These post-COVID ideas for cities could be scaled down for Nawbany.

It's a British publication, and in some ways these ideas are scaled for cities much larger than Nawbany. 

At the same time, the guiding principles are intelligent and applicable, and could be scaled down to fit -- if we had anyone here in a position of authority who could read and assimilate information absent an expectation of cash-stuffed envelopes. 

Bike superhighways

Garden streets

A digitally enabled high street

Multipurpose neighborhoods

Unlikely in this god-awful stupid place, but a boy can dream pro bono.

From garden streets to bike highways: four ideas for post-Covid cities – visualised, by Chris Michael, Lydia McMullan and Frank Hulley-Jones (The Guardian) 

As the pandemic wreaks havoc on existing structures, we look at some visions for post-Covid cities – and how they hold up

There is a huge, looming, unanswerable question that overshadows our cities, like an elephant squatting in the central square. Will a Covid-19 vaccine or herd immunity return us to “normal”, or will we need to redesign our cities to accommodate a world in which close proximity to other people can kill you?

After an anxious summer in the northern hemisphere, during which those of us who were able to safely do so mimicked a kind of normality with limited socialising on patios and in gardens, winter is coming – and it will test the limits of our urban design. Regardless of whether we “solve” this latest coronavirus, humanity now knows how vulnerable we are to pandemics.

Can we mitigate the effects of the next great disease before it happens? And has the colossal disruption to the way we work and travel created a renewed impetus to organise cities in a more sustainable, more pleasant way?

We asked four architecture firms to share their visions of what cities should do, now, to better design everything from offices to streets to transport – and we have analysed each one – to help inoculate our cities against a disease that is proving so difficult to inoculate against in our bodies.

Except Nawbany: "After devoting more than a century of planning and engineering effort to the movement and storage of cars above all other considerations, U.S. cities have suddenly, temporarily shifted priorities."

"While it's so far only a temporary change, the sudden popularity of al fresco streets—a term we are using until a more universally accepted term comes along—presents undeniable evidence that some things in the United States are, for now at least, more important than allowing for the automobile's every possible convenience."

Where's our new redevelopment director in all this? Shouldn't we be talking about al fresco streets in New Albany, too?

Josh Staten came to us well recommended. He knows his urbanism. But here's the thing. Jeff Gahan's campaign finance pay-for-play patronage scheme depends in large measure on contractors who do roads, and paving ... and automobile supremacy.

I'm still hoping Josh can turn that around. But how much can he do when the boss man (a) is clueless, and (b) depends on cars for political succor?

Maybe when Gahan's gone. Maybe then, we can be a real city.

Cities Are Suddenly a Little Less Car-Centric, by James Brasuell (Planetizen)

After devoting more than a century of planning and engineering effort to the movement and storage of cars above all other considerations, U.S. cities have suddenly, temporarily shifted priorities.

... The sudden proliferation of al fresco streets marks a substantial advancement of the cause represented by those scattered few examples of anti-car political success. We shouldn't discount the political achievement, however fleeting, of this unprecedented shift in the balance of political power. The automobile could still end up being the long-term victor in the post-pandemic reality to come. But for now, we are witnessing history.

To create an al fresco street, politicians must legislatively approve the removal of regulations and other obstacles for outdoor operation—of which, there are many (again, the car has been king for over a century). Preceding interventions—complete streets, open streets, shared streets, tactical urbanism, play streets, slow streets, parklets, Park(ing) Day, and Better Block—have tested some of the concepts of a post-car retrofit. Variations on those previous experiments are visible in some of the examples of al fresco streets that have emerged so far.

A book to look for this summer: "Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America."

If anyone cocooned within the bunker-bound Team Gahan inner ruling circle would like to read this book, I'll buy it for them.

It limits my potential monetary exposure to what, three or four people? I'll even buy a copy for the hall of fame automobile supremacist Jim Rice of HWC Campaign Engineering.

But no matter.

New Albany's power brokers in municipal government don't read books, do they? Least of all the monetizer at the top.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, by Angie Schmitt (Kirkus)

A surprising study of anti-pedestrian urban planning in America.

Most readers will be unaware that pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed since the 1970s; in 2018 alone, 6,283 pedestrians were killed trying to cross the street. Former Streetsblog editor Schmitt takes us for an uncomfortable ride into the hard realities of why pedestrians are more unsafe now than they've been in decades.

In a book that will sit comfortably on the shelf next to Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, Schmitt provides an exhaustively researched study of the intersection of automobiles and pedestrians. The author uncovers a car-obsessed America whose civic planning is designed to discriminate against walkers while accommodating motorists. Unlike, for example, many European countries, the motorist has more rights than the pedestrian in the U.S.

Even worse, as Schmitt explains, thinly veiled racism and classism are at the heart of many of the traffic laws that essentially treat pedestrians as second-class citizens. Pedestrians hurt or killed by cars are often blamed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the problem, Schmitt shows convincingly, is often the flawed road systems themselves. And it’s not just the engineers who design these systems, but also the politicians who allow poor urban planning to go unchecked.

The narrative is a deft balance of anecdotal and informational content, emphasizing the real-life human tragedies caused by anti-pedestrian bias but also backing it up with statistical research. Most importantly, Schmitt debunks common assumptions that pedestrian deaths are either blameless random accidents or, more often, the result of laziness or inattentiveness on the part of the walker.

In reality, the culprit is a sometimes-lethal combination of badly designed streets, increasingly larger vehicles on the road, poorly estimated speed limits, and a lack of crosswalks, among other infrastructural failures.

Bravely exposes the human cost of public and political indifference toward pedestrian safety.

"The coronavirus shutdowns are making more obvious a pre-existing epidemic of reckless street design."

A related story yesterday:

The future of work, and of commuting to work, surely will be different.

It should surprise no one that in New Albany, a political process currently being held hostage by mayor and city council president has no room for responsiveness on ANY matter of importance, much less the perennially abused street grid.

I doubt their automobile centrism has abated with quarantine. We'll see. My own period of detachment from involvement with public affairs originally was slated to expire on June 30.

We'll see about THAT, too. Let's have a look at genuine leadership out in Oakland.

Drivers Not Wanted on Oakland’s ‘Slow Streets’, by Laura Bliss (CityLab)

The California city isn’t the first to experiment with car restrictions in the coronavirus pandemic, but its plan to discourage drivers is the most extensive.

Last week, Oakland, California, announced a bold answer to shelter-in-place coronavirus claustrophobia: To create more outdoor space and safer corridors for essential travel by foot or bike, the city would restrict access to vehicles on nearly 74 miles of city street — about 10% of the city’s street network.

“In this unprecedented moment we must do everything we can to ensure the safety and well-being of all families across our city,” stated Mayor Libby Schaaf. “Closing roads means opening up our city.”

The “slow streets” initiative, which began on Saturday and will roll out in four segments through the duration of the coronavirus emergency, comes in response to citizen concerns about overcrowded conditions in parks and on sidewalks during the coronavirus lockdown. It’s not really a “closure,” despite the mayor’s phrasing: Emergency vehicles like police cars, fire trucks and ambulances are still permitted to enter these new pedestrian corridors, as are delivery vehicles and residential traffic. In fact, no drivers will be ticketed if they do drive on these streets.

The change is mostly a firm psychological nudge, said Warren Logan, the director of mobility policy and interagency relations in the Oakland mayor’s office. Confronted by a pair of traffic signs and a barricade blocking one lane, drivers now have to think twice about entering these streets. Many will consider taking a different route. And all will hopefully drive more mindfully when they enter a slow-streets zone — an increasingly important concern in cities where the relative absence of traffic has inspired a wave of speeding violations. “When they do turn into the street, they do it carefully,” Logan said.

After a week in action, Oakland officials say the streets are working as planned — no collisions, no reported instances of unsafe gathering, and more families able to move (and dance) at spacious distances. As if out of an earlier era, small children are riding bikes in the middle of the street without their parents needing to worry. “This is an opportunity to remember that these are our streets, not just streets for cars,” Logan said.

The same flawed HWC Engineering campaign donations-meet-street grid bait 'n' switch that wasn't working prior to the pandemic hasn't grown any more sensible with sheltering at home. It was crap then, and so it remains. 

Have Coronavirus Shutdowns Prompted an Epidemic of Reckless Driving? by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

Reports from many cities indicate a surge in aggressive speeding, and with it, automobile crashes. The statistics are remarkable and alarming in light of how much traffic itself has declined, with many businesses closed and residents sheltering at home ...

... The most common tendency I've seen in reporting of this phenomenon is to blame "reckless driving." In other words, it's just that people who have sociopathic and destructive urges are out there on the empty roads playing Ricky Bobby and indulging them, to tragic effect. Is that the whole story?

This pat answer is consistent with our societal bias toward always talking about traffic violence in terms of individual behavior: either it was just a tragic accident, or the people involved should have been paying more attention. Mainstream media rarely interrogate how street design induces drivers to behave in certain ways. Yet we've written about this again and again on Strong Towns, because the evidence is clear: when you design streets to make high speeds comfortable, you make tragedy statistically inevitable.

Over 40,000 Americans die in traffic in a normal year. The number of pedestrians alone killed by U.S. drivers from 2008 to 2017 averages out to one every 1 hour and 46 minutes. If we're appalled by the level of carnage on our roads while most of us are sheltering in place, we should certainly be appalled by the level of carnage the rest of the time. If we think there's an epidemic of reckless driving right now, it's just a continuation of the epidemics of reckless driving that we witnessed in America in 2019, and 2018, and 2017, et cetera. The status quo isn't anything to want to return to here.

The coronavirus shutdowns are making more obvious a pre-existing epidemic of reckless street design.

You're entitled to my opinion and there's ample time, so here are a few random links.

I'm always making notes and collecting links with the idea that they might become blog posts.

Of course "stuff" happens; in January, I began "political distancing" from anti-social Gahanism, then came the disruptions of the planetary pandemic. In short, the notes and links have accumulated, and so here's a helter-skelter collection.

To kick off the chronology, you'll not be surprised that this particular publication is suspicious of Piketty.

A bestselling economist sets out the case for socialism at The Economist

Thomas Piketty’s new book may prove as famous—and controversial—as its predecessor.

In “Capital” Mr Piketty shared Karl Marx’s goal in the work of the same name that he published in 1867: to reveal the economic logic of the capitalist mode of production. “Capital and Ideology”, by contrast, is closer to the sociological writings of Marx and his followers, especially “The German Ideology” (1845-46), which sought to explain the social and political means by which capitalists maintained power over the working classes.

How many times have I heard a New Albanian return from vacation, praise a walking- and biking-friendly locale far, far away, then sigh: "too bad we couldn't ever do that here." But couldn't we -- I mean, if we weren't so stupid and cowardly about it?

Why Do We Think Walkable Towns Are Only for Tourists? by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about Irish villages. It was intended to make the point that it's not only possible, but utterly normal in much of the world, for some of the best walkable urbanism around to be located in smaller cities or even tiny rural towns.

In such places, the village is compact, with bustling streets and little wasted space. However, if you walk to the edge of town, you are immediately in farm fields. There is a stark line between town and country, not the suburban-style blurring of the edges we often find in car-centric North America, where the edge of town consists of a mile or two of chain restaurants and gas stations.

Earlier this year when the town of Clarksville released its ideas for much needed positive changes to the design of Brown's Station Way, the automobile supremacists came immediately out of hiding, among them Wynken (John Gilkey) and Nodd (Lindon Dodd). We know Blynken is out there somewhere, but don't worry, car fetishists -- it will be a while before the town gets around to doing the rational thing, freeing you to remain Luddites.

DODD COLUMN: Road plan full of potholes (by Nodd, in the local chain newspaper)

Brown’s Station Way — a very short, simple, unassuming stretch of mostly ignored if not forgotten road that has apparently suddenly been discovered by engineers, architects, local political types, safety experts, and developers.

Of course the local chain newspaper is unaware of safety by design, and proved it with an editorial from Terre Haute. The conclusion is correct, but it would be instructive to see Gilkey's former employer show an aptitude for modern thinking about complete streets. After all John lacks it.

EDITORIAL: For safety's sake, ban cellphones while driving

No law is going to prevent every crash or bring an end to distracted driving. But banning cellphone use while driving can help make vehicular travel safer for everyone. It’s time for Indiana to become part of that solution.

Another look at the utter futility of painted (and ignored) sharrows on roadways.

Separated Bike Lanes Means Safer Streets, Study Says, by Aaron Short (Streetsblog)

A 13-year study of a dozen cities found that protected bike lanes led to a drastic decline in fatalities for all users of the road.

Perhaps even more important: Researchers found that painted bike lanes provided no improvement on road safety. And their review earlier this year of shared roadways — where bike symbols are painted in the middle of a lane — revealed that it was actually safer to have no bike markings at all.

One can only imagine the phone sex between Gahan and Duggins as they plot to turn the coronavirus crisis into some way of demolishing public housing in New Albany. Why? Because that's what opportunistic slaves to money do when people aren't looking.

For Those Living in Public Housing, It’s a Long Way to Work, by Sarah Holder (CityLab)

A new Urban Institute study measures the spatial mismatch between where job seekers live and employment opportunities.

Depending upon which zip code they call home, researchers found that the average person using some form of government housing aid is likely to face tougher odds of getting a job near their neighborhood than the average job seeker who isn’t using assistance, even those who are extremely low-income. “In fact, the average assisted household is surrounded by 6,032 more nearby Snagajob seekers than Snagajob postings, compared with 3,056 more for unassisted, extremely low–income households — nearly double the amount,” the report reads.

Of all assisted households, those living in public housing had the biggest difference between the number of job seekers and the number of jobs nearby; next came housing choice voucher, or HCV, recipients.

And, to conclude with topicality.

A Tale of Two Plagues, by Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

Tips on self-isolation from Daniel Defoe and Giovanni Boccaccio

I’ve been catching up on the classics. For example, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, an early example of the nonfiction novel, written in 1722 about London’s Great Plague of 1665. After a slow start—the novel begins with a lot of statistics to establish its factual reliability—it picks up, as Defoe’s narrator, H.F., a prosperous saddlemaker, misses his chances to leave London and finds himself trapped in town, where he alternates between prudent isolation indoors and restless wanderings through the streets ...

... They’re definitely not having as much fun as the wealthy young people in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, who escaped the 1348 plague by holing up in the Florentine countryside, flirting and telling sexy stories.

Glasser don't care: "As a general rule of thumb, it’s not a good idea to encourage bicycling on sidewalks."

Yesterday we were walking westbound on an almost deserted Market Street, when Diana asked me why a grown man and a woman on bicycles were approaching us, riding on the sidewalk.

"Because they're fucking idiots," I said, "and because the city allows them to be fucking idiots."

But then they saw us, moved to unoccupied parking spaces on Market, and commenced riding against traffic.

Of course, I was being flippant up to a point. Granted, they shouldn't be on the sidewalk, and while ignorance is part of it, the bigger reason is an understandable discomfort (read: fear) of riding on the street alongside the cars, when neither the drivers of these cars NOR CITY HALL itself cares to acknowledge them, to calm traffic, or do anything useful to make their passage safer.

That's why when a useful dupe like Louisville's Chris Glasser crows about Jeff Gahan's excellence in street grid reform, he's actually looking at a Potemkin facade erected by congenital liars, and not the real state of affairs experienced by people who actually live here.

Speck's unfulfilled plan: Intellectually lazy carpetbagging shortcuts from clueless Louisvillians don't make New Albany's streets any safer.

Meanwhile, enjoy this digression.

BICYCLING ON SIDEWALKS (The Cornell University Bicycle and Pedestrian Web Site)

There is momentum throughout the country to make our communities more walking and bicycling-friendly, thereby making them more livable. In trying to accomplish this goal, citizens are challenged by limited physical space, high volumes of vehicular traffic, and overall congestion. The question of whether to permit bicycling on sidewalks is often discussed in the planning process.

As a general rule of thumb, it’s not a good idea to encourage bicycling on sidewalks ...

Speck's unfulfilled plan: Intellectually lazy carpetbagging shortcuts from clueless Louisvillians don't make New Albany's streets any safer.

On Wednesday in LEO Dead to Me Weekly, there was an extended hymn of praise for New Albany's Jeff Speck-inspired street grid reversion program, as written by the sort of useful dupe who formerly went to the USSR and asked Stalin's groveling, terrified minions what they thought about their dear leader's unparalleled success.

Care to guess what they said?

Of course, the article's befuddled author Chris Glasser is immune to criticism from those who actually live here as to the effectiveness of these epochal street grid reforms -- which in the end, weren't. Street direction did change, but the virtually all the remainder of the supportive mechanisms proposed by Speck were stripped away and tossed into HWC's rancid dumpster, as we've noted in this space time and again.

(Ironically, as with Republicans in the recent impeachment process, most of New Albany's senior Democrats will acknowledge privately that the truth about the post-Speck street grid differs from what they parrot aloud on a daily basis.)

Glasser's real aim was to criticize Louisville's sloth pertaining to these matters. That's fine; Greg Fischer is enduringly awful, but please, don't misrepresent our reality to further your propaganda. I'll repeat the offer I made to Glasser on Twitter:

Any time you want to come to NA, go for a walk, and get schooled about objective reality, I'm happy to guide you. You know very little about what actually happened here; it's like the American socialists who went to the USSR during Stalinism and came back glowing about paradise.

Jeff Gillenwater replied to Glasser with his characteristic command of actual facts, and the article's author devoted five or so minutes to defending his woefully gullible thesis before slinking back to Louisville to plot future intellectual carpetbagging.

This is a fantasyland recitation worthy of the Trump administration.

As is too often the case, a self-styled advocate/expert has little to no idea of what he’s talking about, no actual evidence to provide, and dismisses fact-based disagreement as the work of Internet cranks. Even his opening salvo that projects like New Albany’s are virtually unseen elsewhere is obviously false. As many of us spent a decade or more pointing out before Speck was even involved, reversions to two-way streets have been common for a long time. New Albany is just one on a long list and not a particularly good example. The only thing in the implemented plan that’s all that similar to the Speck plan is the two-way reversion itself. With as common as that has been around the country (not to mention lots of two-way, complete street advocacy in New Albany before Speck), specifically attributing two-ways to “the Speck plan” would be like attributing ice cream to Graeter’s.

Unlike the author, I have been providing a link to the actual plan the Speck design group created for the project. Anyone interested can see for themselves that the HWC plan that was actually implemented bears very, very little resemblance.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cityofn.../NAReport.compressed1.pdf

Meanwhile Glasser, unable to connive a handy way to fit the wholesale discarding of Speck's bicycling plans into his convenient, fawning narrative -- has career bureaucrat and sophistry mangler John Rosenbarger ever been showered with as much adulation for doing little or nothing? -- Glasser merely glossed over bicycling safety as a necessary compromise.

Unalloyed bullshit, and Bluegill called Glasser's mealy-mouthed bluff.

An important point here. Because a majority of the Speck plan was cut, streets are still dangerous for people on foot or bike, more so in some places. It’s so “compromised” that very few benefits have happened. If this is what success is, why would anyone spend millions on it?

In New Albany, we have scattered bike lanes to nowhere - they just randomly begin and end - in areas where high volume, high speed automobile traffic makes them dangerous. Those lanes are hardly used, reiterating the idea they’re a waste.

The article suggests that Speck-proposed bike lanes were altered from protected to just painted. I’ve asked where all those lanes are. No answer, of course, because they don’t exist. It’s unpopular, but I persist in thinking facts matter.

We already had the fights, spent all the $$ without a good example to show for it. Re-doing what was just done isn’t likely. In some ways, we’re further from getting it right than we were. If everyone in L-Ville does go for similar “compromise”, we’ll be even further behind.

As for Speck, he's still talking from both sides of his mouth, which is unfortunate. Maybe his contract requires him to keep "selling" HWC's shambles. It saddens me tremendously, but there it is.

Of course the flunktionaries on the prom planning committee applauded on cue, safe from the horrible burden of comprehension. That's too bad. It's really not that hard to learn.

You merely must want to learn.

Democrat John Gilkey reveals himself to be a drooling automobile-centric Luddite. That's just too bad, isn't it?

Stay strong, Clarksville. Redesign Brown's Station Way for safety and modernity, and implement this street grid reform plan.

See, here's a positive comment to add to John Gilkey's purportedly universal negative reactions. But don't expect me to help you grease your knob, John. Can't say I like your stick shift quite that much.

The onetime journalist Gilkey well knows how to work a crowd of mouth-breathing car fetishists. Heroically making love to both your vehicles and his, John has opted for the high-speed populism of the eight-cylinder gas-guzzler, while still ridiculously posturing as a "liberal" in matters of state and national importance.

Don't we deserve the same consistency locally, John, not easy potshots at roundabouts, which you know will sell like Mountain Dew to the motorists whose sole consideration is to pass through your town quickly?



Gilkey displays not only ignorance as it pertains to street grid modernity, but political hypocrisy; then again, we already knew hypocrisy isn't restricted to Republicans.

A Biden guy, eh? Or maybe Bloomberg.

Let's just hope those in Clarksville who get it will do it.

GILKEY OP-ED: Road project takes wrong turn in the News&Bune

Clarksville has taken a wrong turn with its Brown’s Station Way road project. Spending just under $17 million to solve problems that don’t exist is the wrong course of action in my opinion.

I represent Clarksville’s 2nd District on the Town Council and serve on the town’s Redevelopment Commission in addition to the Plan Commission and the town’s Technical Review Committee, so I have a reasonably good idea of what is happening in town. Since the proposed road project was first unveiled last year, I have heard nothing but negative comments about the venture. To paraphrase a colloquialism, I could count the number of positive comments I have received on one hand and have enough fingers left to open a greased doorknob.

The project proposes turning a major traffic artery through town into a residential 2-lane street with a 35 mile-an-hour speed limit, interjecting two roundabouts, removing the overpass at Brown’s Station Way and Lewis and Clark Parkway and replacing it with an at-grade traffic light-controlled intersection, and replacing the pedestrian overpass near Randolph Avenue with a profoundly upscaled crossing.

In my mind, the project is an absurd expenditure of money to solve problems that mostly do not exist ...

"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 ...

NAC's New Albany "Person of the Year" for 2019 is Dear Leader's pervasive, relentless Automobile Supremacy.

It’s time once again for NA Confidential to select New Albany’s "Person of the Year." As in 2018, there'll be no run-ups and time-wasting teasers, although our basic definition remains intact, as gleaned so long ago from Time.

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States news magazine Time that features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Given the outcome of the 2019 municipal election, with the incumbent mayor Jeff Gahan winning a third consecutive term for the first time since C. Pralle Erni in the 1950s, the conventional wisdom suggests that Gahan -- currently an unchallenged, dominant figure in terms of accumulated power and authority -- would easily win the title of "Person of the Year."

Maybe in a milquetoast milieu awash in donor dollars, but all I can say to this is "Fuck a bunch o'that."

Rather, let's look at the prime beneficiary of the past eight years of pay-to-stewardship, Gahan-style. What do the following signature Gahan projects all have in common?

• River Run splash pad
• Silver Street pleasure dome
• Cannon Acres luxury doggie park
• Roadway corridor expenditures (Grant Line, Mt. Tabor, McDonald Lane, State Street)
• Summit Springs hilltop chain orgy
• Reisz Mahal opulent HQ
• Downtown grid "improvement" project

Answer: They all promote automobile centrism/supremacy at the expense of other users, whether those on foot, riding bicycles or preferring mobility options like public transportation.

They all came from Gahan with illusory promises to the contrary, which were little more than bait 'n' switch window dressing for the driver-fluffing floor show.

As traffic speeds increase, errant drivers go unpunished and sharrow symbols somehow fail to protect, Gahan has seen to it that the car stays king in Nawbany, and all other street and roadway users remain second-class citizens -- and he'll continue lying about it until the day comes when he finally goes away.

However, there is a certain irony to Gahan's love for our cars. The extended period of the Sherman Minton bridge's repairs and ensuing traffic disruptions will constitute the first serious challenges to the mayor's "Wizard of Bling" stewardship during eight years of cruise control, for which he'll be woefully unprepared and forced to cooperate with Republicans for any semblance of relief.

It will and it won't be hilarious, simultaneously.

---

Previous winners:

• 2018 ... Jeff Gahan's Money Machine
• 2017 ... #MeToo -- the NA silence breakers
• 2016 ... Chloe Allen
• 2015 ... New Albany property tax payers
• 2014 ... Heroic Non-Incentivized Downtown Developers
• 2013 ... (tie) Houndmouth and "Quality of Life"
• 2012 ... Bill "Slumlord" Allen
• 2011 ... The Sherman Minton Bridge

Council district survey results are in, and Bob Caesar remains abjectly clueless about street and road issues.

Who gets quoted the most? The one who comprehends the least. Welcome to governance, New Gahanian Style.

DESIGN DESIGN DESIGN, you blithering idiot.

He hasn't learned a single damn thing, has he?

New Albany City Council compiles list of top public priorities, by John Boyle (Hanson's Journal of Misplaced Priorities)

 ... With the growth of the population along with work being done on roads in different sections of the city, overall traffic has increased. Caesar pointed out two types of traffic — commuter and consumer.

Commuter traffic consists of drivers coming to and from work, while consumer traffic is due to people running assorted errands. The latter is affected by and, perhaps, affects the traffic situation the most, Caesar said.

Unlike commutes, trips out on the town can't always be planned out well.

"When you run around picking up different things, you don’t know how long it's going to take," Caesar said. "A lot of times, people don’t want to have to wait at stop lights, and sometimes you can kind of get yourself in a rush.”

In order to trim time off of their trips, Caesar said drivers will cut through residential neighborhoods that wouldn't otherwise see thru traffic, often doing so at dangerous speeds. Solving the situation will be tough, he said.

Speed limits have been lowered in many neighborhoods, but other things like increased police presence, signage, speed bumps and prominent lines marking stop signs could help.

"It’s a sticky wicket to really discourage people from taking all of these cut-throughs around town," Caesar said. "It’s something we need to convince people to not do. Most of the time, you’re not really cutting down time, even though you think you are.”

"Pedestrian is one of those words that conceals what's it's talking about."

I can recall Jeff Gillenwater and I having this conversation perhaps ten years ago, and my subsequent resolution to stop using the word "pedestrian" in favor of calling walkers exactly what they are -- walkers.

It's a variation of the inanity in which we refer to cars hitting pedestrians, not drivers hitting walkers, or two airplanes having a "near miss" when in fact, it was a "near hit."

Language matters, and seeing as one out of a hundred planners, politicians, campaign donors and automobile supremacists actually read (they're too busy driving, aren't they?), the extent of the conceptual difficulty becomes clear.

Why I'm Not a Pedestrian, by Scott Ogilvie

There's kind of an old idea here—the idea that streets are not just for transportation. The idea is that streets are public space.

This was once a perfectly obvious idea. All kinds of life happened on the street that had little to do with transportation. The desire for a bustling street isn't just nostalgia, because the truth is great cities, great places to visit, are always still great places to walk. There's a shortage of great public spaces in this country, and it's often been observed that we'll travel to visit somewhere that is a great place to walk, but we don't always understand how to build those places where we already live.

A thousand years ago, the whole world was your sidewalk. But since the introduction of the car, the space we allow people to walk has narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed. Walking used to be natural, and essential everywhere—but we invented new rules and customs that moved people out of the way so cars could move faster. We’ve put walking in a smaller and smaller box. We call it “alternative transportation” we “accommodate bikes and peds” In short, we put walking on the margins, rather than at the center of what we do.

Even the word pedestrian—which is a common word, one I use a lot, but am trying to use less. Where does that word come from? Before anyone used that word to describe someone walking, pedestrian meant dull, lacking wit and imagination, ordinary. No one used the word pedestrian to mean a person traveling until the emergence of a related word, equestrian. To go by horse. And then along came the word pedestrian, to go by foot, as its counterpart. But who went by horse in cities? The wealthy and powerful went by horse, while the rest of us, the pedestrians, went by foot. The equestrian was pulled by an expensive four-legged vehicle that needed to be fueled and stored and maintained, while the pedestrian made due with their feet. Sounds a little familiar doesn't it?

So perhaps we should retire the word pedestrian if we want to elevate our ideas about walking. Pedestrian is one of those words that conceals what's it's talking about. No one of us ever says, “Look at those small pedestrians trick or treating.” Of course we use normal words like children, walk the dog, walk to the park, and so on. Yet in transportation-speak, you walk out your door, and you've suddenly been transformed into a pedestrian ...

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.

Just watch this: "Utrecht: Planning for People, Not Cars."

Nice things we can't have in L'America.

"The car is a very specifically American symbol of freedom, but like so many instruments and symbols of American freedom, it is a tool of domination and control."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Not only is car-centrism, or "automobile supremacy," a form of imperialism. It is perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely free from social stigma.

"The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives."

When we get behind a wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumption of acceptable behavior changes every bit as much as when we savage people on social media. We demand to be in control, and we insist the rest of you get the hell out of our way.

The headline is to be taken as sarcasm, by the way.

THE FUTURE IS FOUR WHEELS, CYCLISTS BE DAMNED, by Jacob Bacharach (The Outline)

Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.

 ... Nationally, pedestrian and cyclist deaths have spiked since 2009. The ubiquity of cell phones and the growing preponderance of integrated screens in vehicles is a major contributing factor, as is the American preference for trucks and SUVs, with which their taller front profile makes them far more deadly in collisions than the lower, slanting hoods of normal cars.

There is also the unrelenting, often murderous hostility of drivers toward pedestrians and people on bikes. No cyclist I know has not been menaced by an enraged driver — brushed past within inches, bumped at an intersection, run off the road — and most of us have been menaced more than once. No pedestrian who has to cross at a mid-block crosswalk is unfamiliar with the experience of a driver actually speeding up when they see you; no one who has crossed at a regular intersection is unfamiliar with a turning driver laying on the horn and waiting until the last second to jam on the breaks as you scurry out of the way.

The car is a very specifically American symbol of freedom, but like so many instruments and symbols of American freedom, it is a tool of domination and control. A car is a missile and a castle, a self-propelled, multi-ton fortress, hermetically sealed against the intrusions of weather, environment, and, of course, other people. Drivers view the world through the lenses of speed and convenience — most of the anger at cyclists, in my experience, is at having to drive at something resembling a normal urban speed limit because there’s a bike in front of them — but also through the lens of ownership. Streets belong to cars. The rest of us are interlopers, invaders, invasive species.

In fact, most Americans, and certainly most of our political leaders, seem to view our car-based infrastructure as essentially organic and inevitable, and anything that impedes, slows, reduces, or provides an alternative to the circulation and storage of internal combustion vehicles is an engineered scheme to alter an essentially natural order. Newspapers relentlessly editorialize about massive road and highway projects as absolute fundamentals of economic wellbeing and development, whereas rail and bike lanes and other multi-modal transit options are generally treated as luxe amenities at best, or public menaces at worst.

(snip)

But cars are not creatures and have not evolved to fit their environment; we have designed our environment around cars ...

 ... And here, curiously, we find a great undiagnosed cause at the root of our supposed cultural malaise. (Also, incidentally, a great undiagnosed source of national violence: cars kill as many people in America — around 40,000 a year — as guns.) These, too, are persistent bugaboos of op-ed writers and pundits: fragmentation and atomization; loneliness and disconnection; declines in communal values and an absence of interpersonal interaction.

Well, easy enough to blame it on the internet, but for a century now we have been putting things farther and farther apart and, more and more, traveling to and from everyplace in single occupancy vehicles, grimly zooming from garage to garage, interacting with no other humans along the way except for that fucking cyclist taking up the whole goddamn road! The interactions that presumably create the sorts of communities that conservatives and columnists so frequently lament losing require more than a front porch on which to sit; they require some strolling passersby as well.

Essential reading for HWC's Jim Rice: "Four Ways Traffic Engineers Thwart Public Will."

Marohn dissects a situation in Springfield, Massachusetts; it's about traffic in front of a library, and a clueless board of works, and ... you'll just have to read the whole essay.

Please read it.

Four Ways Traffic Engineers Thwart Public Will, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... There are four common methods traffic engineers use assert their power and thwart the will of elected officials and the public those officials represent. They are all unbecoming of a profession that is supposed to be about public service. The August 6 letter from the Springfield Director of Public Works contains all four. I’m going to review those today in the hopes that, if we can’t affect change in Springfield, at least other cities can learn from their (repeated and ongoing) mistakes.

#1: A Focus on Process, Not Outcomes
Time and again I’ve watched engineers talk down to public officials, minimizing their concerns, by pretending there is some long and dignified legacy of deliberation that goes into every action taken by an engineer ... I touch on this first because the arrogance deeply bothers me. This issue keeps coming up because people keep getting hit, getting killed, and those responsible for the dangerous situation—those who could do something about it—seem unwilling to do anything. People have been elected because they said they would find answers. To fall back on process—silly councilors, we’ve already considered this many times—when it’s clearly not working is tone deaf, at best.

#2: A Reliance on Standards, Not Observation
An engineer working for their own priorities, instead of the priorities of the elected officials or the public at large, will quote industry standards as if they are inviolable laws instead of what they really are: guidelines for the typical scenario. This letter includes plenty of that. Here’s one example ... the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices is a favorite for engineers to cite, but in a unique situation like that being examined along State Street in Springfield, the rote standards don’t easily apply. That’s why we have professional engineers, not merely technicians. Engineers are supposed to think, to use their professional judgement in places where it is warranted.


#3: Elevating Engineering Values Over Human Values
I’ve written about how engineers assert their own values into design decisions, holding them up as truth when in fact they are a subjective ordering that should be made by elected officials. The decision to prioritize traffic flow over safety, for example. Another is the decision to establish a design speed incompatible with the neighborhood. These decisions are made without presenting them as options to elected officials, even though they are an assertion of values, not truth. This letter is full of the engineer’s values being asserted as truth ... the letter talks about “traffic queues” and “Level of Service” as if they were commandments handed down from a divine authority, not merely a set of values being asserted by the Public Works Department.

#4: Pretending to be Powerless Due to a Higher Authority
The fourth way engineers thwart the will of elected officials and the public is to assert that they are powerless, that ultimate authority resides elsewhere. Layered on this assertion of powerlessness is the implied threat that the real governing authority is not very nice, that they are likely to react poorly if provoked by such silly requests.

This is the kind of thing I did when I was a kid and used to babysit. You know, I would let you stay up late, but your mom said I needed to get you to bed on time and we don’t want her mad at us, do we. It’s juvenile, but as part of the broader conversation, it provides the final knockout blow. There is a false sense of empathy projected while simultaneously deflecting any responsibility from the engineer ... of all people, politicians should understand this to be false. None of these decisions are absolutely technical; they are all somewhat political. This is especially true in a unique situation like State Street, where multiple deaths have occurred. It’s a stretch to suggest that reasonable action here might require state board to provide some type of waiver, but it’s absurd to suggest the city could not make a compelling case.

Cities are not powerless. Great local engineers that want to assert the values of the community (instead of opposing them) can become strong advocates for the community with state appeals boards. 

"Aladdin's and all the merchants at the Underground Station will be open regular business hours during the complete reconstruction of Bank St. in front of the Underground Station."

Previously we examined another in a series of oblivious Gahan street grid errors.

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Main and Bank work to begin on Monday the 13th -- or was that Friday the 16th?

As usual, indie businesses bear the brunt as the Democratic Party's patronage imperatives enrich campaign donors.

Dear friends.

Aladdin's and all the merchants at the Underground Station will be open regular business hours during the complete reconstruction of Bank St. in front of the Underground Station. We appreciate everyone's patronage and understanding while this project is underway. And please keep in mind that all parking behind the Underground Station is open and all sidewalks are accessible as well.

Sherman Minton Refusal: The two-way street grid stays as it is, jack, and if we're smart we'll double down on walkability.

In about a year and a half, the city will face a very big challenge over a period of up to four years. The Sherman Minton Bridge repair regimen will be terribly disruptive, to say the least.

The saddest part of all this is the timing.

At precisely the point when we should be talking about improving Jeff Gahan's lacklustre, lowest-common-denominator approach to making New Albany's densest urban areas more walkable and bikeable, by sensibly slowing traffic and incrementally curbing the automobile imperialism that reigns hereabouts, instead we're about to spend the next five years talking about nothing except cars and the "right" of drivers to impose their wills on the cosmos.

Well, no. Not exactly. Already I've heard hints from the car-centric to the effect that the only way to cope with the coming disruptions is to "temporarily" re-revert downtown streets to one-way traffic -- you know, so drivers and get from one end of town to the other more quickly.

Nope.

Principled community leaders (and candidates in this fall's election) need to state cleatly that Gahan's street-grid baby steps -- while too laughably timid by half -- aren't negotiable. Furthermore, as yet stillborn efforts to slow traffic and make the historic city center safe for all users, not just the ones jangling their car keys, need to be revived, implemented and ratcheted up.

Sherman Minton Insanity does not change one important, fundamental fact, because the object remains to better utilize the potential of the city's density by making it a place people want to live, work and play, and not merely drive through.

Yes, outsiders need to be able to get to us. However, residents also need to "get it," and to understand that surrendering to the tyranny of the pass-through motorist constitutes failure, not success.

For the sake of the internal combustion engine, as utilizing an interstate highway bridge already over-used owing to toll evasion, New Albany might well become road kill.

Last evening I was called to task for saying unkind things on the interwebz about INDOT, but the fact of the matter is that INDOT exists to serve the interests of the Sherman Minton as a high-speed, pass-through component of a larger car-centric transportation grid. INDOT cares little about collateral damage in New Albany, a city standing to benefit mightily from low-speed, stay-a-while use.

Happily, much of what has come out of last evening's meeting indicates a shared determination for New Albany businesses to unify and begin (at long last) thinking collectively about the need to "sell" the outside world on New Albany. We're facing a potentially existential threat, and unity is the best way to prepare for it.

It would be nice to hear City Hall's take on this matter -- BEFORE the election.

Slick Jeffie knows how to slow the cars, but he won't. Maybe Mark Seabrook will take action where the Democrats have failed.

“You move through a space and you dwell in a place.”

Here's another one:

Streets ahead: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality, by Charlemagne (The Economist)

It isn't rocket science, but it might as well be given the timidity displayed by Gahan's ruling elite. If they would periodically remove themselves from their own massive vehicles, walk around a bit and survey the situation, they'd understand; if it doesn't feel safe without 4,000 lbs of plastic and metal as protection, then it probably isn't.

But that's no way to perpetuate Gahan's lifeblood of pay-to-play political patronage, is it?

Why Speed Kills Cities, by Andrew Small (City Lab)

U.S. cities are dropping urban speed limits in an effort to boost safety and lower crash rates. But the benefits of less-rapid urban mobility don’t end there.

 ... The most obvious immediate benefit to a fundamentally slower city is the safety boost it delivers. Reducing speeds is the best, easiest, and fastest way to quickly radically improve safety, for both drivers and anyone in front of them. A recent report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates that rising speed limits in the United States have led to an additional estimated 37,000 deaths over the past 25 years. “We know that very small changes in speed can have big consequences for pedestrians,” says Jessica Cicchino, the vice president of research at IIHS. “A pedestrian struck at 25 miles per hour has 25 percent chance of being seriously injured—but that climbs to a 50 percent chance at 33 miles per hour.” Importantly, lower speed limits also reduce the number of crashes, as an IIHS study found last year in Boston after it lowered its default speed in 2017.

Speed kills in a more abstract sense, too. Building urban roads that can handle a large number of vehicles traveling at 35 miles per hour and up means making them wider, with fewer curves. High-speed highways and street-level limited-access urban thoroughfares famously do a host of bad things to those who live nearby or underneath these big hostile barriers. What’s less discussed is what they’re doing to the people inside the cars. In his recent book Building and Dwelling, the planner and urban scholar Richard Sennett writes about how going faster in cities has lead urbanites to value “space” over “place.”

“You move through a space and you dwell in a place,” Sennett told CityLab’s Ian Klaus last year. “It’s a distinction for me that has to do with speed and automobiles. When people start driving at a certain speed, they lose awareness of where they are. … Where this gets reflected in urbanism is the more we create spaces where people move fast, the less they understand about what those spaces are. At about 28 or 30 mph people, moving through an urban environment stop being in a place and are in space instead.”

The time benefits one gets from boosting speeds in urban areas can end up being surprisingly modest: In downtown streets, the difference between a 25 mph commute and 45 mph commute is roughly an additional 48 seconds for every three-quarters of a mile traveled, according to Nelson\Nygaard. It’s also worth remembering that even urban “rapid transit” often isn’t really all that fast. (The New York City subway averages 17 miles per hour.)

When human- or animal-powered urban movement was the norm, there was much less anxiety about losing time in traffic jams, Sennett writes; in the twisted streets of old cities, congestion was accepted as just an fact of life. Only when cities like Paris transitioned from narrow lanes to wide Haussmann-style boulevards did urbanites began to associate speed with freedom of movement—witness reports of widespread road rage that sprouted up in Paris in the 1870s and early 1880s. Urban traffic jams today are a visceral sign that something has gone wrong—the city wasn’t working. Like not being physically touched in public, the desire to move freely—and not be stuck in traffic—is a sensation we take for granted as natural. But it’s a historical construction of our auto-centric sensibilities.

In his prescient 1973 essay, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar,” André Gorz makes a similar point about how private cars turned speed into a commodity that, when introduced into the city, created havoc: “When everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie,” he wrote, “everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets.”

Sennett also uses traffic flows to show the problem of scaling from the local to the urban—a theme in the debate to how to create an “open city.” He compares Lewis Mumford’s top-down garden city urbanism with Jane Jacobs’s bottom-up street-ballet localism. Both Mumford and Jacobs famously loathed the impact of the automobile, but Mumford argues that you can’t build infrastructure bit-by-bit, the way Jacobs sees the urban fabric: When you’re engineering how to circulate millions of vehicle trips, you have to plan at a bigger scale. By that logic, perhaps urbanists shouldn’t demand slow lanes or slow neighborhoods: They should ask for a slow city ...

Gahan's street grid sausage-making: CNA 27 tour attendees, please help us -- New Albany is being held hostage by New Urban Imposters.

Today's the 14th, and perfect weather for New Albany's leadership cadres to mislead people -- and make no mistake, that's exactly what they'll be doing.

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.

If any CNA 27 attendees are reading this note, and you plan to tag along on the New Albany tour this afternoon, please do me this one small favor: ask questions of these serial liars.

• Why the beg buttons? 
• Why the Main Street beautification median?
• Why the reformatted Market Street median? 
• Where are the bike lanes?
• Why so many fading sharrow markings?
• What's the reason for the plethora of routinely ignored pedestrian crossing beg-button-flashing-light "permission" stations? 
• Why is the traffic still moving so damned fast? 
• Isn't there more to walkability than bright shiny beautification projects?

They won't so much as attempt to answer, and you'll probably be hustled off to detention with the police chief.

But please try. Gahan's street grid bait 'n' switch is abhorrent, and the emperor is unclothed.