Sunday Fact Fest, Episode 03: "How the ‘15-Minute City’ Could Help Post-Pandemic Recovery."

Automobile supremacy is a virus, too. 

How the ‘15-Minute City’ Could Help Post-Pandemic Recovery, by Patrick Sisson (CityLab)

A new C40 Cities report touts Paris’s model for putting essentials within close walking or biking distance as an economic boost for coronavirus-ravaged municipal budgets.

The Covid-19 crisis in the U.S. has torn a hole in city budgets, decimating urban economies across the country even as infections continue to roar back and the specter of second-wave lockdowns loom. Las Vegas faces “the most serious fiscal crisis” it’s ever faced. The pandemic is hitting Houston’s finances harder than Hurricane Harvey, according to Mayor Sylvester Turner. Tallahassee, Florida, city officials are trying to “defuse a time bomb” due to $23.4 million in lost revenue this year. Local governments may face a cumulative shortfall of hundreds of billions of dollars, small businesses are closing at staggering rates, and when the temporary boost in unemployment benefits expires, municipal sales tax shortfalls may get even worse.

An international coalition of cities believes that the only path forward for mayors is funding green stimulus plans focused on job creation. The newly released Mayors’ Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery, released July 15 by C40 Cities, an international coalition of urban leaders focused on fighting climate change and promoting sustainable development, was developed by the organization’s Global Mayors COVID-19 Recovery Task Force. The far-ranging series of plans offers a green prescription for financial stabilization that emphasizes several familiar pillars of progressive urbanism — renewable energy investment, energy-efficient buildings, improved mass transit, and spending on new parks and green space. One core idea: Cities are the “engines of the recovery,” and investing in their resilience is the best way to avoid economic disaster.

One of its recommendations has a more novel ring to it. The agenda recommends that “all residents will live in ‘15-minute cities.’” That term echoes the transformative ambitions of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has doubled down on car-free transit and pedestrian infrastructure in the French capital. Hidalgo made the idea that Parisians should be able to meet their shopping, work, recreational and cultural needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride a centerpiece of her recent reelection campaign. The C40 proposal suggests that following such a model would help global cities live up to the document’s promise of equitable access to jobs and city services for all, and rebuild areas economically hard-hit by the pandemic.

“Fifteen-minute cities, micromobility, and more space for walking and biking are innovative solutions that will help our cities rebuild and restore our economy while protecting lives and cutting dangerous pollution,” Carol M. Browner, former EPA administrator and board chair of the League of Conservation Voters, said in a statement supporting the agenda ...

"We see a growing movement in cities throughout the world to stem the usage of cars and close streets to unmitigated traffic."

At the Modacity page at Facebook.

"My country is too big and spread out for bikes.”

A THIRD of all trips in America are one mile or less. HALF are three miles or less. The large majority are driven.

The potential for transformation is huge. But only if we stop making excuses and start making space for cycling.

We could be doing so much more in New Albany. But we're far too stupid and cowardly for that.

Why Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm, by Brooks Rainwater (CityLab)

In cities like New York, Paris, Rotterdam, and soon San Francisco, car-free streets are emerging amid a growing movement.

When asked what they like most about a city they have visited, almost no one answers: “The cars whizzing by on the streets.” Cultural attractions, the people we meet, walking through the city and gazing at plazas, buildings, and places—these are the things that make a city unique.

What if there was a way to get more of what we all like and less of the noise and congestion we don’t? Many cities are working towards that goal, by closing major streets to traffic and opening them up to people.

Cities have limited space, and how it is allocated is tremendously important for people. The denser a place, the dearer each square foot is. Yet all over the world, cities were retrofitted to accommodate cars, giving them an outsized portion of urban space and limiting the area in which people could walk, sit at cafes, or play games with friends.

Many cities in America are newer than those in other parts of the world; most were born before cars but expanded tremendously afterwards. This wasn’t the case in Europe, where centuries of settlement made it difficult for the continent to fully succumb to the automobile. In the postwar era, European cities could have followed America’s lead in designing around cars. Most, however, made very different choices.

The geometry of space shouldn’t favor one very large mode of transportation over others that need room to grow and flourish ...

Head, meet wall: "Zurich shows that effective transportation requires that we widen our focus to see beyond cars."

CityLab is completely free. There's nothing stopping you from following this link and achieving a greater understanding of places where sensible solutions are allowed to exist.

What Does This Street In Zürich Mean?, by Norman Garrick (CityLab)

If you see how cars, streetcars, bikes, and pedestrians use this Swiss street, you can better understand what’s wrong with so many other urban thoroughfares.

Above is a picture of a pretty typical city street in Zürich, Switzerland.

What do you see?

In some ways, this scene represents a kind of Rorschach Test for transportation and urban planning. If you are a passenger on a tram riding on one of the two sets of rails that take up most of the street, this scene represents freedom of movement and a sense that transit is privileged in Zürich. If you’re a pedestrian, this is a relatively comfortable street to be on, with useful services, restaurants, and a few interesting stores (check out the model train store at the corner with Haldenbachstrasse). If you’re on a bike, this, like most other streets in Zürich, is OK, but not great.

But if you’re an American tourist, your first thought might be that these Europeans are real strange: Look at that long line of car traffic on the right, and look at all that road space going to waste. And an engineer or planner trained in the conventional mode will probably agree with you, and see a picture of abject failure. In the parlance of the traffic planner, this is a street operating at Level of Service F.

snip

Let us first deal with the American tourist who sees inefficiency. During the peak hour, the vehicle lanes carry about 400 cars and perhaps 500 people. (I counted!) The two tramlines carry about 3,500 people per hour. So, notwithstanding the fact that at first glance the tram lanes seem empty and remarkably inefficient, the numbers tell a different story—the tram lanes are doing yeoman’s work, carrying 7 times more people than the car lanes, and they could easily carry many more. And this is before we even start to consider the environmental and economic advantages of transit over cars. (People in Zürich have unlimited access to all transit in the city for just $1,000 per year, yet the subsidy from the city, state and the nation is modest, since the fare box returns, and other revenues, pay about two-thirds of the cost of operating the system.)

I'll stop there. I'm too depressed to keep snipping.

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.

Transportation for America has unveiled their three new principles and outcomes for federal transportation policy.

Transportation for America has unveiled the organization's three new principles and outcomes for federal transportation policy. The three principles are as applicable in New Albany as anywhere else. Candidates, your thoughts?

1 Prioritize maintenance
2 Design for safety over speed
3 Connect people to jobs and services

Check it out.

A New Vision for Transportation (Smart Growth America)

Listen Up, Washington: No New Roads (Charles Marohn at Strong Towns)

---

A VISION FOR 21ST CENTURY TRANSPORTATION IN AMERICA
Yesterday our colleagues at Transportation for America unveiled their three new principles and outcomes for federal transportation policy. That may sound pretty wonky, but taken together, they paint a vision for what the tens of billions we spend on transportation each year should actually accomplish for people. Instead of just talking about how much money to spend, these principles delve into how we can better spend the money we already have.

The principles are worth exploring in their entirety—which you can do here, with some great, shareable graphics—but here's why we're really excited about them: they will help create safer, more walkable communities.

Principle #1: Prioritize maintenance
Outcome #1: Cut the road, bridge, and transit maintenance backlog in half

Principle #2: Design for safety over speed
Outcome #2: Save lives with slower, safer road design

Principle #3: Connect people to jobs and services
Outcome #3: Determine how well the transportation system connects people to jobs and services, and prioritize projects that will improve those connections.

Why these principles matter for Complete Streets

Our work at the National Complete Streets Coalition is all about making sure that everyone who uses our public streets can do so safely, and the second principle—design for safety over speed—speaks directly to that. In far too many communities, maximizing the speed at which vehicles travel is the primary motivation behind street design; too often, safe accommodations for people walking, biking, or using transit are afterthoughts, if they're even considered at all. While politicians and agencies talk a big game about prioritizing safety, in practice, it's really just talk. Pedestrians are being killed by people driving at rates not seen in nearly three decades.

If we had a federal transportation policy that explicitly prioritized safety above everything else, our streets and communities would start to look different. Slip lanes in developed areas might be replaced with bulb outs. Extra wide lanes for cars would be narrowed to slow vehicles, making more space for people.

Sidewalks and slow speed lanes for modes likes bikes and scooters would be the norm, not the exception. Once you leave the interstate, streets would be designed to slow traffic—and protect people—instead of speeding vehicles through places to the detriment of safety for all people who use the street.

And principle three is just as important. Complete Streets, and ultimately complete networks, enable people to reach jobs, schools, grocery stores, and many other resources using whatever mode of travel they choose or rely upon. Using new data, we can better assess whether people can get where they need to go on foot or with a bike or via transit. These data can and should help us prioritize the projects that fill in gaps and missing connections in our network. By measuring what matters, then using those data to guide our decisions and investments, we can create safer, more accessible, thriving communities.

Let me know when 1Si and the Our Southern Indiana Regional Development Authority get serious about mobility solutions like this one.

I'm delighted watching as the drivers shriek. Now that's entertainment. Shouldn't we be contemplating "regional" development strategies like this?

A Car-Centric City Makes a Bid for a Better Bus System, by Aaron Renn (CityLab)

Indianapolis is set to unveil a potentially transformative all-electric bus rapid transit line, along with a host of major public transportation upgrades.

Let's skip to the conclusion.

The credibility of transit in Indianapolis is already low, so the city really has to execute on the rollout. It also has to deliver an increase ridership, not just improve the operating characteristics of the system. That could be a tall order: The Red Line is going live at the same time as the new fare system, and as a new CEO is taking over the helm at IndyGo. IndyGo is going fare-free for a month when the Red Line launches, is recruiting temporary customer service volunteers to staff stations, and has arranged a grace period for ticketing bus lane violators (police will only issue warnings) until drivers in Indy figure out the new traffic pattern. Still, there are a lot of balls in the air, with much to potentially go wrong. Over the summer, the city announced a year-long delay in building the next two BRT lines—an inauspicious development.

But if Indianapolis can make its new system work and draw more riders, it would represent something all too rare in the U.S—a capital-light model for improving transit in a car-centric city. If warranted, light rail can always be added later, but as IndyGo’s Horne says, “The bus system is the backbone of any good mobility network.”

Copenhagen's bike lane success is about more than bike lanes.

"Public policies that ask car owners to take greater responsibility for the cost of roads and emissions, and the conscious decision to build housing at much higher densities, make cycling in Copenhagen more attractive and feasible than car travel for many trips."

All of which reinforces a point to be made about New Albany's shambolic and purposefully short-sighted "commitment" to bicycles and similar alternative means of transport.

A bike path or lane cannot be a success when it isn't connected to anything. As with Cortright's comments below, the objective should be creating systems.

In Nawbany, the Democratic ruling elite simply isn't bright enough for THAT.

Copenhagen: More Than Bike Lanes, by Joe Cortright (Strong Towns)

Strong Towns member Joe Cortright runs the think tank and blog City Observatory. This post is republished from City Observatory with permission.

 ... For those who have made the pilgrimage to Copenhagen, and come away with a romantic vision of re-making their auto-dominated city into a more bike-friendly place, there’s a lot than can be learned. While leadership and infrastructure are certainly keys to building a bike-friendly city, too many re-tellings of Copenhagen’s success leave out some of the most important ingredients.

Aside from a reference to parking violations costing as much as $80, the LA Times article spells out none of the details about how car travel is priced in Denmark. A close look at the specific policies for taxing and pricing of cars and fuel, and promoting dense urban development, are key to understanding why Copenhagen has been so successful.

And ...

There’s a lot we can learn from the design and operation of bike lanes in Copenhagen, and the lessons about leadership and the need to make investment are real. But that’s only part of the story. Public policies that ask car owners to take greater responsibility for the cost of roads and emissions, and the conscious decision to build housing at much higher densities, make cycling more attractive and feasible than car travel for many trips. As we always stress at City Observatory, the dysfunction in our transportation system stems fundamentally from charging the wrong price for roads. Stories, like this one from the LA Times, extolling the Copenhagen cycling success story shouldn’t leave out the essential role of correctly pricing cars and fuel and building dense housing.

Multi-modal planning to break the pattern of automobile dependency.

"Many current planning practices reinforce a cycle of increased automobile use, more automobile-oriented community redevelopment, and reduced mobility options. There are good reasons to break this pattern."

What I like about this piece is the way Litman refutes the familiar and shrill "either-or" war-on-cars paradigm by which car-centrists tend to frame the debate.

Multi-modal planning is nothing more than redressing an unsustainable and counter-productive imbalance. As Bluegill noted elsewhere yesterday:

Drivers are often very quick to point out proportionality when they think they pay for all the streets and roads. I like to hook them up with actual facts and then ask which half or so of street space they prefer so other users can have the other half.

It's important reading.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be walking downtown to get my hair cut.

Breaking the Cycle of Automobile Dependency, by Todd Litman (Planetizen)

... People sometimes misrepresent these issues, implying that the alternative to automobile dependency is a car-free transport system, but in most cases the best system is multi-modal, in which people use the most appropriate option for each trip: walking and bicycling for local errands, public transit on major travel corridors, and automobiles when they are truly most efficient overall, considering all impacts. Multi-modal planning ensures that everybody, including people who cannot, should not, or prefer not to drive receive their fair share of public investments in transport facilities and services ...

The Urbanophile nails it: "Louisville Bridges Project Is the Biggest Transportation Boondoggle of the 21st Century."

Go there and read all about it. The Urbanophile is remorseless.

I differ with only one point.

By rights I should be writing this for a major national publication instead of putting it on my personal web site. But I love Louisville and Southern Indiana (my hometown) and don’t want to create negative press for them. I just want it known for the record that this did not have to happen.

Without negative press -- without floggings, scourging and negative feedback in every known public configuration, right here in Louisville and all across America -- these imbeciles will do something just as stupid, yet again.

Louisville Bridges Project Is the Biggest Transportation Boondoggle of the 21st Century, by Aaron M. Renn (Urbanophile)

I have been a steadfast critic of the project to build two new bridges across the Ohio River in Louisville for over a decade. In fact, my first critical post on the bridges proposal was put up in 2007 less than six months after starting my original Urbanophile blog.

The end result was even worse than I anticipated. The project has proven to be a money waster of the highest order, and in fact by far the biggest American transportation boondoggle I can identify in the 21st century so far.

Part of the agreement between Indiana and Kentucky to build the bridges was that they would do official before and after surveys of traffic to determine the impact of the new bridges on traffic flow. The study was published in August of this year.

The result? The two states spent $1.3 billion dollars to build a parallel I-65 span in downtown Louisville that doubled the capacity of that crossing. After spending that money, traffic fell by 50%.

Let me repeat that: Indiana and Kentucky spent $1.3 billion to double the capacity of a road while traffic levels were cut in half ...

"The city that gives you free beer for cycling" (spoiler alert: it ain't us).

Watch the video here.

The city that gives you free beer for cycling. (BBC)

This is how the Italian city of Bologna is getting people to leave their cars behind. Video by Amelia Martyn-Hemphill and Nicola Kelly.

An app records sustainable trips -- on foot, by bicycle or with public transportation. Users amass mobility points, redeemable for freebies from participating businesses.

Bella Mossa: Another Reason to Love Bologna, by Irene S. Levine (More Time to Travel)

Like most urban centers around the world, Bologna has its share of traffic congestion. One major initiative to address this problem was the designation of a pedestrian zone in the city’s historic center that strictly limits automobile traffic. (There are special provisions for tourists who need to get to hotels located within the zone.)

But traffic in most areas of Bologna, which fall outside the zone, still remained challenging, often exacerbated by the frequent strikes (scioperi) and political demonstrations that are typical in Italy.

Goals of Bella Mossa

My Facebook friend, Laura Bizzari (a language teacher in Bologna), recently posted a BBC video on Facebook about an innovative project in Bologna, called Bella Mossa, that aims to make a difference in health and quality of life.

The project is funded through European Commission’s Horizon 2020, an EU program to promote sustainable transport. Launched in April 2017, the project uses incentives to reduce vehicular traffic and CO2 emissions by encouraging people to walk, cycle or use public transportation ...

Take note, progressives: "We’ve built an unsustainable transportation network that makes all of us feel isolated, vulnerable and embattled, no matter how we’re getting around."

It is my aim to continue repeating this simple fact: one needn't be a progressive to grasp messages like the following, but if you consider yourself a progressive in political and social matters, it's contradictory to dismiss messages like this.

I've educated myself. So can you. This writer lives in Washington D.C., and you might be tempted to reject his point insofar as it applies to a smaller setting like New Albany.

You'd be mistaken. It's a difference in degree, not basic facts. I learned them, and you can, too.

Our streets make us unhappy. They don’t have to, by Colin Browne (Washington Post)

... The crazy thing about the automobile is that despite claiming a wildly disproportionate amount of public space, it’s still a slow and frustrating way to get across town. This is not because of all the buses, pedestrians and bicyclists. It’s not because the speed limit is too low or the traffic lights aren’t timed properly. It’s a feature of the machine itself. Cars take an enormous amount of space to safely move the one person inside and another enormous amount of space to store when they’re not being used, which is 95 percent of the time. If you live in Nebraska, you can maybe make that work. In a major world city such as ours, the acreage simply isn’t there.

We’ve built an unsustainable transportation network that makes all of us feel isolated, vulnerable and embattled, no matter how we’re getting around.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can do better. We can think bigger. We don’t have to sacrifice the safety and livability of our neighborhoods to prop up a wasteful and dangerous transportation system.

What does a low-stress street network look like? We need wider sidewalks. Everywhere. Walking to the store with a grocery cart or pushing a stroller to day care or getting to the bus stop in a wheelchair should be smooth and easy for everyone, no matter where you live.

We need protected space on every single street for a variety of active transportation modes. Every child in the District should be able to ride a skateboard or a bike or a scooter to school safely. Not just once a year for a photo op — every child, every day.

We need dedicated space for affordable transit in every neighborhood. According to AAA, the average cost of owning a car in the District is about $8,000 per year. No one should have to pay that kind of money just because he or she can’t afford to live near a Metro station or a reliable bus line ...

The financial and tariff barriers embodied by Ohio River toll bridges, and more dull silence from the oligarch fluffers.

If you're surprised by these statistics, let's have coffee. I have bridge futures to sell you.

Ohio River crossings fall after start of bridge tolls, study shows

Traffic has soared by 75 percent on the region’s oldest bridge, the Clark Memorial, since drivers started paying to cross the river.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – New bridges. Billions of dollars spent. Years of construction.

So far: Less traffic across the Ohio River.

Fewer vehicles are crossing between Kentucky and Indiana since tolls were added to bridges between Louisville and Clark County, Ind., according to a preliminary report obtained by WDRB News.

The two state governments have not publicly released the study, a requirement of the Ohio River Bridges Project. But the draft version provides a first look at how drivers are responding to paying $2.05 to $12.30 to cross the river.

The traffic counts indicate that drivers apparently seeking to avoid tolls are flocking to the region’s oldest span – the 1920s-era Clark Memorial Bridge – in greater numbers than previously envisioned.

Unfortunately, the bridge in question is ours. A little more than two years from now, it's going to be closed for a lengthy period.

I-64 Sherman Minton Bridge

The Sherman Minton, which connects Louisville and New Albany, Ind., carried 90,000 vehicles in 2018, a 23 percent climb from 2013. It is the only toll-free interstate bridge in the Louisville area.

Indiana is planning an $80 million upgrade on the Minton in 2021, making structural repairs and doing other work meant to make the 56-year-old bridge safer. The span is expected to close for months.

In June, the Minton was reduced to one lane after a hole in the road surface opened and forced emergency repairs. The Indiana Department of Transportation has yet to fulfill a WDRB News public records request, submitted June 18, for the bridge’s recent inspection records.

In fact, I've nothing bad to say about Deaf Gahan in this regard. Granted, Gahan hasn't said the first word publicly about contingencies and coping mechanisms for 2021, but it probably won't matter because he won't be mayor any longer.

#FireGahan2019

But it's important that someone begin thinking about this, and the Sherman Minton's 2021 repair closure absolutely has to be a campaign issue for mayoral and city council candidates in 2019 -- and since it's going to be equally important for every resident of Floyd County, cooperation between arms of government must be part of the coping equation.

Meanwhile, the oligarchs seem to be choking on the fruit of their megalomania.

The metro area’s chambers of commerce – Greater Louisville Inc. and One Southern Indiana – backed the project and were members of The Bridges Coalition, a collection of business, labor and government groups that lobbied for the work.

Greater Louisville Inc. hasn't reviewed the study or discussed the current traffic patterns with transportation experts, Sarah Davasher-Wisdom, the chamber's chief operating officer, said in a statement.

"That said, we do believe that the construction of the two new bridges and the rebuild of the downtown interchange has provided new opportunities for economic growth and commerce on both sides of the river," she said.

Speaking of pure evasion, 1Si stares at the ceiling. Are any arts or humanities majors available to interpret Dant Chesser's intentional omissions?

Wendy Dant Chesser, president and CEO of One Southern Indiana, noted in an email that the report doesn’t provide any insight into economic growth and declined to comment in detail.

Ah, but the guy from Ogle gets it.

Kent Lanum, President and CEO of the Jeffersonville, Ind.-based Ogle Foundation, also said the study doesn’t explain what is contributing to the reduced traffic, but it raises concerns nonetheless.

“What was once a cultural and historical barrier for our region to kind of get across between Southern Indiana and Kentucky is now more of a financial and tariff barrier,” he said. “And people are acting with their pocketbooks.”

"If we're interested in social justice, beginning to reorient the majority of the transportation infrastructure running through cities should be sought."

Is it your city, or does it belong to the ones passing through, speeding as they text?

The Bicycle as a Tool of Social Justice, by Steven Snell (Planetizen)

... Philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich was fascinated by technology. Forty years ago he was arguing that the automobile, rather than a tool of freedom, contributed to entrenching mobility hierarchies. The car is at the sharp tip of the pyramid; all other transportation modes can get sucked under its tires. Where we've continued to allow the design of our cities to worship the automobile, Illich might have seen a monopoly, or worse, a dictatorship. He saw cities as subservient to this machine rather than an expression of people.

Illich couldn't have forecasted that motor vehicle crashes are one of the leading cause of death for those aged one to 34. Nor could he have fathomed that the use of a technology while driving could become such an epidemic. Distracted driving is the number one leading cause of car accidents in America. Drivers who use a hand-held device are four times more likely to get into a car accident than those who don't, and individuals who text are 23 times more likely to get into an accident.

"What a human and wonderful thing: to be able to walk down the street and feel like you're a first-class citizen."

Photo credit

Remember when the ORBP's commission was prattling about mobility solutions, and concluding that a massive road-building project was the only one worth considering?

Seeking a corrective for such autocentric foppery? Click through, and get a sense of how modernity operates.

Oslo just declared that it will become the first major city to ban cars, by Leanna Garfield (Tech Insider)

Cars are no longer welcome in downtown Oslo.

Oslo plans to ban all cars from its city center by 2019, Reuters reports.

It will also build more than 35 miles of bike lanes by 2019 and invest heavily in public transport.

The permanent ban will affect the 350,000 or so car owners in the Norwegian capital.

Oslo's car ban is the largest of its kind, says Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an organization that supported New York City's Citi Bikes and advocates for car-free cities.

"The fact that Oslo is moving forward so rapidly is encouraging, and I think it will be inspiring if they are successful," he tells Tech Insider.

The car ban in Oslo will reduce pollution and make it a safer city for those on foot.

"We want to make it better for pedestrians, cyclists. It will be better for shops and everyone," Lan Marie Nguyen Berg, lead negotiator for the Green Party in Oslo, tells Reuters.

Silver Hills rail link, mobility solutions, and what we will or won't learn.

Kudos to these spirited volunteers, and yes, to Councilman Caesar, too.

As always, the challenge in a place like New Albany is to take this 122-year-old lesson, lift it from the realm of museum piece fetish, and apply it to "modern" times. Count me among those not willing to hold their breaths.

Silver Hills line leads group on a search for history, rail link to the past, by Grace Schneider (C-J)

For the last six months, Kelly Carnighan and a group of helpers have dragged mounds of old tires and cleared scrub from the hillside overlooking New Albany’s Main Street to unearth a 122-year-old relic.

It’s the path of the New Albany Highland Railroad Co., a two-mile electric streetcar line that ran from western New Albany to Silver Hills starting in 1891.

The volunteers found a steel rail, five original railroad ties, and, best of all, an idyllic corridor carpeted with myrtle and dark green ivy.

They’re planning to share what they’ve found May 18, exactly 122 years and a day after the electric railway took its inaugural ride. They expect to unveil an historical marker, pass out brochures and send hikers and history buffs on self-guided tours of the line.

Shaw: "Plans for a downtown bridge parallel to the Kennedy should float, like a petrified cow pie, downriver."

When the accompanying 21st-century of Southern Indiana is written, the questions might sound like this:

Why were self-referential (not to mention reverential) economic oligarchs like Kerry Stemler given the task of planning this retro-atrocity?

What brand of Kool-Aid was served to Bob Caesar to cause him such fancy flights of oligarch fluffery?

Where was Ed Clere, anyway?

A wicked sister bridge, by Steve Shaw (LEO)

When the early 21st-century history of Louisville is written, if the Ohio River Bridges Project proceeds as planned, I can already hear the official refrain: “Mistakes were made.” Michael Kimmelman, a New York Times critic, made a big splash in the local news media last week. His conclusion: Plans for a downtown bridge parallel to the Kennedy should float, like a petrified cow pie, downriver ...

... Amid our highway construction fatigue, we’re contemplating years of downtown disarray and congestion — and tolls with no end in sight. Kimmelman is exactly right: “Louisville needs to devote far more resources to public transit.”

Let’s stop trying to defy the gravity of an increasingly poor and aging population and start living within our means. Our choice is clear: to repeat a mistake or make history with a vision.

Serious mobility solution questions for Bridges Authority member Jerry Finn.

In this morning's Courier-Journal, we learn that Mayor Greg Fischer of Louisville, a consistent advocate of the Ohio River Bridges Project's oligarchy enrichment and bridge tolling mobility solution, is "not inclined" to pursue eminent domain -- a resolution long contemplated -- to wrest the K &  I Bridge from Norfolk Southern's leaden, obstructionist hands and open it for pedestrian and bicycle traffic.

In political terms, Fischer's a complete wuss, and the Republican would have been better elected. How many times do you hear me say that?

But Jerry, here's the question: If the bridges project is supposed to be about "mobility solutions," and if we'll have to pay an unfair tax (i.e., tolls) to cross the new ones in cars, then why wasn't the K & I part of the planned "mobility solution" from the very start? Shouldn't using it be on the ORBP's front burner, along with the remainder of the new construction projects? If it's all about mobility, then shouldn't all mobility be on the table?

While I'm at it, what ever happened to that Hoosier small business economic impact study, anyway?

(And they wonder why we write the things we write ... discussion at Facebook, too)

ON THE AVENUES: We cannot let this window close.

ON THE AVENUES: We cannot let this window close.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

When it comes to presumed birthrights, absolute freedom of mobility ranks somewhere near the top of the bucket list, at least to American eyes.

In theoretical terms, this can be a positive trait. Even a hardened cynic like me must take note of the possibilities for personal development and realization inherent in greater mobility, as compared to the limitations of hidebound social castes and conventions in other sectors of the globe.

However, in this sense we’re speaking more of social mobility than physical transportation, which moves us from one place to the other.

Arguably, the intrinsically American solution to the problem of social mobility has been to strive toward an untrammeled state of purely physical movement. The earliest settlers may well have come here in search of social, religious and economic freedoms, but once landed, the first imperative for many was to race toward wherever the land stopped and the ocean resumed.

From dirt trails to plank roads, and from Conestogas to Chryslers, we’ve concluded that freedom of movement is synonymous with economic freedom, and the freedom to accumulate wealth is the sole key to upward social mobility.

The problem: As decades pass, it becomes increasingly hard to avoid the certainty that future generations will look back on what we Americans have accomplished in the cause of unshackling humanity from its roots, and judge it to have been wasteful, unsustainable and perhaps even tragicomic.

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Here in New Albany and Southern Indiana, at least for the moment, posterity is of far less concern than posteriors, or those appendages resting atop car seats stuck in traffic, slated for transfer to office chairs once newly sticky rush hours are transcended, and ultimately destined for plopping down in sofas later that evening, when television, radio and Internet pundits comprise our Greek chorus: “Woe is to us, and how will we survive this disastrous catastrophe!”

Pfui!

Now that we’ve lost the Sherman Minton Bridge for an indefinite period of time, until its steel cracks are repaired or the entire structure replaced with Minor Moves bucks, there seems to be a prevailing temptation to parlay annoyance and self-pity into the sort of hyperbole that has become the modern world’s substitute for reasonable thought.

It’s too bad, because if we as a community conclude that the absence of immediate mobility gratification dooms us to irrelevance and impoverishment, we’ve lost the fight before the first bell is even rung.

Disaster? Hardly. Tsunamis, wars, earthquakes, plagues and famines are examples of genuine disaster, as is the collapse of a bridge carrying traffic, and in our local instance, potential disaster has been averted. This is to be celebrated, not unfairly characterized out of shapeless pique.

While it may be the first time in the lifetime of many readers that a functioning Sherman Minton Bridge has not been something to be blithely taken for granted, it also is the case that with the bridge’s sudden closure, a window has opened, and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities have arisen.

I may be guilty of over-simplification, but to me the concept of localism is, at root, the operational converse of sprawl, not in any sense of localism replacing all aspects of accepted civilization in the short term, but gradually swinging the pendulum back from the extreme unsustainability of the far-flung exurb to the greater utility of sacrificing a mere jot of absolute, unrestrained mobility to gain some of the economic and spiritual benefits of community rootedness.

We’ve not always been able to articulate the tenets of localism. Now, amid the inevitable snarl of transport in the opening stages of bridge deprivation, there is the chance to illustrate localism to Hoosiers by means of shared experience. Business owners in New Albany and environs will be grasping this brave new paradigm shift, and getting it fast, or else they’ll be swept away.

For a length of time yet to be determined, we’re no longer an afterthought. Rather, we’re the very best, most efficient option for Indiana residents accustomed to using the bridge(s) for purposes of discretionary spending. We may not be able to solve the perennial metropolitan Louisville employment quandary – yet. However, we can provide most of what one needs, and do so right here.

Think of it not as a captive market, but as a soon-to-be savvier market. The game board has been upended, and the pieces are scattered across the table. The beauty of this immense opportunity is that New Albany and Southern Indiana need not re-arrange the match under the rules previously handed us. We may now rewrite the rules, or play an entirely different game.

Perhaps, in the end, the greatest freedom of all stems from seemingly narrow options.

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One last thought.

New Albany’s municipal elections approach, and while Facebook is not the ultimate arbiter of such matters, a cursory review of the 24 candidates who have a Facebook campaign presence (roughly half of them) reveals that as this monumental paradigm shift explodes in all directions through their neighborhoods, they remain primarily concerned with endless recitations of yard sign plantings and fundraisers.

Really?

Democratic council candidates John Gonder and Doug England (our current mayor) stand out as major exceptions. Republican mayoral hopeful DM Bagshaw at least seems to have noticed. Of those candidates not on Facebook, Dan Coffey is displaying a deep interest in the situation (trust me). Readers and candidates, you may enlighten us as to anyone I’ve missed.

We’ve long lamented the absence of platform content on the part of mayoral and council aspirants, but it simply beggars belief that at this juncture, they’re still prattling on about 4-by-4 monster signs and golf scrambles.

I’m not suggesting candidates panic, or rush to conclusions that cannot yet be determined. At the same time, isn’t showing the slightest semblance of recognition that the Sherman Minton’s condition is (a) not a disaster, but (b) an enormous and probably unprecedented opportunity the barest of minimums we should expect from New Albany’s slate of leaders?

Norfolk Southern: Tear down this wall! Open this bridge!

Look, ma -- it's a mobility solution.

Thanks to Ted for the borrowed photos.

Ford: "The mobility model we have today will not work tomorrow."

Bill Ford, great-grandson of Henry and executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, spends about 17 minutes in this TED Talk explaining that, in terms of future mobility, "the solution [to gridlock] will not be more cars, more roads", i.e., misguided, auto-centric anachronisms like the Ohio River Bridges Project. As TED says, "when he worries about cars' impact on the environment, and about our growing global gridlock problem, it's worth a listen. His vision for the future of mobility includes 'smart roads,' even smarter public transport and going green like never before."