Five years ago today: "The more greatly a place conforms to post war auto centric design, the more injurious it is to people."

Gahan, Rosenbarger set to go full frontal Pinocchio about their urbanism credentials when the Congress for the New Urbanism 27 meets in Louisville June 11-15.

Originally published on June 3, 2014 and just as true today as then.

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Are we bugging you with facts? We don't mean to bug you.

More Narrative (Rational Urbanism)

There are conceptual links which, somehow, form narratives in the news media, and others which don’t. Urban homicides form a narrative. Whether at a bar at closing time, a domestic dispute, a drug deal gone bad, or something gang related they are all bound together as a tale of death and the streets. That they are linked more to behavior and identity than place goes unnoticed and uncommented because it unwinds the narrative.

The story of death and the road, as distinct from death and the streets, is told much differently. It is told as a tale of behavior and identity (speed, age, drunkenness) but almost never a story of place. Place rating sites completely ignore traffic fatalities and pedestrian deaths in their calculations of livability despite the fact that there is clearly a causational link between place and fatality and injury: the more greatly a place conforms to post war auto centric design, the more injurious it is to people.

"While we inherited a transportation system built on racial discrimination and a belief that moving cars is most important, it does not mean that we can continue with the same type of thinking."

Here's the link, and the title says it all.

Equitable, just and inclusive transportation systems are within our reach, by Veronica O. Davis (Roads & Bridges)

Taking into consideration Team Gahan's ongoing aversion to books and reading, not to mention genuinely purposeful and inclusive communication, I'll highlight the conclusion while noting that the entire article is worth ten minutes of every one's time.

Bringing it all together

As transportation professionals, we are charged with ensuring people are able to move from Point A to Point B safely and reliably. While we inherited a transportation system built on racial discrimination and a belief that moving cars is most important, it does not mean that we can continue with the same type of thinking. Even as we grapple with new technologies such as autonomous vehicles, dockless bike-share systems and scooters, we are susceptible to repeating past mistakes unless we completely shift the paradigm. In point of fact, complete streets and Vision Zero require us to think, act, and design differently.

We must:

• Make bold decisions to reallocate lanes for single-occupancy vehicles to other modes such as public transit, biking and walking.
• Champion complete streets and Vision Zero as a philosophy and a way of doing business so they become more than paper documents.
• Recognize whose voice is not being heard in the process and then being proactive and reach out to those communities. This may include increasing resources to be able to engage the community.
• Create a framework and vision that sets the ground rules for new technologies to serve all communities.
• Increase the number of women and people of color within the profession, so we may reflect the communities we serve.

Following the examples set by our predecessors is not an option. We must shift the paradigm to right historical injustices by designing a network that is inclusive of all people as we prepare for the future.

#SLOWTHECARS ... "Streets emphasize wealth creation. Roads are about movement."

The primary reason why Jeff Gahan botched the two-way grid reversion is explained right here. It's because he didn't know, or didn't care, about the difference between a street and a road.

Charles Marohn could have told him; Jeff Speck tried. So did numerous advocates in New Albany.

Deaf ears ... Deaf(er) Gahan.

SLOW THE CARS, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

We design our streets like roads, as if their primary function — and sometimes their sole function — is the movement of automobiles.

Many people don’t grasp the difference between a street and a road. They think the terms are interchangeable, and rightly so. In the United States, we’ve spent decades — and trillions of dollars — blurring the distinctions.

To make our cities financially strong and successful, we need to reclaim the lost art of building great streets, and we must empower our transportation professionals to build high-performance roadways. There is a serious difference between those two pursuits.

Streets: The function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth. On a street, we're attempting to grow the complex ecosystem of businesses and homes that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobiles) are the indicator species of success. Successful streets are environments where humans and human interaction flourish.

Roads: In contrast, the function of a road is to connect productive places to one another. You can think of a road as a refinement of the railroad — a road on rails — where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two.

With a street, we’re trying to build a place. With a road, we’re trying to get from one place to another. Streets emphasize wealth creation. Roads are about movement ...

All this money, and we still won't be ready for bridge tolls. But at least we can rely on stormwater flooding.

I'd be for the expenditures if I thought they'd keep detouring. Anyone seen that frozen deer carcass?

Thanks, MB (and MW earlier today). I'm initializing your names for Second Amendment reasons.

Paging Irv Stumler, Bob Caesar and Padgett Inc: Here are three ways to make streets safer for pedestrians.

Rather keeping New Albany fast and dangerous, perhaps there's a better way.

#SLOWTHECARS IS OUR CAMPAIGN TO MAKE OUR STREETS SAFE AND PROSPEROUS.

Strong Towns advocates for financial solvency and productive land use in American cities. Places that are built for people, using traditional development patterns, can help us achieve both of those goals. On the other hand, neighborhood streets with wide lanes, huge clearance zones and other dangerous design features cause thousands of pedestrian and car passenger deaths every year. Dangerous roads do not make productive use of our land or our lives. Furthermore, they depress investment in our cities by making our neighborhoods less pleasant places to be.

People are the indicator species of success. We know that pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods are more economically productive, healthier and safer. We need to build places where people want to be.

To be specific ..

3 WAYS TO MAKE STREETS SAFER FOR PEDESTRIANS, by Adam Porr

... As someone whose brain has been trained for decades that streets are for cars only, the persistent presence of pedestrians triggers a sympathetic nervous system response that is stressful to say the least. Still, I love it. Pedestrian activity is an indicator of vibrant neighborhoods and a healthy local economy, and upon my return to Columbus, Ohio in a few months I hope to do whatever I can to duplicate this environment. But how can we bridge the dangerous gap between the current culture and one in which pedestrians feel safe to be in the street and drivers are attentive and courteous enough to allow this to happen? I'd like to discuss three strategies that may help.

1. ENCOURAGE PEDESTRIAN STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
2. FORCE DRIVERS TO WAKE UP
3. PRESERVE AND EXPAND PEDESTRIAN PROTECTIONS

... Perhaps there are more people who, like me, will learn how enjoyable and economically productive pedestrian-friendly environments can be and carry the torch back to their own hometowns!

Conversely, perhaps you live in a bastion of ignorance like New Albany.

I'd like to renew the challenge I've offered numerous times in the past (though never accepted), as directed not merely to predictable reactionaries like Stumler, Caesar and the heavy trucking lobby, but also to people like Jeff Gahan, Terry Cody and Warren Nash.

Come out and walk with me. Not just around the block, but up and down one of our arterial one-way streets. See what it feels like.

Experience the thrills of auto-centrism in your own shoes. I guarantee enlightenment.

Have these folks always been scared of the truth, or is it just simple ignorance?

Maybe this final question is best left unanswered. Haven't they done enough to persevere in doing nothing, already?

Wildlife crossing structures: "What's been done about roadkill, and why isn't it enough?"

In the Netherlands -- from the article.

File under "things none of us have thought about lately."

NEW SOLUTIONS: WHAT’S BEEN DONE ABOUT ROADKILL, AND WHY ISN’T IT ENOUGH?

While Europe has many, indeed hundreds, of wildlife crossing structures, North America has relatively few. The best-studied and only overpass crossing structures are in Banff, Alberta. However, these structures were not designed specifically for wildlife; rather, they were conventional bridge structures which were adapted. They have proven remarkably successful in restoring ecological connectivity and in improving road safety, but could their capacities expand and the cost of their construction contract with a redesign expressly for their purpose?

New solutions to wildlife crossing infrastructure are intended to reduce the costs and to tailor each type of crossing to the specific species in various landscape contexts. We are also considering new solutions to the construction and material of these structures, as we may need to move, enlarge or downsize them based on changing wildlife movement patterns due to changes in habitats, climate or other factors. In the broadest sense, we aim to capitalize on the potential for crossing structures to tell a story—the story of our renewed relationship with wildlife and landscapes.

"If this isn't the job of an engineer -- and it's not -- who should design streets? The answer is as simple as it is radical: everyone."

They're roads, not streets.

This is too good not to print in its entirety .The point isn't to spark conflicts between engineers or to malign those charged with engineering jobs. Rather, it is to delineate between streets and roads, and to urge democratization of the planning process as it pertains to their proper uses in a varied environment.  

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Engineers Should Not Design Streets, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Last Friday I was participating in the 5th Annual Mayor's Bike Ride in Duluth following a week spent sharing the Strong Towns message on the Iron Range. The friendly woman riding next to me asked me what could be done to to better educate engineers so they would start to build streets that were about more than simply about moving cars. My answer rejected the premise of the question: We should not be asking engineers to design streets.

A quick review for those of you that are new here (which might be up to half the audience -- amazing). Roads and streets are two separate things. The function of a road is to connect productive places. You can think of a road as a refinement of the railroad -- a road on rails -- where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two.

In contrast, the function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth. On a street, we're attempting to grow the complex ecosystem that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobile) are the indicator species of success. So, in short, with a street we're trying to create environments where humans, and human interaction, flourish.

Engineers are well-suited to constructing roads. Road environments are quite simple and, thus, lend themselves well to things like design manuals and uniform guidelines. There are only so many variables and the relationship they have to each other is fairly straightforward. In the United States, we have tested, refined and codified an engineering approach to roads that is pretty amazing and, in terms of engineering, the envy of the world.

There are two primary variables for designing a road: design speed and projected traffic volume. From those two numbers, we can derive the number of lanes, lane width, shoulder width, the width of clear zones and the allowable horizontal and vertical curvature. From those factors, we can specify all the pavement markings and signage that are necessary. We can then monitor things like the Level of Service, the 85th percentile speed and traffic counts to optimize how the road functions over time. Engineers are really good at this.

Engineers are not good at building streets nor, I would argue, can the typical engineer readily become good at it. Streets that produce wealth for a community are complex environments. They do not lend themselves well to rote standards or even design guidelines. There are numerous variables at play that interact with each other, forming feedback loops and changing in ways that are impossible to predict.

Consider just one variable: the future of the adjacent land. The operative component of building wealth on a street is building. Who owns the property? What are they going to do with it? What is their capacity? Will they stick with it? Will they find the love of their life and move across the country? Each property has a near infinite set of complexities to it that change and respond to change, each of which is far more important to the wealth capacity of the street than, for example, lane width.

If we're trying to create an ecosystem that results in our indicator species (people) showing up in greater and greater numbers, we can't just focus on one or two variables. It can't be just design speed and volume. The natural ecosystem equivalent would be an observation that productive forests have trees and so we hire our forest engineers to go out and plant rows and rows of the optimum tree. It's obvious that, absent other flora and fauna, insects and bacteria, sunlight and rain and a myriad of other variables, the trees we are planting just aren't enough to get the ecosystem we're after.

If we're trying to create a natural ecosystem, we first have to recognize the environment we're in. A desert ecosystem will be far different than a northern forest. We then need to seed the basic elements, but we don't direct them day-to-day; we nurture them as they grow. If we know what we're after -- if we know our indicator species of success -- if we see the experiment getting way off track, we can intervene in small ways to nudge it back on course. We can introduce small changes and see how the system responds. Over time, our natural ecosystem will show us how it wants to grow.

We do a disservice to our communities when we treat streets as if they were roads, when we ignore the complex environments streets are meant to create and treat them as if they were simple throughput models. Streets need to be designed block by block. Those designs need to be responsive and adaptable.

Understanding that 99%+ of all streets that will exist a decade from now already exist today, what we're really talking about here in North America isn't building new streets but making good use of existing streets. The way we do this -- the way we design block by block in ways that are responsive and adaptable -- is to try things and see what works. Our tools are not traffic counters and code books but paint, cones and straw bales. Before we make any change permanent, we test it -- and possibly other variations -- first to see what works.

So if this isn't the job of an engineer -- and it's not -- who should design streets? The answer is as simple as it is radical: everyone. Building a productive street is a collective endeavor that involves the people who live on it, those who own property on it, those who traverse it as well as the myriad of professionals who have expertise they can lend to the discussion.

Put your least technical person on staff in charge of your next street. Empower them to meet with people, observe how people use the street and then experiment, in a low cost way, with different alternatives. Keep experimenting until you start to see your indicator species show up (outside of their cars, of course). Now you have a design you can hand over to your engineer to specify the technical stuff -- pavement thickness, paint specs, etc... -- and get the project built.

Engineers are highly competent at building roads. When you are trying to move automobiles quickly from one place to another, put your engineering in charge and do what they recommend. When you are trying to build a street -- when you are trying to make your city wealthier and more prosperous -- make your engineer one small voice in a larger chorus of people whose words and, especially, whose actions dictate what your design should be.

"On a main street, that which looks like 'vehicle delay' to a traffic engineer looks like economic activity and success to a local merchant."

What it looks like to Jeff Gahan is complete and utter  incomprehension.

Tell the Feds: Don’t Turn City Streets Into Highways, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

Will the Obama administration prod state DOTs to abandon the destructive practice of widening roads and highways, or will it further entrench policies that have hollowed out cities and towns, increased traffic and car dependence, and made America a world leader in carbon pollution?

It can't be stated any more clearly:

There’s a direct connection between how we decide to measure [congestion] and how we choose to address it. If we focus, as this rule does, on keeping traffic moving at a high rate of speed at all times of day on all types of roads and streets, then the result is easy to predict: our solutions will prioritize the investments that make that possible, regardless of cost vs. benefits or the potential impacts on the communities those roads pass through.

USDOT plans to measure vehicle speed and delay seven different ways, while ignoring people carpooling, taking transit, walking & biking or skipping the trip entirely.

"The idea that people riding bikes don’t pay for the roads is pervasive, and completely untrue."

Because Easter is the perfect sort of day for myth-busting.

The Free Rider Myth – Who Really Pays for the Roads?, by Elly Blue (Momentum Mag)

... The idea that roads are funded by user fees paid by people who drive is one of the great myths that buttresses our entire way of life. While the veneer on that myth has been crumbling for some time, we have only recently been forced to begin to look hard at it. And the difference between riding a bicycle and driving a car is surprisingly vast – but not in the way most of us imagine.

What if I told you that by driving a car you become a freeloader, a drain on the economy? That people who bicycle instead are subsidizing a road system that they are largely not welcome on? In order to break even on the cost of roads and pay for every driver who uses them each year, we would need 54% of commuters using a bicycle as their sole means of transportation.

Conservatives to Padgett: "The heaviest road users are the ones who get the biggest subsidies."

Narcissus, still gazing at that pesky erection.

Wanna know what's really funny?

The Padgett-led heavy trucking coalition seeks to sue the city of New Albany for failing to maintain city streets suitable for their interstate-grade vehicles.

And yet, when it comes to overall maintenance of roads in this nation, note the disparity.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that trucks already cost the public as much as $129 billion annually more than they pay in road user fees.

Whoa! That's a lot of TIF bonds.

But wait, because here's the punch line: In the article below, which explicates "asphalt socialism" in our autocentric nation, the air is being let out of the truckers' tires not by liberal leftist pinko fags, but by the Padgett Political Action Committee to Elect Republicans' very own beloved conservative element.

That's rich, indeed. The hypocrisy flies over their heads as quickly as the dump trucks speed down Spring.

I'm reprinting the entire article here, because it's just too good to excerpt.

House Republicans’ Asphalt Socialism, by Joe Cortright (The American Conservative)

The House of Representatives has hit on a clever new strategy for funding the bankrupt Highway Trust Fund: raid the Federal Reserve. Their plan calls for transferring nearly $60 billion from the profits earned on the Federal Reserve’s operations—basically fees paid by member banks—to bail out the Highway Trust Fund.

For years, many macro economists have been urging the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy by using its power to effectively print money in the form of a “helicopter drop”—simply crediting every American with a certain amount of extra dollars in their bank accounts. The idea has been suggested as a way to jump start consumer spending in a moribund or deflationary economy by economists of some stature, including Ben Bernanke and Milton Friedman. The idea was advanced as a way of accelerating the sluggish growth we’re currently experiencing in an article in Foreign Affairs. But while it might make theoretical sense to economist, it was simply politically impossible, because as The Economist intoned, the idea of a helicopter drop would be anathema to Republicans.

But when it comes to a helicopter drop for highways, there’s no such problem. Remarkably, the proposal to tap the Federal Reserve’s funds comes not from radical Keynesians, but from the Republicans in the very conservative House of Representatives. And apparently, the same people who preach personal responsibility in almost every other field of endeavor want to insulate automobile drivers from paying the costs of the roads they drive on. While they may espouse the virtues for the free market in almost everything else, this position makes them “asphalt socialists” when it comes to transportation.

The best estimates are that drivers now pay only a tiny fraction of the direct costs of building and operating roads, not to mention causing huge externalities in the form of crash-related injuries and deaths and pollution. As we’ve noted before, the heaviest road users are the ones who get the biggest subsidies: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that trucks already cost the public as much as $129 billion annually more than they pay in road user fees. And a report from TransitCenter and the Frontier Group recently detailed the $7.3 billion in parking tax subsidies drivers get every year as well.

(Even with these subsidies, however, increasing fuel efficiency and the decline in per capita driving have pushed down revenues for the Highway Trust Fund, and contributed to the current crisis.)

While this latest chapter of dysfunctional public finance and ideological hypocrisy is playing out at the federal level, it’s equally prevalent in the way states and localities treat driving, too. Local governments have parking requirements that drive up the cost and drive down the supply of housing to subsidize car ownership. In Seattle, parking requirements add something on the order of $250 a month to the price of a typical apartment.

The new transportation bill will favor cars in other ways, too. Local highway projects will get an 80 percent federal match, but transit projects will get only 50 percent. Meanwhile, important sources of funds for transit, pedestrian, and bicycle programs, including TIGER grants and the Transportation Alternatives Program, were cut or imperiled.

While advocates of the road system regularly cloak their arguments in the rhetoric of choice and the free market, our transportation system is actually characterized by heavy government intervention on behalf of private vehicles. Massive, taxpayer-supported subsidies effectively bribe people to drive, and insulate them from the financial consequences their choices impose on others.

Drivers want more roads—as long as they don’t actually have to pay for them. The fact that there’s no stomach for increasing the gas tax—even though gasoline prices have fallen by more than a dollar a gallon in the past year—shows that when put to the test of the marketplace, there’s actually little demand for more transportation.

The irony, of course, is that transportation is clearly one policy area where traditional free market principles would put a serious dent in the problems of traffic congestion, air pollution, and safety. If car users faced anything close to the actual costs of building and operating roads (and mitigating or preventing the injuries and pollution effects), we’d see much less driving, and much less demand for additional capacity.

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

Have an opinion about traffic congestion?

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

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

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

Here is November's.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A new report aimed at reducing transportation bottlenecks."

Remember induced demand:

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

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

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

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

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

"The more greatly a place conforms to post war auto centric design, the more injurious it is to people."

Are we bugging you with facts? We don't mean to bug you.

More Narrative (Rational Urbanism)

There are conceptual links which, somehow, form narratives in the news media, and others which don’t. Urban homicides form a narrative. Whether at a bar at closing time, a domestic dispute, a drug deal gone bad, or something gang related they are all bound together as a tale of death and the streets. That they are linked more to behavior and identity than place goes unnoticed and uncommented because it unwinds the narrative.

The story of death and the road, as distinct from death and the streets, is told much differently. It is told as a tale of behavior and identity (speed, age, drunkenness) but almost never a story of place. Place rating sites completely ignore traffic fatalities and pedestrian deaths in their calculations of livability despite the fact that there is clearly a causational link between place and fatality and injury: the more greatly a place conforms to post war auto centric design, the more injurious it is to people.

ON THE AVENUES: Roundabouts make the politicians really ring.

ON THE AVENUES: Roundabouts make the politicians really ring.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Earlier in 2013, New Albany’s planners announced a long-gestating “improvement” project for Mt. Tabor Road.

Residents in the vicinity promptly objected to the plans, noting presciently that proposed measures to reduce traffic congestion would have the real-world effect of putting more cars on the road at faster speeds, compromising safety and reducing their neighborhood’s quality of life.

In short, they’d spotted the likelihood of induced demand, and decided to press the case against it.

The neighborhood activists found an eager ally in 6th district councilman Scott Blair, who lives nearby. He assisted them in the orchestration of a city council appearance, in which elected officials were petitioned for a reconsideration of the improvement project. Specifically, a roundabout proposed for the intersection of Mt. Tabor Road and Klerner Lane came under intense criticism, and not merely owing to the selective logic of the NIMBY. Rather, these were very good points.

If the four-way stop at this intersection functioned so well amid existing traffic that there had been few, if any, accidents reported there in years, why construct a roundabout that would require a larger topographical footprint than the current working arrangement?

And, by extension, wouldn’t the “need” for a roundabout serve as tacit acknowledgement from planners that far from regulating traffic in the neighborhood, the coming “improvements” actually would be increasing it?

There came a magical moment when the words were spoken aloud (paraphrasing): Won’t these changes bring more traffic from people using Mt. Tabor to pass through to somewhere else?

Yep. In a nutshell.

Veteran council watchers agree: Nothing tilts the legislative balance quite like large numbers of citizens crowding the inadequate council chambers. Public forums are one thing, and demonstrating at a regularly scheduled meeting something else entirely. It brings out the fears in their eyes, and the tears in mine.

There is little doubt that CM Blair was being quite savvy, indeed, in the sense of leveraging a positive resolution to his district’s roundabout issue by transforming it into one of those political chits, to be redeemed in the form of a favor returned for previous support … say, for an aquatics center.

Well, this is the way the game is played, isn’t it, and these thoughts came back to me this week when I received a tweet from one of the Mt. Tabor activists.

“Ding dong the roundabout is DEAD! Now hopefully one way streets follow.”

Roger couldn’t agree more, but I was curious: How did he know, seeing as I’d not yet heard the news through normal channels?

“The four of us on the corner received a personal visit from the mayor Sunday evening. Nothing in the paper that I know.”

Roundabouts are not intrinsically evil, but the Mt. Tabor Road residents looked past the surface dollar sheen and got to the heart of the matter: Roadway engineers would be altering conditions to suit the maxim of moving traffic through their neighborhood as “efficiently” as possible, and by doing so, would be reducing their quality of life in an almost mathematical, commensurate ratio.

These activists asserted their right to some degree of neighborhood autonomy, and because their councilman almost surely understood that it was time for a favor to be returned, the point was made, and the mayor visited their homes to concede it. It may be the single most important lesson of the year, and a template I hope is being grasped in Midtown neighborhoods, where the very existence of one-way arterial streets affects quality of life, property values and fundamental prospects for renewal as feet are dragged, Main Street is fluffed, and City Hall’s eyes are averted.

Mt. Tabor residents, I salute you. You clarified some very important points.

Midtown residents, just this: See what we’re trying to say?

Quality of life might be a valid concept, and it might also be a cliché. Quite possibly, it is both. But one recurring feature of life in New Albany is that rational definitions always pale in comparison with organizational skill and raw bile.

And selective hardball on the part of a councilman doesn’t hurt, either. It can be distasteful … but like invasive surgery, sometimes it is necessary. Shall we count favors?

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Throughout the year, the newspaper’s Amanda Beam has been writing a weekly “Bicentennial column,” which I often enjoyed prior to the Alabama Pop-Up Paywall’s construction.

(Mr. Hanson, tear down this wall)

In her final installment, at least until we commence the People’s Bicentennial celebration in 2017 (the 200th anniversary of the city’s actual incorporation), Amanda looks to the future – and remember, when it comes to future versus past, 1 for 52 is a far better batting average than Bob Caesar can muster.

New Albany residents, business owners and community leaders were asked to answer the question, “where do you see New Albany 100 years from now?” Below are their responses.

Respondents include Ed Clere, Jessica Knable, David Barksdale, Alice Miles and Dan Coffey … and your faithful blog columnist. I was hesitant to offer a reply until I’d conferred with the Green Mouse, who has seen it all.

“In 2113, the tiny number of white-skinned speakers of English left in New Albany will gather together during Cinco de Mayo at the usual spot by the Fork in the Road sculpture, decant their bottles of NABC Quadcentennial Ale, and say: ‘You know, 100 years ago there were one-way streets here. That’s amazing. It’s a wonder they ever figured it out; but after all, even a stopped clock is right twice a century.’”

Marohn: "We built places that rocked back when we had to build them to be financially sound."

"Chuck Marohn, the executive director of Strong Towns, explains the difference between a road, which is a connection to two places and a street, which is a network of activity. He stresses the importance of returning roads to towns for community and economic development."

In the process, Marohn does a nice of job of explaining how the government driven dominance of automobile-centric development has led to unsustainable economic inefficiencies and the breakdown of our social fabric.

Anyone advocating on behalf of the Ohio River Bridges Project or just about any other massive, in-town road (rather than street) building project under the guise of economic development, social good, or the free market is simply ignorant - and perhaps purposefully so - of our history, both impetuses and outcomes. They are rallying in favor of debt, the unneeded and unwise prostration of locals to volatile international financial markets, and a model that extracts rather than enhances the value of place for a majority of regional citizens.

Interstates and highways were meant to connect places over long distances, something they're sometimes actually good at. When we make them the centerpiece of local development, however, we've missed the point entirely, resigning ourselves to the sort of disrespect for and loss of previous investment and work from which it's difficult to recover.

NA Open Air Museum: Straight ahead.