I'm in Love with My Car.

A Twitter user encapsulates: "We need to take radical steps to build more resilient, equitable communities that reverse our climate- destroying, auto-centric land use."

Appointed and elected officials in New Albany insist that their half-measures of the past few years have magically calmed the city's streets.

I simply isn't true, period. Automobile supremacy continues to be the only writ they know, because pay-to-play doesn't work with walkers and cyclists.

If any of them ever make this claim of success to you, look them square in the eye and say, "You lie just like Trump."

Because that's exactly what they're doing -- and worse, as with Trump, they know it.

Slowing the Cars in Austin, by Gabe Colombo (Strong Towns)

... Drivers kill or seriously injure more than 70 people a year on Austin’s roads—nationwide, about 18 pedestrians die every day in traffic crashes—and the design of our roads plays a critical role in what is, by all accounts, a public health crisis. East Yager Lane, where Billy was killed, is about 30 feet wide, and the speed limit is 45 miles per hour. There are no sidewalks.

Traffic fatalities are also deeply inequitable. Black people are nearly twice as likely to be killed by cars while walking than white people, and the fatality rate for Native Americans is nearly five times higher. Lower-income metro areas also have a higher rate of pedestrian crash injuries and fatalities.

The reasons are many: Non-white and low-income Americans are less likely to have access to a private vehicle (which is more expensive to purchase, feed, and maintain) and more often have no choice but to walk for their daily needs. At the same time, streets in neighborhoods of color and low-income neighborhoods are more car-oriented—with more and wider lanes, fewer crosswalks, fewer trees and poorly maintained or nonexistent sidewalks—owing to a legacy of underinvestment. Plus, urban transit systems have historically excluded communities of color and low-income neighborhoods.

In light of this stark reality, Austin’s recent decision to reduce speed limits across the city could not have come at a more appropriate time ... while a reduction of five mph might not seem like much to a driver, it has a significant impact on pedestrian safety. A car is roughly seven times as likely to severely injure a pedestrian when traveling at 35 mph than when traveling at 25. Boston’s recent widespread reduction in speed limits from 30 to 25 mph resulted in a nearly 30-percent reduction in the likelihood that drivers exceeded 35 mph on the city’s streets ...

Charles Marohn went to Paris and learned a lot of simple things that elude us in America.

"I’m not suggesting it would be easy or straightforward for North American cities to become Paris, but as my friend John Anderson has said many times, we don’t need to be Paris, we just need to be a slightly less crappy version of America."

I've trimmed this down a bit, hoping Marohn doesn't mind that I've left his five central observations intact.

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The Streets of Paris, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

1. Street Trees
Especially here in my hometown, I’m constantly hearing how we can’t have street trees, largely for maintenance reasons. The leaves drop and mess up the drainage. The roots damage the pipes. They are in the way for people in wheelchairs. Car drivers will hit them. And my favorite: If we ever need to widen the street, they are in the way.

And, of course, there is the persistent criticism of street trees: They won’t grow. My response to all of these criticisms has been to point to amazing places full of street trees and say, “If they can do it, why can’t we?” Paris is full of street trees, and it has been doing it successfully for a lot longer than any modern North American city has existed.

2. Ubiquitous Bollards
In the United States, our civil engineers often insist on a clear zone on each side of the street. You can ‘t place anything in the clear zone because, by the theory of Forgiving Design, if an automobile is driven off the driving surface, the sudden stop from hitting a fixed object will harm the driver and any passengers of the vehicle. This thinking is rightfully applied to highways and areas where we want traffic to move fast without the potential for conflict. When we apply Forgiving Design to local streets, though, we get absurdities like breakaway light poles along sidewalks. There isn’t a clearer statement of the North American engineer’s values than that.

I actually encountered an engineer once that didn’t allow a sandwich board sign because of the hazard it presented to automobiles should they strike it.

Needless to say, Paris has gone far in the opposite direction. Seemingly everywhere a vehicle could operate at speeds that would injure people, they have erected obstacles to keep the errant car from striking a human. Absorbing the kinetic energy of a collision is the responsibility of the car and driver, not the people walking along the street. This is cheap, easy, and really effective.

3. Narrow Streets
In the United States, we use transportation funding as a mechanism to address public safety concerns. Our fire departments often operate on the theory that if you can respond to an emergency quickly, the public is safer. European countries have a much different approach, one that emphasizes prevention over response time. Here in the United States, we require wide lanes, wide shoulders and wide clear zones along our streets so that emergency response vehicles travel unhindered to any emergency. The concept of a clear zone is ridiculous in Paris.

I’ll note that you are far less likely to die in a fire in a European city than an American one. Ditto a traffic collision. Two of our classic Strong Towns memes apply here.

4. Slip Lanes
When a design prioritizes building wealth in a place instead of moving traffic, the basic geometry of the public space shifts. In terms of wealth creation, I really like how this street is designed. There is human space on the edge; wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side and meet a pair doing likewise coming from the opposite direction. They are protected by bollards along the entire stretch. Then there is a one-way slip lane for drivers seeking a place to park a vehicle — these lanes are constrained to ensure slow speeds. Then there is a parking lane, although with a decent amount of that space given over to scooters and bikes. Then a boulevard to provide some vertical framing for the street in the form of street trees and nice lighting. The center has two driving lanes with opposing flow, and then it all repeats along the other side.

For cities that want to make their stroads into wealth-creating streets, this is a great cross section to utilize.

5. Shared Space Intersections

Finally, I’m a huge fan of shared space intersections—intersections that lack traffic markings, including stop signs or traffic signals—and I ran into a great one in Versailles. With tired kids and wife, I didn’t get to linger as long as I would have liked to, but in the short time I was there, I did see the humane mingling of humans and vehicles induced by slow speeds and the more chaotic design.

The idea of a chaotic design is anathema to everything North American engineering practice stands for, yet when drivers are less sure of their own path—let alone the path of others—they do remarkable things like slow down, look people in the eye, and yield. It’s a beautiful thing to watch; it’s just too bad there are so few examples here in the United States.

In Brainerd MN as in New Albany IN: "I find myself having to accept another senseless death, another feeble response, and the promise that nothing is going to change anytime soon."

Marohn's description (link below) of Wise Road in his hometown of Brainerd can be easily visualized in the context of Spring Street in New Albany.

Over a space of car-centric decades, Spring Street was engineered to be a highway zipping traffic through populated areas. The idea was to move cars from one side of the city to the interstate ramp on the other side, as quickly as possible.

Then it became evident that the goal of revitalizing neighborhoods was plainly incompatible with the continued use of this street as a highway. It took more than a decade to convince community pillars of this obvious fact, but finally a handful grudgingly did their homework and concluded something needed to be done -- less about the design, more about silencing dissidents.

We know what happened next. Mayor Jeff Gahan took control of street grid reform not as a means of doing what was needed to slow drivers, but to loudly and garishly pretend he'd done so.

Traffic calming became another grandiose paving project, with the usual cash-laden fruit baskets passed around. Victory was declared, and yet of all the ways Spring Street might have been altered by purposeful design, only the barest minimums were deployed. Accordingly, we were urged to venerate politicians who'd "solved" 20% of the problem.

Now the same pay-to-play engineering firm that gleefully sabotaged Jeff Speck's masterly street grid reform plan at Gahan's behest is conducting yet another round of speed studies.

Does anyone really think HWC Engineering will conclude that the company's Speck retrofit was fundamentally mistaken?

We don't need a mayor who responds to every emerging situation by commissioning another taxpayer-funded study from the same old suspects, who promptly deposit tithes in the re-election fund before producing the pre-determined result.

Rather, we need a mayor who leads. As it stands, we have a vacuous cult of personality.

#FireGahan2019 

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Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn lives just a few miles from one of the deadliest roads in Central Minnesota.

But no one in his town seems to be particularly worried about it. And we bet you have a road just like it in your town.

How have our communities become so apathetic about the deaths of their citizens? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Today, Chuck is taking a hard look at Wise Road, and using it as an object lesson for breaking through the inertia around traffic deaths. 

It won't be easy. There aren't many options—according to Chuck, there's really only two. But it's the hard work we need to do if we want our towns to be strong.

How will you help #slowthecars?

-Kea and the rest of the Strong Towns Team.

Not in Nawbany, but in Idaho: "Main Street is no longer only a place for cars — it is a place increasingly linked to public spaces built by and for locals."

As it pertains to taming the inadequacies of a high-speed, pass-through street grid, Mayor Jeff Gahan and his merry band of minions have spent the past few years seeking to disprove the time-tested axiom that one must break eggs to make an omelette.

In effect, they've substituted powdered eggs, and as a result, it's an omelette, all right -- just not a very good one.

We've spent millions of dollars for an illusion of reform that in plain fact has resulted in a doubling-down of car-centrism. One-way highways have been transformed ... into two-way highways. The problems remain, and the opportunities continue to be squandered.

But one thing cannot be denied: Gahan's campaign finance coffers have been enriched by all the folks and their companies who have benefited from these contracts.

Are you feeling any safer? I'm not. Meanwhile there's a quaint little local oligarchy, carved out at the expense of each and every one of us. Look past the smoke, mirrors, deception and bright shiny objects, and see the corruption hiding in plain sight.

It's not a pretty picture, is it?

TAKING BACK MAIN STREET IN HAILEY, IDAHO, by Katherine Peinhardt (Project for Public Spaces)

Can a city re-design its Main Street to the human scale? The town of Hailey, Idaho set out to answer this question in 2015, starting with Highway 75, a primary thoroughfare for multiple towns in the Wood River Valley. The highway, which moves large volumes of high-speed vehicles every day, also serves as Hailey’s Main Street, though the wide street was no place for locals to linger and it lacked a true sense of place. PPS and partners at New Mobility West, an initiative of Community Builders, along with transportation organizations like Mountain Rides kicked off the placemaking process by joining Hailey residents in taking a closer look at Main Street and reimagining it as a place for people. The process was made possible through the vision and funding of the LOR Foundation, which works on the ground with rural stakeholders to meet local challenges and create a shared vision of success.

Yes, the fight to remake streets for the use of all people, and not only their cars, is a social justice issue.

The AARP understands it, too.

Crossing the street shouldn’t have to mean crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. While unsafe streets disproportionately affect older people, safe streets are for everyone. It is critically important to adopt policies that ensure our streets are designed for all who use them — pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and public transportation users of all ages. All of us need safe and efficient streets. That won’t happen without change.

It's undoubtedly important to resist harmful agendas, whether propagated by faraway partisan bureaucrats engorged with payola bucks, or local officials just down the street.

Arguably, the local officials are more accessible when it comes to compensatory re-training. It isn't always the case, but it can be a place to start.

Muting the excesses of our car-centric street grid and making it more responsive to the needs of humans isn't about neighborhood safety alone, or the health benefits of alternative modes of transport, or even civic aesthetics. 

All these matter, but as this article makes very clear, car-centric street design perpetuates inequality. That makes it a social justice issue, one that budding community leaders need to be better informed about.

The article has been linked here before, but let's do it again. A refresher course in truthfulness is never a bad thing. There was a time when I didn't understand these concepts, either. Happily, there's ample guidance for those wishing to learn more about the importance of street grid reform.

New Albany inched forward with last year's two-way reversion. We can do far better.

The Hidden Inequality Of America’s Street Design, by Diana Budds (Fast Company)

New data shows that pedestrians in the U.S. are more likely to die if they’re poor, a person of color, uninsured, or old.

Urban design has a long history of perpetuating racial and economic inequality, and the burden of bad streets is still being disproportionately borne by underserved populations. According to a new report, pedestrians in the United States have a higher risk of being killed by cars if they’re people of color, aged 65 or older, uninsured, or from a low-income household.

The report, called “Dangerous by Design 2016,” is authored by the National Complete Streets Coalition, a working group within the nonprofit Smart Growth America, which supports socially equitable, environmentally responsible, and economically healthy urban design strategies. The report focuses on designing streets for multi-modal transportation, and ranks every state and more than 100 major metropolitan areas by what it calls the Pedestrian Danger Index, or PDI, which assesses the likelihood of a car hitting a pedestrian by comparing the rate of pedestrian deaths in an area to the rate of people who walk to work. (SGA calls this the best available measure of how many people are likely to be out walking every day.)

“The leading goal is equity in implementation for all avenues of transportation,” says Emiko Atherton, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition. “It really is about not only treating everyone equitably, but also encouraging departments of transportation to focus on the most underserved.”

Put simply: Bad street design is disproportionately impacting historically marginalized groups in America ...

Green street design: New Albany can't have nice things because our "leaders" don't, and our "pillars" aren't.

Because for the clique to even intelligently discuss it, they'd first be compelled to imagine it. They can't, and it's not even close.

And so we settle for the best that C-minus students can offer. It isn't much.

‘A VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF GREEN’: HOW STREET DESIGN CAN BE CALMED BY NATURE, by David Goldberg (Sightline)

Making Cascadia’s streets more like gardens ensures complete streets are green streets.

A revolution is brewing in the streets of Cascadia’s major cities. Not since the mid-20th century has this region seen such a wholesale remaking of city rights of way.

Rapid growth is driving experimentation in ways to move more and more people through the same corridors, whether by foot, bicycle, transit, rideshare or private vehicle, all while accommodating a rising tsunami of deliveries. And as as ever more buildings fill urban space, those public rights of way become critically important refuges for greenery.

Until recently, traffic engineers designed streets solely to move cars. For them, street trees were to be eliminated as roadside hazards and landscaped zones were a hindrance to “vehicle throughput.” Today, though, planners increasingly see space for trees and plants as vital to safety, clean waterways, and resiliency and adaptation to climate change.

Some cities are beginning to fuse four strains of fresh thinking that have emerged over the last decade or so:

Complete Streets
Vision Zero
Green Stormwater Infrastructure
Urban Forestry

“Trees and other plants clean the air, add economic value to real estate and commercial sales and they make places where people want to be,” said John Massengale, co-author with Victor Dover of Street Design: the Secret to Great Cities and Towns (Wiley 2013). “Perhaps most importantly, they slow cars down, which is critical to achieving Vision Zero.”

“There is a virtuous cycle of green,” said Brice Maryman, senior landscape architect at MIG|SvR in Seattle. “Giving street space over to plants and trees helps slow vehicles, and once you have slower vehicles you can use even more space for natural functions.”

Also, some of the same techniques that can be used to calm traffic and create safe zones for people on foot or bicycle offer opportunities to introduce more soothing vegetation and ecological functions—ensuring that complete streets are green streets ...

New Albany doesn't have the balls for this traffic calming solution.

"Traffic calming measures aren’t just concrete and strategic design: they’re a clear signal that drivers don’t own the roads we live on, and that our streets are where residents live, not just where we drive our cars."
-- Kea Wilson

Read all about it. What to do when driver bots hate traffic calming?

Wilson proposes involving the neighborhood in the decision-making process; beautifying; educating; building incrementally; and celebrating.

When your city hates your traffic calming measures, by Kea Wilson (Strong Towns)

 ... This is the uncomfortable reality of the movement to #slowthecars in our human-scaled neighborhoods; all too often, drivers really, really hate being slowed down. And a lot of them will stay angry, no matter how beautifully you argue that narrowing your road makes your neighborhood immediately safer for all modes of transport — and let’s be clear, it does. There’s no magic wand that will force all your neighbors to be happy about changes to the streets they drive down every day — much less stop them from flooding the alderwoman with calls to get the “hazards” removed, especially when the nightly news is all but telling them to do it.

Does that mean we shouldn’t #slowthecars? Nope. The safety and financial productivity of our cities is far too important.

But it does mean that we can and should get a little better at implementing traffic calming measures each time we attempt them. That’s the essence of the Strong Towns approach.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from my neighborhood’s Great Concrete Ball saga of 2018 that might help in your town too ...

South Bend: "But why slow down traffic at all? A major reason is economic growth. Smart Streets isn’t just a traffic project — it’s economic development."

A mayor who makes public speeches? How is it possible?

Pete Buttigieg lays it all out. The thinking is clear, and the delivery conversational. I try to imagine a New Albany mayor -- any of them -- communicating like Pete Buttigieg. Surveying the aspirants, I still don't see one. Is it time for the "Draft Ed Clere" movement yet?

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Mayor: Smart Streets will mean a more vibrant downtown South Bend, by Pete Buttigieg (South Bend Tribune)

Walk around downtown South Bend today, and you’ll see tremendous investment and growth.

From the recently renovated LaSalle Apartments, located on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, to the Courtyard Marriott under construction by the former College Football Hall of Fame, from the conversion of the JMS Building to the massive renovation of the former Chase Tower, there are signs everywhere of the fastest downtown growth in generations.

What you might not realize is that each of these projects happened with the help of Smart Streets.

Today we celebrate the completion of the repaving, streetscaping and traffic redesign known as Smart Streets, as planned and under budget. The city and our partners took roughly one year to complete work that would normally take three or more.

Doing it this way was disruptive, but allowed us to get it over with quickly — like tearing off a Band-Aid. I appreciate the patience of the commuting public as daily routines were impacted, as well as the efforts of the planners, engineers, and workers who made it happen.

We moved forward on this project after dozens of public meetings and several votes of the Common Council and Redevelopment Commission, with strong support from the downtown business community. Still, I recognize that not everyone is a fan of the changes.

In particular, some residents have expressed frustration with the idea of traffic calming, a major feature of the project. Why would the city ever deliberately act to make traffic go slower? Isn’t the point of a road to get cars where they are going as quickly as possible?

First, remember that the changes to commuting times are minor.

A recent side-by-side comparison by The Tribune showed just a three-minute change in the overall drive time from Angela Boulevard in the north to the Chippewa roundabout on the south side — almost the entire length of the city. You can still get across the core of downtown in less than five minutes, most of the time.

But why slow down traffic at all? A major reason is economic growth. Smart Streets isn’t just a traffic project — it’s economic development. And by that measure, it is already a tremendous success.

We’ve counted a total of over $90 million in private investment from businesses who say Smart Streets was a factor in their decision — a threefold return on our public investment.

If you’re glad that the Chase Tower is being renovated rather than torn down, or that Main Street Row is getting a new façade at private expense, thank Smart Streets.

A vibrant city has streetscapes that work not just for cars but also for pedestrians, bicyclists and shops. The old traffic pattern forced pedestrians on Main Street to walk alongside a four-lane highway blasting traffic out of the area as quickly as possible — not exactly an inviting place to walk, socialize or shop.

Today, our new downtown is a destination rather than a throughway. It’s a tremendous improvement, for which a few minutes’ slowdown is the price we had to pay.

The other major consideration is safety. Not everyone loves roundabouts like the ones we have installed, but they can lead to dramatic safety improvements.

Studies have found that roundabouts can reduce injury crashes by up to 80 percent. The slower speeds in the downtown area are also a safety enhancement: when speeds go from 35 miles per hour to 25, it cuts the risk of fatalities by more than half.

No street design can prevent all serious accidents. But we know that Smart Streets improvements can save lives in the years to come. This is one reason the U.S. Secretary of Transportation recognized South Bend with the Mayor’s Challenge Award at a road safety summit last year in Washington.

Of course, safety depends on users as well as engineering. We’re counting on residents to pay attention to signs and markings, and to familiarize themselves with safe use of crossings, bike lanes, roundabouts and other features.

Green crosswalks are for bike traffic. Red areas are forbidden to cars. Divided sidewalks indicate two-way traffic. Taking advantage of Smart Streets improvements means spreading street smarts about how to use them.

In the months and years to come, we will continue to tweak markings, signal timings and design to ensure the best environment for drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists and businesses.

But the bulk of the work is behind us. Now is the time to become familiar with the improvements and changes, and take advantage of the increasingly vibrant downtown that South Bend deserves.

Pete Buttigieg is mayor of South Bend.

Grid Control, Vol. 18: Finally a few BoW street grid project answers, almost all of them citing "contractor error."

I accompanied the Bookseller to yesterday's meeting of the Board of Public Works and Safety, and asked some of the questions we've all been asking about the downtown street grid (two-way) project.

Chris Morris of the News and Tribune was there, watching as I asked his questions. He'd have noticed that I received answers, most of which were coherent, and some of which weren't so much.

But Morris chose not to mention a single iota of it in his dispatch for the newspaper, and to be succinct, this is why so few of us any longer trust the newspaper's commitment to truth-telling in New Albany. You can read the triumph of the stenographer's art here: Questions? Me?

Before I run down the list, a larger question:

If all these snafus owe to "contractor error," who among Team Gahan has been watching the contractors? 

Let's begin with the case of the British traffic arrows.

Grid Control, Vol. 17: Judging by the misdirection of this "CROSS TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP" sign, we now reside in the British Empire.

City engineer Larry Summers said he discovered this mistake first, even before NAC brought it to your attention, and that it owes to ... yes, "contractor error." All mistaken signs will be replaced, he added.

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Next, the question of cross hatching repairs. After NAC pressed the issue, HWC Engineering acknowledged this error (on Facebook, no less), and has since said it will pay to redraw the lines. 

Grid Control, Vol. 5: Egg on HWC Engineering's well-compensated face as it botches Spring Street's westbound bike buffer cross hatching.

NAC's question: Seeing as nothing's been done for a month, will this fix take place before or after Spring Street is open for two-way traffic?

Summers said he expects it to occur before the debut of two-way traffic, and that doing so will not require the north lane of Spring Street to be closed.

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Next, parking space size disparity.

Grid Control, Vol. 2: Southsiders get six more parking inches, but you gotta love those 10-foot traffic lanes on Spring.

We'll be returning to this one.

In answering my question, Summers told the board that while Spring Street's width isn't uniform, citing the street's quirks and age, he could find only "four or five" parking spaces out of sync in terms of measurement, on the whole of the north side of Spring between Vincennes and 4th, where the bike lanes dissolve into nothingness to make room for Padgett's fleet of community value reducers.

He also mentioned the contractor perhaps erring in places while measuring from the middle of the street, which gave me pause, because I personally witnessed measurements on Elm being made from the curb on the south side of the street -- not from the middle.

Stay tuned for NAC's parking space measurement survey, coming soon or whenever I get the time to do someone else's job (again). Maybe Morris would like to help me with the calculations.

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Then, the biggest question.

What about the death trap meat grinder at Spring & 10th?

Grid Control, Vol. 1: You people drive so freaking horribly that someone's going to die at Spring and 10th.

According to Summers, this bizarre made-for-mayhem dog leg is yet again the result of "contractor error," with the contractor having been told to make repairs.

The nature of the fix was not disclosed, but I asked Summers whether he thinks this intersection can be made safe and manageable without controlling it by installing stop signs or stop lights.

Yes, he said. It can be.

As a side note, and in theory, state guidelines proclaim that there should not be crosswalks drawn across a street like Spring in the absence of stop signs or stop lights to control the crosswalk, hence the necessity of "high visibility" (and added expense) crosswalk lighting.

Concurrently, City Hall plainly wishes to pretend it is lowering traffic speeds on streets like Spring, while actually doing little to facilitate this desired outcome apart from the two-way direction change itself.

Merely observe that once the two-way directional change has been made, there'll still be nothing to calm traffic from 15th Street all the way to 7th Street ... with the dog leg right in the middle of this race course at 10th Street ... where there'll be some sort of motion-activated warning light that all by itself will convince drivers to slow down for sitting duck pedestrians.

I submit that nothing better illustrates the cowardly legacy of Jeff Gahan's pocket-stuffing paving plan, ineptly masquerading as revolutionary street grid modernization, with loads and loads of "radical" change described in badly written press releases, though of course all of it existing apart from the fact that as little as humanly possible actually is being changed.

The dogmatically auto-centric suburban satrap Gahan and his minions first stripped the grid plan of its genuinely transformative bicycling infrastructure, and subsequently has rigged the two-way plan to ensure the fundamental "pass-through-NA-at-unsafe-high speeds" dynamic remains as it is, prior to all those beaks being wetted on paving slush.  

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Two other asides from yesterday's BoW meeting:

HWC Engineering's Paul Lincks says he has spoken again and again with churches and businesses throughout downtown in an effort to resolve the "bus stops now taking up entire city blocks" problem, especially as it pertains to churches.

Grid Control, Vol. 3: TARC's taking your curbside church parking, says City Hall.

And, there is a good news/bad news item to report. Many of the pedestrian crossings within the boundaries of the grid modernization project area now are timer-based, meaning one needn't push the "beg button" to cross.

I privately asked Lincks whether these timed intersections, as well as the "high visibility" crosswalks being installed within the grid project work area, would also provide connectivity by spanning Main Street to the south (for instance, to Underground Station and the YMCA) and State Street west, toward The Exchange and La Tiendita, to name just two walking destinations.

Lincks answered that no, such critically important, pedestrian-friendly reforms were never a part of the project from HWC's design perspective.

In short, instead of pushing "beg buttons," we'll be begging city officials for relief, as was required at Main & W. 1st after these same city officials assured us it was impossible.

Naturally, the city might be pro-active by telling us what it plans to do to extend the walkable street grid past the boundaries of the current project area, though this would require a commitment to the timely dissemination of information.

The newspaper (and, for that matter, DNA) could help in all this, but unfortunately, fluff takes precedence.

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Previously:

Grid Control, Vol. 17: Judging by the misdirection of this "CROSS TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP" sign, we now reside in the British Empire.

Grid Control, Vol. 16: What about HWC's cross hatching correction? Will this be finished before or after Team Gahan declares victory?

Grid Control, Vol. 15: Dooring enhancement perfectly epitomizes Deaf Gahan's "biking last" approach to grid modernization.

Grid Control, Vol. 14: Yes, you can still park on the south side of Spring Street during the stalled two-way grid project.

Grid Control, Vol. 13: "Dear Deaf Gahan and minions: FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, STOP TRYING TO BE COOL AND DESIGNER-ISH. YOU'RE NOT, AND IT'S EMBARRASSING ALL OF US."

Grid Control, Vol. 12: Meet the artistic crosswalk design equivalent of dogs playing poker.

Grid Control, Vol. 11: HWC Engineering meets with St. Marks, city officials nowhere to be found.

Grid Control, Vol. 10: City officials predictably AWOL as HWC Engineering falls on its sword over striping errors.

Grid Control, Vol. 9: "This was supposed to be discussed with us," but Dear Leader doesn't ever discuss, does he?

Grid Control, Vol. 8: City Hall characteristically mum as HWC Engineering at least tries to answer the cross-hatching question.

Grid Control, Vol. 7: What will the Board of Works do to rectify HWC's striping errors on the north side of Spring Street, apart from microwaving another round of sausage biscuits?

Grid Control, Vol. 6: Jeff Speck tweets about NA's grid changes, and those missed bicycling opportunities.

Grid Control, Vol. 5: Egg on HWC Engineering's well-compensated face as it botches Spring Street's westbound bike buffer cross hatching.

Grid Control, Vol. 4: But this actually isn't a bus lane, is it?

Grid Control, Vol. 3: TARC's taking your curbside church parking, says City Hall.

Grid Control, Vol. 2: Southsiders get six more parking inches, but you gotta love those 10-foot traffic lanes on Spring.

Grid Control, Vol. 1: You people drive so freaking horribly that someone's going to die at Spring and 10th.

City Hall institutes a 24-7 counseling center to help drivers outraged by forthcoming two-way street changes.

Push "1" for the campaign donation line. 

Meanwhile, we learn from Dat Jeffersonville Newspaper that when it comes to vehicular traffic, though for very little else, Deaf Gahan wants you to be informed.

"Our plan is to keep the public informed with details as we move through the construction period."

Well, there's a first time for everything -- and they do tend to coddle drivers, don't they? As for me, I'll believe it when I see it. For the official statement from downtown curmudgeons, go here:

"Lads of the Village" cheerily assist WDRB in previewing two-streets from the vantage point of Thrasher's Art Store.

Whatever happened to Irv, anyway? It may be time to declare a self-immolation watch.

GOING BOTH WAYS: Initial work on New Albany two-way street conversion begins, by Elizabeth Beilman (Popeye's Has Us Excited)

Conversion to finish early fall

... Slower traffic means increased pedestrian safety, which will in turn encourage more people to walk and bike downtown.

Many downtown New Albany businesses say that's a huge plus.

Ryan Westphal, manager of the restaurant Dragon King's Daughter, is in the heart of the conversion at their location on Elm and Bank streets.

"If [city officials] feel that two-way streets will benefit commerce, the economy and general trends, we're 100 percent down," Westphal said.

Any sacrifices along the way — construction, for example — are worth the new customers that could pass in front of the restaurant's doors, he said.

"The more foot traffic, the better," he said.

Traffic calming and street safety: "The change needs to come from the highest levels of leadership all the way down the chain," though not in #OurNA.

It's been almost a year, and neither Jeff Gahan nor any of the posturing luminaries among his chortling pack of frat boy subalterns has bothered to publicly acknowledge the senseless death of a woman who was just trying to cross the street.

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

Chloe Allen's passing must not be in vain. In years to come, principled citizens of this city – the ones for whom conscience isn’t a high school vocabulary term to be discarded once they’re elected to office – must forcibly insist that her memory be honored, nay, overtly exploited for the sake of a worthwhile agenda.

Specifically, an agenda of public safety in this city. Among other aspects, this public safety agenda reorders auto-centrism by reimagining our streets as community spaces, not mere transit routes. This agenda urges a genuine commitment to public safety by design, for all users, not drivers only. This public safety agenda empowers from the grassroots up, not the TIF bond down.

Apart from its crass inability to display genuine human decency -- they don't even pretend well -- Team Gahan is the very last organism to enlist in any project involving reimagination.

That's because there's no imagination in those craniums to begin with.

So, drivers: You're terribly inconvenienced by traffic calming, two-way streets and narrowed traffic lanes?

Here's an idea: Piss off.

Gahan's merry band of vandals won't say it, so other among us must do so, instead. When Dear Leader is finished with the cleansing of public housing dwellers, how about a Declaration of Pedestrian Rights?

Or was he planning on demolishing pedestrians, too?

Traffic Engineers' Epic Fail, by Jon Larsen (Strong Towns)

... What’s the solution? There are numerous other “traffic calming” treatments that could be added to this street, none of which really cost that much, especially when compared to the precious young lives that are at stake. If we can afford to add new streets and highways, we can afford to fix our existing streets first. You can start with a temporary implementation in your city to spark people's imagination.

That said, the best, most lasting solution is to narrow the street until it’s uncomfortable to drive fast. There have been some previous Strong Towns posts on the virtues of narrow streets. The benefits go well beyond safety, as articulated in “Narrow Streets do More with Less,” and “Some Thoughts on Narrow Streets.”

I’m calling out my entire profession. This is a systemic issue, a tragic case of groupthink gone wrong. The change needs to come from the highest levels of leadership all the way down the chain. Just as important, change needs to come from policy makers (i.e. elected officials) who make it crystal clear that safety is more important than speed. The change needs to come from an educated public that understands this tradeoff and is OK with it. Until that happens, the tragedies will continue.

Why we fight: In 2014, Jeff Speck told us how street design impacts our city.

Following is Jeff Speck's preface to his New Albany Downtown Street Network Proposal. It has been featured here previously, but it never hurts to have a refresher.

Or to actually read it.

As you are doing so, bear in mind the mind-numbing pervasiveness of City Hall's failure to date.

In which we catch Jeff Gahan in a flagrant, bald-faced lie about city streets, bridge tolls, and his city's non-readiness (Feb 2016).

"Gahan said he doesn't expect the project to be complete until after the bridges start tolling."

Speck: "It will be considerably easier to accomplish prior to the 2016 tolling changes."

The ineptitude starts at the top, with Daddy Parkbucks. What we have here is a failure to prioritize -- and this comes as no surprise, does it?

---

Two Futures

Literally and figuratively, New Albany is at a crossroads. Significant changes, likely positive and negative, are underway. On the positive side, demographic shifts are powering a national resurgence of downtowns nationwide, and smaller historic centers like New Albany’s are demonstrating a newfound capacity to attract new residents and businesses. On the negative side, a new Indiana DOT pricing regime for Ohio River crossings, in which the Sherman Minton Bridge remains the region’s only un-tolled interstate path across the river, threatens to blight the downtown with a dramatic upsurge in what is already a burdensome amount of pass-through traffic.

Historically, traffic has been good for American downtowns. Indeed, many downtowns came into being because of it. However, a century of automobility has taught us that the form that traffic takes—the way it is shaped by local streets and roads—is the principal determinant of the fortune of the cities through which it passes. To illustrate with two extreme examples: plowing an elevated interstate through a city center, with no off ramps, can be expected to have a catastrophic impact on local property value, while welcoming vehicles along a tree-lined main street has been the very foundation of many a community’s success.

These two examples bookend a continuum of choices that cities can make about how their streets are designed and organized. While a relatively convenient flow of traffic is essential to a community’s vitality, allowing one or many downtown streets to hold traffic of inordinately high volume or speed is certain to undermine that vitality. For this reason, the more effectively a city is able to distribute its traffic through a robust network of thoroughfares, and the more each of these thoroughfares resembles a main street rather than a highway, the more auspicious that city’s future is likely to be.

Along that continuum from main street to highway, a key threshold is the transition from two-way to one-way flow. Because one-way streets provide passing lanes and eliminate opposing traffic, they encourage higher-speed driving and create a more highway-like environment for properties along them. They also undermine the robustness of the street network, by providing drivers fewer choices regarding their paths of travel. It is principally for these reasons that the introduction of one-way street networks to many urban centers in the mid-20th century has been associated with the precipitous decline of those centers, and explains why many American downtowns have been reverted back to two-way traffic, with celebrated results.

A second important threshold is the transition between two-lane and four-lane travel, for the similar reason that it introduces passing lanes, encouraging driver behavior that is not compatible with downtown pedestrian activity. Especially where traffic volumes do not demand the presence of additional lanes, their presence—and the additional road width that they create—push urban thoroughfares well down the continuum from main street to highway, with unsurprising results.

For this reason, it is essential that downtown street networks be designed based upon the amount of traffic that they experience rather than in anticipation of larger volumes. This is particularly the case when a community is threatened by an onslaught of new traffic as is feared from the new INDOT tolling regime. A street system that is designed around higher-volume and higher-speed traffic can be expected to quickly receive this traffic—especially trucks, whose drivers are keenly sensitive to the time and cost of travel.

In contrast, a street system that is designed to accept reasonable volumes at reasonable speeds is likely a city’s only defense against the noxious impacts of pass-through traffic.

This premise is not always an easy one to accept; nobody likes congestion or wants more of it. Therefore, it is important to lay out New Albany’s choices honestly. Decades of experience in other communities suggests that the City must choose between two futures: one with somewhat more peak-hour congestion at reasonable speeds, and one with considerably more car and truck traffic at high speeds. If the principal purpose of the City’s downtown street network is the vitality of New Albany, then the choice is clear.

Social Impacts of Street Design

This discussion takes place in a larger context, in which the reshaping of the American built environment around the automobile has been associated with a marked decline in the health of our population, especially children. As will be discussed ahead, the elimination of the “useful walk” from the lives of our youth has helped to create the first generation of children who are expected to live shorter lives than their parents. Almost nowhere is this more worrisome than in the Louisville region, which was recently ranked 49th out of the US’s 50th largest US metros in the ACSM (American College of Sports Medicine) American Fitness Index.

In New Albany, this status is only being further undermined by a County-wide school system that is closing walkable neighborhood schools in pursuit of a suburban model of fewer, larger facilities, mostly unreachable on foot. This effort is characterized by the recent shuttering of Silver Street Elementary, an older school that was walkable, diverse, and highly regarded; President Bush had visited there and called it a shining example of his no-child-left-behind agenda.

Against this backdrop, New Albany has the opportunity to encourage more healthy lifestyles by embracing national trends towards downtown living, walkability, and cycling. In pursuing those objectives, nothing is more significant that the design of downtown streets. When sized and oriented to welcome traffic of the proper volume and speed, thoroughfares encourage “active transportation” on foot and bicycle, while naturally providing more room for it. Excess driving lanes become available for other use, such as on-street parking and cycle lanes—the former essential to local businesses, and the latter much in demand by would-be downtown residents. Indeed, bike lanes, while a benefit in their own right, are often recommended to serve a different purpose: narrowing oversized driving lanes to a normal width to limit dangerous speeding.

What This Report Is and Isn’t

With an understanding that proper streets are key to New Albany’s future, this Proposal has been commissioned to consider the organization of the downtown street network and the design of all downtown streets. It focuses on the City’s historic core, roughly from W. 10th Street to Vincennes Avenue and from Culbertson Avenue to the River, but also extends eastward to Silver Creek along its principal East-West corridors, as well as northward along State Street to Floyd Memorial Hospital. With a focus on national best practices in network planning and street design, it proposes an almost comprehensive reintroduction of two-way travel, modifications to the current regime of traffic signals, and new curb-to-curb configurations for every street for which improvement is possible.

In the interest of economy, almost every recommendation pertains to striping and signalization rather than reconstruction. The principal study area is bounded by W. 10th Street to the west, Silver Creek to the East, Culbertson Avenue to the north, and the Ohio River to the south. This Proposal is a planning document and not an engineering document. It does not provide technical drawings or cost estimates. Nor does it specify priorities, though it can be said that the modified Ohio River bridge tolling regime, due in 2016, will make eastwest transformations a high priority. Determining a proper schedule for the recommended changes will constitute a larger project determined by the availability of federal, state, and local funds. Finally, this report does not try to address traffic safety comprehensively; such an effort has recently been initiated citywide as an independent effort.

Instead, this Proposal, after reviewing some of the most compelling reasons for making New Albany more walkable, lays out ten criteria that are understood to have the greatest influence on the safety of downtown street networks. As each criteria is discussed, and best practices described, specific recommendations for New Albany that arise from them are enumerated. A final section, the longest, describes redesigns recommended for every street within the study area for which change makes sense. Where a significant reconfiguration is recommended, illustrations are provided as well. In some cases, where more than one good solution exists, multiple alternatives are provided.

In every section, this Proposal attempts to explain fully the reasoning behind its recommendations. However, because each section builds from the ones prior, those attempting to implement this Proposal are advised to read it in its entirety. It is submitted with confidence that downtown New Albany, by welcoming traffic on its own terms, can redirect current developments and challenges to its own long-term advantage.

A Mandate for Action

New Albany has good bones to become a more walkable place: an efficient street network of small blocks, a healthy balance of land uses, and an improving downtown retail district surrounded by neighborhoods of character. The national website walkscore.org awards some close-in areas a rating of nearly 80 (out of 100). But New Albany can cultivate a truly excellent, walkable environment with limited, strategic changes and reasonable investments while still fully accommodating automobiles.

By metropolitan standards, the downtown grid system has almost no congestion, but it is in danger of receiving much more. The planned bridge tolling scheme threatens to undermine the downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods’ potential by injecting significantly more speeding traffic through the city. Prior to the construction of I-265 and the I-64 riverfront expressways, Spring Street was a state highway that carried more than 40,000 cars daily at its eastern segment. It now carries only 23,000 vehicles per day.

The new tolling scheme, scheduled to begin in 2016, threatens to re-convert Spring Street and other east-west thoroughfares into highways again, with a huge influx of car and truck traffic. This traffic can be expected to have a destructive impact on the downtown retail district, as well as its surrounding neighborhoods, unless the street network is modified to encourage less noxious driver behavior than is currently the norm. This report lays out a simple, limited-cost, and comprehensive proposal for this modification.

It will be considerably easier to accomplish prior to the 2016 tolling changes. Central to this proposal is the reversion of the downtown one-way grid back to two-way traffic, and the right-sizing of its component driving lanes (in number and width) to encourage the appropriate amount of traffic at the appropriate speed. These changes create the byproduct of increased opportunities for bicycling and on-street parking downtown, both beneficial to local businesses and residents. But these benefits must be understood as secondary to a primary goal: to allow New Albany to thrive in the face of an extraordinarily burdensome traffic regime.

ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

These periodic time capsules are worth the risk of repetition.

That's because they have a tendency to vibrantly illustrate a basic New Albany truth: As those in positions of authority dig their claws into the upholstery as you attempt to compel them to gaze past the county line, they like to dismiss the topic of the day as something newly brought to their attention, raised only now by wild-eyed, book-reading radicals with hidden agendas.

They invariably play to the peanut gallery as pitiable victims of fresh thinking and new ideas, when the thoughts expressed actually extend well into the past, even allowing for local standards of comprehensive indifference to modernity.

And so it was April, 2009, and my column in the newspaper, which means that these words were not confined to a blog that no one ever reads until it needs rebutting, in which case someone else reads it aloud to them so they they needn't concede using their own eyes. Nowadays, Steve Price is back to playing music, which he does quite capably, and Dan Coffey -- after four years assisting the Gahan administration in spending more discretionary "quality of someone else's life" money than the Overton, Garner and England regimes combined -- has declared his neutrality, at least until the next paymaster comes calling.

I'm not entirely sure where the bloody shirt has gone, although the odds are it isn't in the landfill.

The two words I'd most like to take back are struck through. Other than that, I'm delighted with being so prescient.

Thanks for asking.

Now, go and read a book.

Any book.

---

BAYLOR: Two-way, better way ... April 30, 2009.

What is the desired outcome, and how do we get there?

If the desired outcome is boosting New Albany’s future prospects as an urban entity, a key element is improving the city’s quality of life in residential districts adjacent to downtown, and linking their inhabitants to niche-oriented commercial redevelopment in the historic business district.

A restoration of the city’s two-way traffic grid is rightfully viewed by a diverse cross-section of the community as an achievable centerpiece of future downtown redevelopment strategies, with added benefits for residential and business interests alike.

If the desired outcome is doing as little as possible to avoid offending a steadily shrinking minority of city residents who view the future as a threat to be “nickel and dimed” into leaving us alone, the chosen political alternative is lethargic decay management, a strategy preferred by those of our local council ward heelers adept at “boiling the bitter Coffey.”

Who are they, and what is that? Let’s begin with a digression.

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Out there – in the wider world, beyond the Knobs, and even past the state line – there is broad agreement as to the merits of slower, calmer automotive traffic patterns.

According to the bigger picture, speeding and certain other manifestations of dangerous driving are viewed as street design issues, not law enforcement issues. To design a traffic grid that encourages speeding and reckless driving is to achieve exactly that. Aggressive law enforcement should be a given, and yet approaching the problem from a design perspective offers more lasting and substantive relief, as well as a long list of added attractions for urban areas.

By requiring greater driver attentiveness, two-way streets and related traffic calming measures lower travel speeds, and lower speeds reduce the number of accidents as well as their severity, further lessening repair costs and the number and extent of injuries. Lower speeds also are green, reducing noise and automotive emissions.

Planners of a previous generation responded to the advent of suburban sprawl and the corresponding desertion of the historic city core with one-way, arterial street refittings, manipulating the transport grid as a means of motoring people in and out as quickly as possible, and jarringly dismissing the patterns of urban life prefacing the city’s original layout.

Now, in 2009, as conditions in the real world outside New Albany constantly change, it’s plainly mistaken to persist with an antiquated one-way traffic pattern that defies all efforts to revitalize New Albany into a human-friendly, future-oriented city, creating a more civilized, less threatening streetscape for pedestrians, cyclists, residents and visitors, improving livability in the city’s neighborhoods, and helping to attract fresh New Albanians by offering them a better quality of life.

The rational future of downtown lies in its transformation into an overtly-stated, explicitly-billed antithesis of the plastic, big-box exurb, and what is more perfectly representative of the soulless exurb than its cruelly auto-centric traffic requirements?

Conversely, how better to jump-start the process than allow the city center to function as the city center was originally designed to function?

----

Let’s return now to New Albany’s stunted political culture.

The phrase "waving the bloody shirt" came into common usage following the American Civil War. It describes a familiar trait of political demagoguery, wherein a politician points to the bloodshed suffered by “our side,” as heinously inflicted by the enemy (“them people”). The tactic is a conscious effort to deflect criticism and avoid honest consideration of the topic.

In the lexicon of the New Albany Syndrome, the bloody shirt might be paraphrased as “boiling the bitter Coffey,” wherein a local politician attacks the source (“them people”) of ideas, innovations and hope in a conscious effort to deflect criticism, avoid honest consideration of the topic at hand, and protect “our side” from a difficult, demanding future.

Accordingly, to “boil the bitter Coffey” is to be trapped in a state of perpetual political obstructionism, inexorably bound to the nonsensical principle that “them people” – i.e., those residents who are eager, educated, capable and willing to assist in the process of change – are arrogantly and callously demanding unaffordable and effete luxuries, something that the saintly and penurious “little people” must oppose at all costs, supposedly on financial grounds, but actually on ones vaguely reminiscent of the GOP’s culture wars – except that our Coffey boilers are always Democrats.

We’re about to see a high volume of Coffey being mercilessly boiled, right down to the darkest dregs, because these standard bearers of the city’s embittered and increasingly irrelevant wannabeens seem fully prepared to go to their mattresses in an offensive against the current administration’s efforts to rebuild and re-energize New Albany.

In addition to proposals for comprehensive paving and two-way street conversions, a full range of uniformly exciting and long overdue public and private investments currently are on the table, including the second phase of Scribner Place, ongoing riverfront enhancements, rehabs for existing housing, and positive ideas for West End redevelopment, all aimed at improving the quality of life for residents and businesses within the city’s historic core, and providing a platform for future growth.

The two council districts with the most to gain from progress are the 1st and 3rd, congenitally under-represented on the city council by Dan Coffey and Steve Price, surely the city’s most predictable proponents of deflated defeatism, penny-wise, pound-foolish fiscal deconstructionism, and outright malice toward a modern world that neither seems to comprehend.

Decay and death, or progress and life?

Can we afford not choosing the latter?

---

April 21: ON THE AVENUES: The Green Mouse tells all.

April 14: ON THE AVENUES: Forever NA, the wrong way ... from 2012, through 2014, to 2016 and beyond, forever more.

April 7: ON THE AVENUES: The Six Session Beers of Session Beer Day.

March 31: ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

Know that "traffic calming will occur prior to the tolls," just don't mention in which direction.

Much to my surprise, earlier tonight I came tantalizingly very close to having an actual policy conversation with a City Hall operative.

It seems that City Hall is hiring a Right-of-Way Coordinator.

This position administers the City's Right-of-Way Management System, including authorizing and overseeing all construction or maintenance activities in the City's public streets, right-of-ways, or potential developed right-of-way within new developments, under the provisions of the City's right-of-way requirements and ordinance of Infrastructure Standards.

Naturally, any mention of "right-of-way" immediately brings to mind New Albany's "wrong-of-one-way" streets, and so I asked a logical question -- and it was answered.

Jeeebus ... did glasnost and perestroika break out and no one told me? Here's how it went down.

Roger Baylor
Is the two-way street coordinator position being posted?

City Hall operative
The options are being engineered and costs determined. No coordinator needed.

RB
Is it still projected that nothing will occur until after the start of bridge tolls?

CHO
Traffic calming will occur prior to the tolls.

RB
One-way or two-way traffic calming?

CHO

Shrug.

Close but no cigar. You can't blame a guy for trying to squeeze facts out of City Hall, since the newspaper has no intention of doing it, and I understand how hard it must be to live in constant fear of losing one's job for telling the truth.

So, I'll say just this: Mayor Jeff Gahan is going to botch the two-way street dream. It's going to be an historic choke, composed of equal parts incomprehension, butchery, mockery and farce, and when the mayor finally and officially flushes Speck's plan down the commode, there'll be stinky dripping rotten egg on the faces of those who've continued to insist that he can be trusted.

They'll throw their arms up and lament: "But what could I have done?"

Not much.

Maybe take a stand, lead, agitate, educate, put your ass on the line, push back, have a spine and tell it like it is, but apart from those, no, I can't think of a single thing.

ON THE AVENUES EXTRA: "No, John Rosenbarger, congestion is our friend. Help us achieve it, or get out of the way."

ON THE AVENUES EXTRA: "No, John Rosenbarger, congestion is our friend. Help us achieve it, or get out of the way."

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

As City Hall dithers, Year Zero draws nearer: Bridge tolls, social injustice, NA's street grid ... and the silence of the culpable.


The column originally was published on February 6, 2014. Two years later, it strikes me as one of my better summaries on the topic of New Albany's enslaved street grid. In fairness, I was wrong about one thing: Our economic development director is not capable of understanding what I wrote. As for the rest, I absolutely nailed it.

---

For months – nay, years – we’ve remorselessly documented the fear, confusion and sheer intellectual laziness of local officialdom when it comes to grasping the basic tenets of street grid reform in New Albany.

It’s true that some of them are further along the path of righteousness than others, but virtually all are afflicted to some degree with a myopic inability, or maybe a plain unwillingness, to think clearly about the topic -- much less to do so openly and for attribution.

Festering at the heart of this ongoing disconnect is a fundamentally flawed understanding of the revitalization New Albany has managed somehow to achieve, against all institutional odds, in recent years: Who has propelled it, why it has occurred, and the incalculable extent to which such progress might be aided and abetted by immediate year-round infrastructure changes guaranteed to be far less costly than a part-time aquatics center.

Precisely because city officials don’t have a clear grasp of cause and effect, they are too easily afflicted with paralyzing dread of the unknown, which merely compounds the dead weight of a civic inferiority complex they simply can’t seem to shake.

---

Conventional ruling wisdom is this: If we as a city do anything that might be remotely construed as discouraging the unrivaled hegemony of the automobile, or if we fail to resolutely mimic the residential and commercial logic of the suburb, these are signs of electoral weakness, and suddenly, no one will like us any longer – both as politicians seeking votes, and also as a municipal entity begging for attention in a crowded marketplace.

It’s inane drivel, but bizarrely resonates among the defeatists. It’s almost as though city officials are conceding that to them, the very idea of an independent business-led downtown revival always was doubtful, at best, especially when most folks (read: “city officials”) still prefer those nice dependable plasticized multinational chains crowding the former pastureland out along Veterans Parkway.

Sadly, this rampant manure fertilizes pervasive wrongheadedness.

In football terms, the governing deletes harbor an attitude similar to the infamous “prevent” defense, which typically stifles vigor and initiative, except that in football, coaches don’t start misusing the prevent until they’re ahead. Here, we’re doing it from behind.

In Junior High School terms, it’s like suffering from rampant adolescent insecurities and low self-esteem, and trying to dress and act like everyone else, just to fit in, only then belatedly realizing that not being yourself is no way to find yourself.

In economic development terms, it’s just plain unimaginative, derivative, non-creative insanity.

---

As it pertains to the street grid, and as befitting those ordinary citizens of a similar age and demographic background who have traveled but paid depressingly scant attention to what they were seeing in a wider world, certain of our city officials evidently believe that the logic of the suburb applies equally and inexorably to the city center itself – that success can be achieved only by maximizing access via automobiles, whether it’s a doctrine applied to arterial streets that handily desecrate entire transitional neighborhoods, or surface parking that both mars the historic streetscape and prevents infill.

It is a self-defeating fallacy for an urban area, but it is the inextricable root fallacy of our detached leadership cadre, many of whom seem proud to know absolutely nothing about the contemporary ideas advanced by Jeff Speck (among others) in the year 2014, as opposed to 1964, and even though we’ve been talking and writing about these matters here at this blog since 2004.

That’s because when challenged to think, they fall back on their native “common” sense, gleaned from confounded, compounded incomprehension, and therefore not very sensible at all. I don’t mean to be harsh, but really, sometimes one must step away from the pasty white Cracker Barrel banquet table, break open an actual book, and learn something.

---

In some respects, I do take city officials at their word. I believe they genuinely grasp that as the Ohio River Bridges Project advances from construction displacement through invasive tolling regime, New Albany stands to be badly harmed by hordes of pass-through cars and drivers, and by the congestive havoc they’ll cause.

However, I don’t see them grasping one iota of the curative logic, albeit counter-intuitive and requiring deeper thinking than suffices for watching network television, which explains the single best counter-active strategy available to us, as prefaced by Jeff Speck:

“Were it not for traffic congestion, we would drive enough additional miles to make congestion."

In short, to reduce congestion, induce congestion, although characteristically, city officials appear to be frozen in the approaching Hummer’s headlights as they grapple with their reigning congestive vision failure.

There’ll be congestion caused by the pass-throughs … but geez, how do we cope with congestion by reducing and slowing vehicular access … shouldn’t we be adding lanes and increasing speeds … hell, those neighborhood people gripe all the time, and they knew their quality of life downtown wouldn’t be half what it is on Rainbow Drive … can’t we just sit here and do nothing, because maybe a few of those cars will stop and eat, and then we can call it economic development, declare victory, and get re-elected and shit.

No. No. No.

NO.

To reduce congestion, induce congestion.

We must actively and unapologetically move to intentionally “congest” our current one-way arterials by making them two-way streets again; reducing lane sizes; lowering speeds; crowding them with walkers and bikers; or even adding a few of John Rosenbarger’s trademark totemic, fetishistic bump-outs of the sort be believes alone can transform paradigms over endless decades of gradual implementation.

But why fight congestion with congestion?

Because if we don’t, people in outlying areas will see downtown New Albany’s streets in precisely the same way they will view the Sherman Minton Bridge: A cost-free route for immediate passage.

Therefore, we must add user costs so as to discourage them, and seeing as we’ll not be tolling city streets during peak usage like London does, purposefully congesting the streets is the only way to impose a cost in extra time for the prospective pass-throughs, encouraging them to self-divert to avoid the cost in time, with the additional practical effects of (a) curbing bad congestion by using good congestion as a tool; (b) enhancing neighborhood quality of life; and (c) helping small, independent business to remain the driving force of downtown redevelopment.

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Now, here’s where the inferiority complex comes in.

But, omigod, Roger … if we do these things, then they’ll stop coming here, and everything we’ve tried to do …

Wait.

Everything YOU’VE tried to do?

Please.

It seems to me that if the indie business community has the confidence to grasp that street grid reform will deter unwanted pass-throughs while creating urban conditions all the more favorable for the great customers we already have – accepting the obvious fact that we’ve invested far more in money and time toward downtown revitalization than local government has ever dreamed of expending – why not take our word for it?

The people who are spending money downtown right now are not doing so because it has the same vibe as Veterans Parkway, or because we’re a convenient destination. New Albany’s always been out of the way, hasn’t it?

They’re doing it because downtown is different. Street grid reform stands to make downtown even more different, and better for the change; this can only increase consumer loyalty, not defeat it.

As an added bonus, lifting the quality of life in neighborhoods by ending the tyranny of one-way arterials stands to bring more of the neighborhood back to downtown, in effect adding the housing we currently lack in the epicenter. Why? Because they’ll be able to walk and bike and use the grid between their homes and downtown as human beings, not merely driving cars.

What stands in the way?

Essentially, an outdated mantra worthy of Warren Nash: “But it’s the way we’ve always done it.”

---

Boy, haven't we. And see where it's gotten us?

Even it public works über-honcho John Rosenbarger “gets” all this, I’m finished defending him against his detractors, because it has occurred to me that never in my experience advocating for two-way traffic, when John’s somewhere within earshot, has he unequivocally endorsed the idea. Not once.

Rather, each time, he has uttered a disclaimer: Well, if not two-way streets, then traffic calming, and yes, this might make sense if he had a record of actively spearheading traffic calming and complete streets, but while he’s always talked a wonderful game about them, it has taken three decades for us to boast even those minuscule, scattered and pathetically unconnected examples we have now.

Sorry, but it’s time to say it publicly: For reasons unknown, John’s fatally biased against two-way street reform, perhaps because of his preference for the lifelong bureaucrat’s creeping bump-out incrementalism, which we no longer have time to indulge. He’s not helping us; he’s pushing back against us. In fact, I’ve come to believe that John is a major force against the changes we need right now, whether intentionally or otherwise. That’s too bad, and I wish I knew why. He’s not helping us. He’s hurting us.

Concurrently, I believe that economic development director David Duggins is fully capable of understanding the points I’m making here, but chooses not to do so, probably because there are no one way streets in the industrial park.

Moreover, perhaps as few as two, maybe three council persons see the merit of street grid modernism. And, honestly, I have no clue what Mayor Jeff Gahan sincerely believes about this topic, or for that matter, what he believes about anything at all. He remains a sphinx, forever guarded.

The fact is this: We’ve utterly wasted ten years on slipshod photo-op chicanery best symbolized by two bike lanes on each side of a one-way street, attached to nothing, and sheltered not one jot from unregulated vehicular traffic that negates the effort of painting the stripes, and if people like John Rosenbarger want to boast about this as though it were some semblance of a professional legacy, that’s exceedingly odd, because it isn’t, unless professional legacies typically embrace perpetually parsing fifty shades of stalled congestive anxiety, then waiting another few years before refraining from doing anything yet again.

Those municipal officials seeking a substantive legacy might consider leading change rather than road-blocking it. Otherwise, getting the hell out of the way would be a nice alternative, or at least not sabotaging the effort of those who’ve actually put money where their mouths are.

I’m ready to start painting yellow lines.

Aren’t you?

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Recent columns:

February 4: ON THE AVENUES: Hello, I must be going.

January 28: ON THE AVENUES: They're surely not ROLL models.

January 21: ON THE AVENUES: When I grow up, I'd like to be alive.

January 14: ON THE AVENUES: Should the Queen fail to rescue us, there's always H. L. Mencken.

January 7: ON THE AVENUES: You know, that time when Roger interviewed himself.