In which Team Gahan takes a roadtrip to Paradise.

THE END ... well, it can be the end of New Albany's swampy clique if you cast your ballot for David White for Mayor.

#FireGahan2019
#DrainTheSwamp
#FlushTheClique

Plowshares into swords, bollards into furniture. Can we safely walk yet?

Photo credit: the article.

Just imagine the day when we have so many people walking in New Albany that city council spends money to install street bollards aimed at protecting them.

Although perhaps a useful first step would be doing more to make streets and sidewalks safe for all users, in everyday life, apart from those statistically infrequent occasions of vehicular terrorism -- as opposed to drivers using their mobile devices while traveling down a city street as though it were an interstate.

This ingenious hack turns anti-terror bollards into furniture, by Katherine Schwab (Fast Company)

Defensive street architecture is designed to prevent terrorist attacks. But it could also double as a way to bring strangers together.

In the last few years, vehicle-aided terrorism has become a horrible reality for many cities. To protect pedestrians, cities have expanded efforts to install street bollards, peppering the urban landscape with these three-foot-high metal barriers. After New York was hit by a truck-borne terrorist in 2017, the government decided to spend $50 million on bollards, dramatically increasing the footprint of this defensive architecture on the streets.

Could these increasingly common devices serve a second purpose–and bring strangers together on city streets? That’s the idea behind three prototypes by the Peruvian designer and architect Beatriz Pero Giannini. The three chairs–called the rocker, the slider, and the wobbler–sit atop bollards and function like seesaws. If one person sits down they’ll probably be uncomfortable, but if two people sit together it brings each design into balance. By encouraging people to sit down together, Giannini hopes to bolster a sense of community among strangers.

Peak inner city suburban Gahanism as HWC recommends buying IKEA when two local furniture dealers are yards away from the redesign atrocity.

Yesterday at a very private "public input" meeting, the braying luminaries informed us that we'd be needing tables and chairs for the soon-to-be unshaded northern expanse of Market Street between Pearl and State.

Of course, professional planning functionaries who spend most of their days indoors planning Disney vacations, then go to the air-conditioned gym for exercise, have no reason to consider shade in the context of walkability ... but we digress.

According to HWC Engineering, the company that gets so many assignments from Dear Leader that it established an office right across the street from his, there'll need to be an all-expenses-paid road trip to Indianapolis or Cincinnati, because ... I mean ... shouldn't it be obvious ... any city in the process of demolishing public housing units needs IKEA for street furniture downtown where the cool people with money hang out.

So much for localism.

Seriously, how many donations to Jeff Gahan's re-election campaign have to be deposited before local merchants like Schmitt and Classic get to put in bids?

Ah, but who are we as proletarian laymen to question the highly remunerated expertise of HWC's suburban design engineers?