When humans outrank anchors 'n' autos: "It’s not about making all cities like Amsterdam. It’s about making them better versions of themselves.”

Well, at least the hue and cry over Spring Street bike lanes recently repainted  (they've actually been there since 2009) has lessened the customary terminal anguish over roundabouts.

Previously, we learned about ...

Leotards, brimstone and "How Amsterdam became the bicycle capital of the world."

"The prevalence of bicycle use in Amsterdam and the Netherlands more generally is a reason why I will never move back to the UK. It is only when you've experienced living in a city that is not dominated by the motorcar do you realise the immense impact it has on your quality of life. The UK now looks like a hellish, backwards, aggressive place full of people who have failed to realise that they've partly created the hell they're living in."

After all, since escaping a culture of car-centric dominance offers further benefits extending in all directions, not merely a bicycle lane or two alone, there's this.

Sharing Amsterdam’s story of transformation into a city for people (Daily Hive)

 ... The experience of living and working in Amsterdam was transformational, shifting her focus from one of environmental sustainability to urban livability. Securing a job as a tour guide to supplement her income, she would show historical photographs of the city’s car-choked streets to tourists, and their reactions were almost entirely uniform: “They would almost always say the exact same thing: ‘That looks an awful lot like my city,’” remembers Dinca.

Dinca and her Californian partner briefly moved back to North America for nine months in 2013, drawn by Vancouver’s reputation for world-class quality of life and progressive politics. But a frustrated stint into the bicycle advocacy scene – including the fledgling Streets for Everyone – would often end in the same reaction from local leaders: “This isn’t Amsterdam”. But, drawing on those archival photos she had collected over the years, Dinca reminded them that, as recently as the 1980s, neither was Amsterdam.

And so, rather than continue down that rather unproductive and unsatisfying path, Dinca decided it was time to return to her adopted home, and complete her Master’s in Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam, with an emphasis on exploring the (often undervalued) connection between transportation and land use planning.

When it came time to select her thesis project, Dinca recalled the old black-and-white photos that she would show to tourists, and asked herself a compelling question: “Why don’t cities learn from their peers’ historical mistakes and successes?”

She knew, for example, there was intense opposition and outrage at the removal of car parking at the time, while, decades later, almost all Amsterdammers would enthusiastically agree it was a positive step. So she set about better defining and quantifying these dramatic steps towards a city for people, and the average person’s reaction to them.

We have roads, but we have no streets. Time for a change.

A street in Brooklyn (from the article).

A street in New Albany.

One by one, day after day, we post these statements of transformative principle, safe in the knowledge that the planet is filled with practical examples of their utility.

One by one, day after day, elected and appointed officials in the city of New Albany fail to grasp the central point, letting precious time slip past as they embarrass themselves through abject ignorance.

Granted, no one wants to get involved with the filth of politics, and yet the only real answer to this conundrum is to fire the incumbents. You'll have two opportunities to do so this year, and in the process, to select individuals who "get" it.

Reimagining Our Streets as Places: From Transit Routes to Community Roots (Project for Public Spaces)

In a city the street must be supreme. It is the first institution of the city. The street is a room by agreement, a community room, the walls of which belong to the donors, dedicated to the city for common use. Its ceiling is the sky. Today, streets are disinterested movements not at all belonging to the houses that front them. So you have no streets. You have roads, but you have no streets.
– Louis Kahn, The Street

Streets are our most fundamental shared public spaces, but they are also one of the most contested and overlooked. Today, and for most of the last century, we have taken for granted the idea that our streets are primarily zones for cars, parking, and the transporting of goods. This has not been the case, however, throughout most of history. Across many cultures and times – since the beginning of civilization, in fact – the street has held vast social, commercial, and political significance as a powerful symbol of the public realm.

The street was “the first institution of the city,” as architect Louis Kahn once wrote, and even if we don’t always recognize it, streets are still a powerful force in shaping our physical and mental landscapes. We name them after our idols and fallen heroes—in remembrance of presidents or literary figures, civil rights leaders or old Hollywood stars. In many of our own lives and experiences, they are sites for both celebration and rebellion: Stages for summer block parties and holiday parades, they are also the place we gather to express public dissent—as with recent demonstrations following the grand jury decisions in St. Louis and New York, where millions took to the street in protest of widespread police brutality and racial injustice. When streets function well on the level of everyday experience, they provide opportunities for people to connect in a way that no other public space can.

Louisville metro and our place in it: The words are watching.

(H/T to Gabe Bullard of WFPL for the article link)

Has anyone else noticed that when local independent sorts are left to their own devices the metro area tends to get great national coverage and makes "best of" lists but when the regional power structure intervenes we always seem to get targeted with suspicious glances and generally confused disbelief?

Like the Ohio River, a Bridge Project Divides a Community, by Bobby Allyn (New York Times)

Hank V. Savitch, a professor of urban and public affairs at the University of Louisville, said that while some cities were shifting away from accommodating cars, Louisville’s project signaled a declaration of faith in suburban-style growth.

“They’re still fighting the last urban war, which was highway development — but that’s not the nature of the future of the city,” Professor Savitch said. “It will dissipate energy in the central city, where they should be concentrating investment, and instead draw capital to the outer metropolitan area.”

For New Albany, a complete streets and "streets as places" initiative is as much necessary defense mechanism as it is forward movement at this point but, the more we shed the 1Si/GLI/everybody-and-everything-in-service-to-exurban-expansion model, the more success we'll have in being the river hugging city we were designed to be. It's perhaps uncomfortable to think we've regressed to the point that something as fundamental as reclaiming our public streets for multiple, human uses - for the people who live and work here - needs to framed within the same pioneering ethos that built this place, but it's where we are 200 years into our history. In many ways, we're a start-up again and, like Louisville, our locally elected New Albany leaders would do well to heed the work of the independents already rebuilding and declaring us forward rather than outward bound.

In the early eighteen hundreds, pretty much everybody else hereabouts goose stepped in succession on the eastern side of the falls except for us and we became a gateway to something else entirely. It sounds more maudlin than I'd like, but wouldn't it be great if that were true again?

We have the basic infrastructure in place. We have the brains and the other resources. As Roger alluded recently, all we really have to do is decide.