GHK Truss, a wide load, and untolled bridge, and why we can't have nice things.

GHK Truss's "number one priority is to you -- the customer."

Yesterday this vehicle traversed the world's longest interstate entrance ramp.

City officials giddy as New Albany finally makes Guinness Book of World Records (REPOST).

The trip began in Clarksville, and brought the drive past this sign, which serves as a reminder of New Albany's enduring enforcement dysfunction.

Further commentary would be superfluous. New Albany has built and maintained its downtown streets to be a pass-through for users like this one, and the rate of abuse can only increase when tolling regimes begin.

At this morning's Bored of Works meeting, the engineering firm hired by the city to mute and monetize Jeff Speck's Downtown Street Network Proposal will present its findings.

Will it be QOL, or GHK?

But wait, wasn't Irv just robotically touting the spotless civic-mindedness of trucking companies?

A reader writes:

This tractor trailer turned right from Spring up Silver Street. Squashed all of the traffic cones on the way. I especially like the way someone sprayed white paint over the phone number you're supposed to call if you have issues with the driver's behavior!

However, there's a bright side: At least it wasn't a Tiger truck.

Tiger Truck Lines and 13th Street: Isn't it time for the spoiled brat to get a good spanking?

Tiger Trucking's affectionate "fuck you" to the residents of New Albany.

Tiger Truck Lines and 13th Street: Isn't it time for the spoiled brat to get a good spanking?

Here comes the Tiger Truck Lines rig northbound on 13th Street. The driver has just crossed Market. Behind me is Spring.

Since the advent of the Main Street Beautification Project, Tiger has transformed 13th Street into its own company connector road, regularly using Spring for westbound trucks and Market for eastbound.

Ironically, even though so much of the Main Street project is pure blather, the designers actually did take Tiger's needs into mind when inserting those God-awful medians.

In fact, Tiger never has been somehow excluded from using Main Street, just as it did before.

This is 14th Street, looking south from Dewey. Just over the railroad track is Tiger's scenic headquarters. You can see the K & I Bridge on the horizon.

When a Tiger trucker emerges from its lair on 14th, he or she comes first to Dewey, then Main. Here's the view, looking north toward Main. Prior to the Main Street project, Tiger's employees drove straight and turned onto Main in either direction.

The next three photos show the intersection of Main and 14th. As you can see, the medians are pulled way back to allow for wide turns. It is a huge expanse of asphalt left open for only one reason -- for truckers like Tiger's to use.

And they don't use it.

Rather, ever since the Main Street project came about, Tiger's adolescent management pique has translated into a new access policy. First, let's go back to the intersection of 14th and Dewey, this time looking west, not straight toward Main.

Tiger's truckers now turn left here ...

 ... and then right (north) here, on 13th ...

 ... to come rumbling across Main here (headed to the right, or north), using 13th as the company road to go to Market and Spring.

Obviously, 13th is a residential street, never designed or intended for commercial vehicles of this Tiger's size. Plainly, Tiger's management has undertaken a program of civic vandalism these last two years, operating from a vantage point behind the billows of Padgett's litigious gown.

There's only one logical answer to this problem.

Give 13th Street a two-block-long road diet, with bike paths and 10-foot lanes, and force Tiger's trucks back onto Main, where they belong.

Or, place a weight limit on 13th and enforce it.

The likes of Irv Stumler instinctively sides with the vandals in a case like this. Obsessed with flower pots, the Silver Hills resident pays no mind to the appearance of heavy industrial equipment on a residential street. Perhaps these residents are too poor for Irv's taste, or not sufficiently ambitious to get better jobs and move from the trucking ghetto to his neighborhood.

Irv aside (and he needs to be), the city has allowed Tiger to behave like a petulant brat. The city might alter this behavior, and should. The city made changes to Main. It can make changes to 13th. It should.

Irv Stumler set to lecture BOW about property safety on the 200 block of East Main Street. He is not expected to address street safety amid monster trucks.

The pulpit's gonna be rocking. It says so right here, in the Board of Public Works and Safety agenda for Tuesday, July 12.

Surely Irv intends to mention Bill Allen's perennial eyesore at 213 and 215 East Main. That nice, new steeple -- and this same old act of public vandalism.

Will he also include the corner of 202 E. Main ... but didn't I hear that it had been sold to a local developer?

I'm going to edge out on a limb here and suggest that Irv will not mention other daily threats to public safety.

Is there a safety exemption for mechanical fetishes?

Paging Jeff Gahan: From a safety standpoint, are vehicular speeds above 25 mph justifiable anywhere in downtown New Albany?

It should come as no surprise that lots and lots of lawyers understand the heavy truck vs.smaller car differential.

What Makes an Accident With a Semi-Truck Different From a Regular Car Accident?

... But, the clearest difference between a car accident and a semi-truck accident is that the impact can be much, much more severe solely based on the size and weight of a semi-truck (3,700 pounds of car vs. 80,000 pounds of truck). Because of this, it takes a semi a lot longer to stop than it does a car, especially if the truck is carrying a heavy load. This can become even more dangerous when a truck is on the highway and traveling at a high rate of speed.

Taking a lateral step, many of these same attorneys grasp the potential for mayhem in the heavy trucks or smaller cars vs. walkers. When so many of them base their sales pitch on the results of a five-year-old study commissioned by an organization that isn't numbered among the nation's bastions of crazed Commie agitation ...

Impact Speed and a Pedestrian’s Risk of Severe Injury or Death (2011; AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety)

... Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph. The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph. Risks vary significantly by age. For example, the average risk of severe injury or death for a 70‐year‐old pedestrian struck by a car travelling at 25 mph is similar to the risk for a 30‐year‐old pedestrian struck at 35 mph.

These results could be used to inform efforts to improve pedestrian safety …

... you begin to see just how unconscionable the city of New Albany's obtuse and reactive street grid management program really is.

Charitably taking Jeff Gahan's "plan" for downtown New Albany in its best possible light, it's about "revitalization" via an urban experience predicated on walkability.

At the very same time, Gahan continues to promote a street grid intentionally calibrated to negate walkability owing to high speed vehicular traffic and a bizarre concurrent unwillingness to mold infrastructure to suit the needs of humans on foot (or riding bikes).

Apparently our mayor's grasp of reality is so excruciatingly feeble that he truly believes in the co-existence of polar opposites, whether awakening at 3:00 a.m. to admire brilliant sunshine, orpopping the top on an ice cold Bud Light Lime and proclaiming it "craft beer."

Even the AAA knows better. Has Gahan ever displayed an ability to learn anything that wasn't precast like Soviet concrete in kindergarten?

Photo essay: Which one's a heavy truck, Warren?

Four years later, and City Hall still can't explain this sign. Feeling good about New Albany's "plan" to cope with tolls?

Yo, CM Phipps: Why doesn't this sign prevent destructive monster truck immigration?

See that sign by the stop light?

Here's a closeup. It hangs from the spot where westbound one-way traffic commences on Spring Street.

So, if no heavy trucks are supposed to be traveling past this point, how do we explain this?

And this.

And these.

Padgett and friends have filed a suit alleging that these heavy trucks are being prevented from using their rightful street (Main Street) owing to beautification changes there. Accepting these claims at face value, how does it make these heavy trucks on Spring Street any more legal?

Shouldn't they be ticketed for improperly using the street?

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

Now you see our city's potential ...

... and now you don't.

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

Tourists in New Albany sure do appreciate the, er, view.

There's something behind that monster truck on high-speed, pass-through, too-wide, human-unfriendly Spring Street -- but what is it?

It's just the Carnegie Center for Art and History, that's all.

If New Albany only had a brain ...

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

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

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

This needs to change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You DO have a CDL, right?