’, the ‘wider is safer’ approach based on intuition should be discarded once and for all. Narrower lane width, combined with other livable streets elements in urban areas, result in less aggressive driving and the ability to slow or stop a vehicle over shorter distances to avoid a collision.

Actually, 8.5 feet wide is the federal standard for commercial vehicles.

(thanks W)

As we inch toward the Speck plan's public meeting finale on Wednesday at the Pepin Mansion ((March 18, 6:00 p.m., 1003 E. Main Street), perennial civic value extractors in the trucking and heavy equipment business, and their convenient politically motivated apologists like Irv Stumler and Dan Coffey, continue to press the point that their narrow interests must trump all other considerations.

James Padgett's infamous newspaper missive remains an instructive example of a random argument generator, into which is fed various fears and innuendo, and even the stray good point, in the creation of a grandiose mash-up with the superficial appearance of credibility.

However, just because intellectually lazy newspaper editors adoringly fall for it doesn't mean the rest of us should. As a friend points out ...

The Padgett comments were classic misdirection - meant to confuse the folks who don't pay attention to facts. When people use wrong "facts" as a way to claim they aren't lying in a dishonest debate - it's just wrong.

So true, as in the case of lane widths. We already know that a 12' - 13' wide lane width isn't necessary to accommodate a Honda Accord -- one of the best selling cars in America at 6' 7" wide.

You don't need 'em for trucks, either.

WIDTH REQUIREMENTS

U.S. Department of Transportation - Federal Highway Administration

The maximum width limit for CMVs on the NN and reasonable access routes was originally established at 102 inches, except for Hawaii where it is 2.74 m (108 inches). (See discussion of Reasonable Access on page 12.) To standardize vehicle width on an international basis, the 102-inch width limit was interpreted to mean the same as its approximate metric equivalent, 2.6 meters (102.36 inches) (Figure 1 above).

Here is Spring Street as Rosenbargered today.

And here is a quick capture of Speck's planned refit for the same stretch of street.

See a median anywhere in there?

That's what I thought. When it comes to reading comprehension, New Albany remains the land that time forgot.

Will Jeff Speck's "10 not 12!" axiom apply to Spring Street?

Previously, setting aside legitimate and persistent concerns as to whether there exists within City Hall the requisite political courage for implementation of street grid reform, we speculated as to the future configuration of Spring Street, as reconstituted via Jeff Speck's forthcoming recommendations.

Jeff Speck on John Rosenbarger's 12-ft wide Spring Street traffic lanes: “A 12-foot lane is a 70 mph lane."

 ... Presumably, Speck will advise them to correct the idiocy, and perhaps they will. I'm guessing a Spring Street fix involves two-way traffic lanes at 10 feet, with a slightly wider turn lane in the middle, and the removal of biking lanes, which are largely useless. Should there be lanes for bicycles? Yes, somewhere. Just imagine if we had an actual plan for them, in the sense of actually leading from and to a destination ... but then a traffic lane might have to be changed, and we know how THAT inconveniences Democratic Party grandees.

The photo above tells the rest of the story. Speck himself recently has crusaded very publicly as to the street grid reformer's equivalent of "Remember the Alamo":

It's "10 not 12!"

Not since "Fifty-four forty or fight!" has there been a numerical equation so compelling.

Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety and Must Be Replaced Now: Let's make "10 not 12!" a new mantra for saving our cities and towns

... States and counties almost always apply a 12-foot standard. Why do they do this? Because they believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong. Or, to be more accurate, they are wrong, and thousands of Americans are dead.

With this background established, yesterday the Green Mouse was fed an interesting rumor: Main Street project lanes soon are to be striped at 11 feet (a namby-pamby Rosenbarger compromise in itself), which is the same lane width proposed for a future two-way Spring Street -- not by Adam Dickey, but by Speck.

Noting that the number 11 does not even exist in Speck's "10 not 12" slogan, how could it be that I've been reading the 10-ft lane width fighting words all across the Internetz, and then see 11-ft lanes proposed for the de facto interstate trucking route currently operating right outside my front door?

Since Speck invariably has been responsive, a trait hitherto unknown to the likes of John Rosenbarger and the majority of cloistered city officials, I thought I'd ask him directly.

Here's the exchange on Twitter.

Roger A. Baylor: Rumor has it that in New Albany, 11-ft lanes for Spring are advised. True? If so, how does it jibe with your 10-ft advocacy?

Jeff Speck: I'm surprised of rumors, since recs are in flux. That said, every street has to make best use of it's existing curb-to-curb.

JS: And I would generally keep bike lanes at 6 feet max so cars don't use them. This may lead to 11-foot lanes.

RAB: City's been talking about sharrows, so I assumed the bike lanes would be ditched. As constituted now, they are useless.

RAB: High-speed, pass-through heavy truck traffic is killing us. Looking for relief any way we can.

JS: Yes, very aware and concerned!

RAB: Thanks; it has been highly stressful.

Interestingly, the Green Mouse's same informant stated just a few weeks ago that the city's real and abiding secret wish is to inflict medians on Spring, as have been built on Main, seemingly precluding bike lanes, and replacing them with the dreaded, ineffective sharrows.

That's insanity, but then again, this is New Albany.

To be sure, these are no more than bits and pieces, leaks and rumors, and they only hint at broader outlines, which we'll not be privy to until the moment, at long last, when the Speck report is finished and the city decides to share it with us prior to doing whatever City Hall already had decided to do -- because that's the way this administration has chosen to operate, and by extension, that's why it has broken faith with those supporting it.

As Speck wrote, it is in flux, and we must wait and see.

The frustrating thing is that bike lanes should have been on Main Street, period. Now that Main Street has been ingloriously (permanently?) botched owing to changes there being conducted politically without consideration for their connectivity to our current dysfunctional street grid, or to any future street grid rendered functional, what is the ripple effect for subsequent alterations?

Apparently one of them is gifting Spring with 11-ft lanes, so as to allow for bike paths that lead nowhere and shouldn't be located where they are, and with all due respect to Jeff Speck, doesn't this only compound the perpetual foolishness rather than ameliorate it?

After all, as most of us can see all too well, the compounding of foolishness is this city's historic mission and legacy. New Albany fails because it refuses to begin at the beginning, and to decide what it wants to be prior to spending millions of dollars on incompletely implemented plans that tend to change with the prevailing seasonal (and political) winds.

As the Complete Street project recently tweeted:

Before we talk about transportation we have to ask what city we want and how we want to live!

That never happens here, does it? You see, what it comes down to is Abraham Lincoln.

If I could calm this street grid without changing any lane I would do it, and if I could calm it by changing all the lanes I would do it; and if I could calm it by changing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

But it makes a fairly good campaign platform plank ... almost as good as "10 not 12!"

ON THE AVENUES: Egg, meet face: How many different ways can we botch the Main Street Deforestation Project?

ON THE AVENUES: Egg, meet face: How many ways can we botch the Main Street Deforestation Project?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

My usual Thursday column space has been pre-scheduled for the timely "rewinding" of a 2013 essay about the annual advent of Harvest Homecoming.

In our municipality’s case, it isn’t workers’ rights but uncomfortable irony that bedevils the citizenry, second only to bed bugs, and so the dire threat posed by ironic detachment must be recast into simpler truths, like the prevailing fiction that Harvest Homecoming has anything whatever to do with economic development apart from the money necessary to perpetuate the fest itself.

However, there is so much to write about, isn't there?

Concurrently with Harvest Homecoming's arrival, this administration's signature "shining path" public works project is inching toward an abysmal conclusion, and so for those too busy chuckin' punkins to pay attention, let's take a look at what Jeff "Walkable City" Speck has been doing.

Speck is the man hired by the city of New Albany to study our ragtag, dysfunctional streets and recommend changes to enhance walkability, make these streets safer, and in a presumably comprehensive way, bring this persistently dirty river town into modern times.

Yesterday morning, Speck released an article at City Lab: Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety and Must Be Replaced Now. I made it the basis of a posting at NAC; more about that in a moment.

States and counties believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong.

Speck left absolutely no doubt as to the ultimate importance of the lane width topic. It is a foundation of his platform. Here is what he tweeted about the article:

ATTENTION! This is the most important article I have ever written. Please read, share, and join the fight!

Later in the day, Speck wrote words that may come back to haunt him when he returns to NA to present his street study, and is confronted with our generations-old, institutional imbecility.

Reading comments to my article, I wonder: what makes people who have never travelled so confident that things they haven't seen don't exist?

Someone might say: "Roger, why all the pessimism?"

First, there are those long years of experience listening to illuminating barroom opinions about Europe, spouted by people who've never been any further east than Cincinnati.

More pressingly, there's this: As the streets specialist we've hired to advise us makes it perfectly clear in national forums that 10-ft traffic lanes are the mantra for any street grid's makeover, the city of New Albany prepares to put the triumphant finishing touches on a multi-million dollar Main Street project with lanes that have grown in width like John Rosenbarger's nose, from 10 feet to an "official" 11 feet, with a "two foot offset" rendering them into ... that's right ... 13-foot lanes.

In turn, if a traffic project ostensibly intended to calm traffic fails miserably to implement the one sure mechanism for doing so, chances are that traffic will not be calmed, in which case every bit of the Main Street project's expense and squandered opportunity cost has been devoted to cosmetic fluffing, not altered function.

And about those ritzy sidewalk address engravings? A reader beings this to our attention, asking:

"When you look at the existing city ordinance pertaining to street numbers, do you feel spending 'our money' on horizontal, inset sidewalk plaques makes sense, as they don't meet the City's own ordinance requirements?

§ 99.02  POSTING OF HOUSE NUMBERS.

   (A)   All owners or occupants of commercial or residential buildings located within the city limits should be and are required to conspicuously post their address so as to be easily visible from the street on which the building or home lies.

   (B)   The address shall be in standard arabic numbers no smaller than three inches high and shall be posted either on the improvements or on a sign or mailbox on the street.

   (C)   The numbers shall be of a color in contrast to its background so as to be easily read.

(Ord. G-93-156, passed 8-19-1993)

The city of New Albany has opportunistically spent "free" state monies, as intended to be used for future maintenance, on a showpiece project, the engineering of which contradicts most of what paid consultant Speck is about to advise us to do.

With the remainder of the city increasingly disgusted at the attention lavished on one neighborhood to the exclusion of all others, a few functionaries have fanned out to privately issue promises that given time and someone else's money, they'll botch Spring Street (for example) in precisely the same way as Main, meaning that traffic will not be calmed, walkability will not be enhanced, and bikers will be provided street access by means of sharrows symbols drawn on every uncalmed street.

Victory will be declared, and nothing will have changed. Our own Jeff provides his usual succinct (and damning) summary.

The distance between the parking lanes and median on Main Street is indeed 13 feet. With those wide lanes in place, the median itself will act as a buffer against oncoming traffic, further reducing any sense of car-slowing friction that would normally occur from pushing sufficiently narrow, opposite direction lanes closer together. Bike lanes have proven effective at helping to slow traffic (not to mention providing a transportation alternative), but they're absent as well. In short, there's little reason millions of dollars later to slow down on Main Street.

My biggest concern with the City's potential implementation of Speck's plans for the remaining grid isn't that they won't do anything but rather that they'll do a lot of something, inserting their own stunted reasoning into it instead of just following directions. If Main Street and other recent projects are any indication, there's a strong likelihood that they'll spend an enormous amount of money building something ineffective in a way that will make it much more difficult to correct in the near future. To do Main Street well, for instance, would likely involve removing or at least substantially reducing the median. Who's going to pay for that having just built it?

So far, it's area residents who are eating crow and the City that's serving it.

If you ask me, "stunted reasoning" is a polite way of referring to a steaming cow pie, but for once, perhaps I might profit from some semblance of ironic detachment.

Speck on Main Street's 12- to 13-foot traffic lanes: "(They) believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong."

Hell, we're accustomed to it on Spring Street

Jeff Speck provides more food for thought as the Gahan administration's presumably exculpatory "public safety" mantra is repeated again and again, as applicable to anything area of the human experience apart from the city's own street grid.

It's a meal of finely roasted crow these uncommunicative sorts probably won't like very much, but let's serve it, anyway.

Those traffic lanes on New Albany's latest and greatest shining path, the Main Street Deforestation Project ... they're HOW wide?

Well, in the 2012 feasibility study, it was stated that the "minimum travel lane width is 10 feet." Then the usual backroom wheels were set to spinning, and they became 11 feet. Then, earlier this year, just prior to the commencement of deforestation, the newspaper had this to say about it.

Notable among the updates to the project: An extra foot of space between the medians and the traffic lanes has been included in the plan. The lanes will technically still be 11 feet wide, but there will be a two-foot offset from the stripe and the walls protecting the medians.

For those capable of math, 11 + 1 = 12. Or is it 11 + 2 = 13? Either way, it's damning.

Crickets chirp, and pins drop.

John Rosenbarger somehow retains his position.

In short, we're in the process of implementing on a new and "improved" Main Street precisely what Speck refutes in the article linked below. And you still want to know why we have no confidence whatever that Speck's OTHER street study recommendations will be implemented here in New Albany?

Read it and weep ... for our seemingly bottomless stupidity.

Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety and Must Be Replaced Now: Let's make "10 not 12!" a new mantra for saving our cities and towns, by Jeff Speck (City Lab)

... I have steeled myself for the task of explaining here, in a manner that can never be disputed or ignored, why the single best thing we can do for the health, wealth, and integrity of this great nation is to forbid the construction, ever again, of any traffic lane wider than 10 feet ...

... States and counties believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong. They are wrong because of a fundamental error that underlies the practice of traffic engineering—and many other disciplines—an outright refusal to acknowledge that human behavior is impacted by its environment. This error applies to traffic planning, as state DOTs widen highways to reduce congestion, in compete ignorance of all the data proving that new lanes will be clogged by the new drivers that they invite. And it applies to safety planning, as traffic engineers, designing for the drunk who's texting at midnight, widen our city streets so that the things that drivers might hit are further away.

More on the shining path can be found here. Also, previously at NAC:

Jeff Speck on John Rosenbarger's 12-ft wide Spring Street traffic lanes: “A 12-foot lane is a 70 mph lane."

Jeff Speck on John Rosenbarger's 12-ft wide Spring Street traffic lanes: “A 12-foot lane is a 70 mph lane."

When we took up residence on Spring Street in 2003, it was one-way arterial, three lanes wide, and with parallel parking on both sides by the curbs.

Doug England's self-congratulatory Spring Street restriping in 2009, for which John Rosenbarger now claims glorious triumph whenever he finds himself speaking to people who don't know any better, actually involved increasing the number of total one-way lanes to four, albeit by reducing the number of automotive lanes to two, and adding two bicycle lanes, one on each side of the cars.

(Why anyone would think that two bike lanes starting nowhere, leading nowhere, and running in the same direction was a good idea, in any imaginable universe, is impossible to fathom. After all, these are locally educated functionaries.)

For a brief period, the change seemed to have a calming effect, but ultimately, traffic got fast and wild again. Recently, many more heavy trucks than before have been using Spring Street and adding to the problem, even as Rosenbarger habitually denies that these vehicles are being diverted from the Main Street Deforestation Project.

More on that utter fabrication, tomorrow.

Well ... who are you going to believe, Rosenbarger or your own eyes and ears? If his nose gets any longer, the Greenway can use it to bridge Silver Creek. So, why did Diamond John's 2011 Spring Street restripings not help at all?

Primarily, because nothing whatever changed.

The street is 50 feet wide from curb to curb. Before, there were three traffic lanes and two parking-only lanes by the curbs, but the parking lanes were not delineated. On the north side of the street, one's driver-side door just opened into speeding traffic.

Therefore, in essence, there were three 12-ft wide lanes for automotive traffic (36 feet in all) and two for parking (approximately 14 feet). One traffic lane of the three was removed. 10 of its 12 feet became bike lanes at 5-ft each. The parking areas were delineated at 8 feet. The two remaining traffic lanes remained 12 feet wide.

As for what it means to have 12-ft wide traffic lanes running through the middle of a neighborhood that politicians wish to be seen promoting as "revitalizing," let's turn to Jeff Speck and an article from Butte, Montana explaining Speck's street reform recommendations there.

... “A fight I’m fighting in state after state is the 12-foot lane width standard that most states apply,” he said.

The federal government in the past few months set new standards that differ from the states however, setting the travel lanes at 10 feet in width and parking lanes at 8 feet, he said.

“A 12-foot lane is a 70 mph lane,” Speck said. “Twelve foot lanes versus 10 foot lanes are the DOT versus us. There is no measureable decrease on urban street (traffic) capacity with 10-foot lanes. The burden is on DOT to prove why they need 12-foot streets.”

Speck argues that 10-foot lanes are safer for everyone, too, by slowing traffic.

“A person hit by a car going 30 mph is 10 times more likely to die than a person hit by a car traveling 25 mph,” he said.

That's right.

England and Rosenbarger claimed victory, by changing absolutely nothing. They built two unbuffered bike lanes next to 70 mph traffic lanes. They did nothing else, and they want you to believe that what they did was heroic and innovative, primarily so one of them can run for office again while the other keeps his job -- again.

Unfortunately, the Gahan administration has spent three years endorsing the status quo, and the status quo was, and is, a mistake, which puts the lie to all other efforts aimed at "revitalizing" the neighborhood.

Presumably, Speck will advise them to correct the idiocy, and perhaps they will. I'm guessing a Spring Street fix involves two-way traffic lanes at 10 feet, with a slightly wider turn lane in the middle, and the removal of biking lanes, which are largely useless. Should there be lanes for bicycles? Yes, somewhere. Just imagine if we had an actual plan for them, in the sense of actually leading from and to a destination ... but then a traffic lane might have to be changed, and we know how THAT inconveniences Democratic Party grandees.

Of course, in all likelihood, Rosenbarger will take credit for the correction to the problem he created. Almost surely, England will run for mayor, or council, or maybe dogcatcher. He'll claim credit for the results obtained by doing nothing. New Albany will languish because we've never met a box we didn't prefer to be constrained within.

And nothing will get done.