GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Both Jeff Gahan and Warren Nash believe that driver convenience far outranks considerations of human life.

The Green Mouse has learned that in response to Midtown neighborhood resident concerns about speeding and recklessness in the aftermath of skateboarder Matt Brewer's death at the hands of a irresponsible driver, both Mayor Jeff Gahan and Board of Public Works president Warren Nash have commented privately and repeatedly that drivers using the Spring Street corridor cannot possibly be inconvenienced by further traffic calming measures.

I trust the Mouse's multiple sources on this matter. If mayor and mentor disagree, then perhaps they'd like to submit a correction.

Of course, they've both lied repeatedly in the past, and it isn't the first time these two execrable human beings slouch before you, exposed as charlatans.

Isn't it about time that Gahan and Nash went on record, publicly, with these "drivers as permanent privileged class" sentiments? Surely Adam Dickey would slobber servile veneration in response.

In reality, Jeffrey's and Warren's street grid "modernization" sham was a campaign-finance impelled paving project, and now their innate cowardice has turned deadly.

So come right out and say it, gentlemen.

Perhaps HWC Engineering already has quantified an acceptable level of pedestrian, bicyclist, skateboarder and handicapped user attrition before anyone need be concerned about the vital flow of money into the mayoral re-election campaign account.

Just remember that when I asked HWC's Jim Rice about the effectiveness of the street grid reversion, he replied that well, they'd sure kept the heavy trucks moving.

How many bodies are underneath those wheels, Jeffrey, Warren and James -- and how many more before you're able to muster a human response?

#FireGahan2019
#FlushTheClique

The Green Mouse Says, "If and when the city finishes the job and restripes the street, the mouth breathers will go berserk."

Another week passes without stripes on Upper Spring -- no narrowing, no calming, but plenty of Irv's speedway tumescence.

The Green Mouse has received a strange e-note, even by the standards of his periodically radioactive clientele.

It sounds at first like another crazy conspiracy theory, but here's rub: Given the way things work hereabouts, it's entirely plausible. You can hear local Democrats talking this way over Bud Light Limes over at the Roadhouse.

Can anyone confirm or deny?

So, you're wondering why the city won't finish the striping and new traffic pattern on Spring Street on both sides of Silver Street -- you remember, our sole line of defense against toll "dodging", as the moron second-tier city planners like to call it.

Let me remind you about the election coming up on November 8.

Seabrook, Stumler and their legion of good old boy fat cats have raised the roof bitching about the two-way street plan, and you may have noticed most of them are Republicans (I know, but Irv's stopped pretending now that Doug's in Florida). Trump's a piece of excrement, but we all know he'll carry Floyd County in a yuuuuge way. In this hellhole, Trump actually helps the local Republicans.

Right now, thanks to Irv's magical mystery tour, the only comments being made aloud about two-way streets are negative. Some of us have caught on, when you said you'd stop talking about streets and said it was someone else's turn, things got quiet fast.

You'd think these other two-way advocates could write letters and raise hell, too, but they don't, do they? Do they exist? You can bet your last TIFF that Dickey's noticed that, and he's running scared. It's the only way he knows how, after all. 

So the city paved Spring Street, and all the redneck speed racers are delighted. If and when the city finishes the job and restripes the street, the mouth breathers will go berserk, and the Democrats are absolutely terrified of this before the election because they know Irv's right -- changing the streets has little popular support, and the mayor doesn't have a backbone, as we all know. All it can do right now is make the Republican beatdown even worse.

It's a comedy, and I figured you'd like to know why. No charge, but you can buy me a beer sometime.

Another week passes without stripes on Upper Spring -- no narrowing, no calming, but plenty of Irv's speedway tumescence.

If this isn't finished soon, John Rosenbarger's nose will reach all the way to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

In New Albany, as in St. Paul: "Finding the Political Will to Fix 'Four-Lane Death Roads.'"

In the aftermath of Chloe Allen's death at the ridiculously dangerous intersection of Spring and Vincennes, we've waited in vain for City Hall to register a response.

A pedestrian was killed, another was sent to the ground two weeks later, and the city's Board of Public Works and Safety didn't so much as mention either occurrence.

Through private channels only, a city functionary held that forthcoming changes to Spring between Beharrell and Vincennes would heroically pave the way for future change.

We've also been told that getting walkers across a busy street is impossible, because the street is busy, and it's busy because it's not controlled, and we'll do nothing to control it -- see, impossible.

What City Hall forever seems unable to grasp is that elected and appointed officials are there to lead. Circling wagons and pouring five more feet of concrete around the down-low bunker do not qualify as leadership.

I'd describe these acts as institutional cowardice.

But I wouldn't dare insult the institutionalized.

Finding the Political Will to Fix “Four-Lane Death Roads”, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

A mother was killed as she crossed this “four-lane death road” in St. Paul last week. The victim was 32-year-old Erin Elizabeth Dunham, who was dropping her kid off at the bus. She was walking in the crosswalk on Maryland Avenue, a four-lane, high-speed road running through an urban area.

Local officials know Maryland Avenue is dangerous, which is why the intersection where Dunham was killed was recently the site of a “crosswalk safety awareness campaign.” But the campaign was not enough to prevent Dunham’s death.

What a street like Maryland Avenue needs, says Lindeke, is a road diet to shorten crossing distances and calm motor vehicle traffic by narrowing it to one car lane in each direction and a center turn lane. The hard part is the politics, he writes:

The first road-diet hurdle is institutional. Advocates and leaders have to convince city staff, and public works engineers in particular, that the “loss” of “level of service” (LOS) is worth the “gain” of safety. Making the argument that “more congestion is OK” can be challenging, especially for people in institutions that have spent decades fighting against congestion, or who might see crashes as inevitable accidents. (One common response, at least in Ramsey County, is that any increase in congestion makes streets less safe because drivers will become angry and begin driving erratically. I call this the “LOS extortion argument,” and I don’t think it’s accurate. Rather, I think you can change and “calm” our driving culture through engineering and other efforts.)

Bob Caesar: Opposes traffic calming, but wants to see kids "walking out on the street."

Way back in August of 2011, we were graced with one of those cherished reminders that Bob Caesar's thinking trends inexorably toward sheer befuddlement.

Expansion could lead to more liquor licenses in New Albany

 ... Councilman Bob Caesar said he will likely vote in favor of expanding the district, but added city planners and officials should be wary of the state’s intentions for approving the riverfront licensing program. He added that while he’s not opposed to patrons safely enjoying an alcoholic beverage, he believes the “city wants to see families with their kids walking out on the street.”

Concurrently, then as now, Caesar opposes two-way streets, which among other positives act to calm traffic, making it safer for ... that's right ... for families and their kids walking out on the street, though perhaps he meant "on the sidewalk."

That's because Caesar's jollies derive from traffic merrily racing from one side of town to the other, better to make it out the opposite end before their texting session concludes. The hypocrisy probably hasn't occurred to him, not even once.

Then again, confusion is Caesar's default condition.

“The need here is restaurants, not more bars,” Caesar said. “This was done so that restaurants could serve liquor, that’s what you want. It does no good at all to have bars that can serve a bratwurst.”

Bars without food? Even a drunkist like me finds this notion bizarre. Perhaps it depends on whether the bratwurst is locally sourced.

ON THE AVENUES: Egg, meet face: How many different ways can we botch the Main Street Deforestation Project?

ON THE AVENUES: Egg, meet face: How many ways can we botch the Main Street Deforestation Project?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

My usual Thursday column space has been pre-scheduled for the timely "rewinding" of a 2013 essay about the annual advent of Harvest Homecoming.

In our municipality’s case, it isn’t workers’ rights but uncomfortable irony that bedevils the citizenry, second only to bed bugs, and so the dire threat posed by ironic detachment must be recast into simpler truths, like the prevailing fiction that Harvest Homecoming has anything whatever to do with economic development apart from the money necessary to perpetuate the fest itself.

However, there is so much to write about, isn't there?

Concurrently with Harvest Homecoming's arrival, this administration's signature "shining path" public works project is inching toward an abysmal conclusion, and so for those too busy chuckin' punkins to pay attention, let's take a look at what Jeff "Walkable City" Speck has been doing.

Speck is the man hired by the city of New Albany to study our ragtag, dysfunctional streets and recommend changes to enhance walkability, make these streets safer, and in a presumably comprehensive way, bring this persistently dirty river town into modern times.

Yesterday morning, Speck released an article at City Lab: Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety and Must Be Replaced Now. I made it the basis of a posting at NAC; more about that in a moment.

States and counties believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong.

Speck left absolutely no doubt as to the ultimate importance of the lane width topic. It is a foundation of his platform. Here is what he tweeted about the article:

ATTENTION! This is the most important article I have ever written. Please read, share, and join the fight!

Later in the day, Speck wrote words that may come back to haunt him when he returns to NA to present his street study, and is confronted with our generations-old, institutional imbecility.

Reading comments to my article, I wonder: what makes people who have never travelled so confident that things they haven't seen don't exist?

Someone might say: "Roger, why all the pessimism?"

First, there are those long years of experience listening to illuminating barroom opinions about Europe, spouted by people who've never been any further east than Cincinnati.

More pressingly, there's this: As the streets specialist we've hired to advise us makes it perfectly clear in national forums that 10-ft traffic lanes are the mantra for any street grid's makeover, the city of New Albany prepares to put the triumphant finishing touches on a multi-million dollar Main Street project with lanes that have grown in width like John Rosenbarger's nose, from 10 feet to an "official" 11 feet, with a "two foot offset" rendering them into ... that's right ... 13-foot lanes.

In turn, if a traffic project ostensibly intended to calm traffic fails miserably to implement the one sure mechanism for doing so, chances are that traffic will not be calmed, in which case every bit of the Main Street project's expense and squandered opportunity cost has been devoted to cosmetic fluffing, not altered function.

And about those ritzy sidewalk address engravings? A reader beings this to our attention, asking:

"When you look at the existing city ordinance pertaining to street numbers, do you feel spending 'our money' on horizontal, inset sidewalk plaques makes sense, as they don't meet the City's own ordinance requirements?

§ 99.02  POSTING OF HOUSE NUMBERS.

   (A)   All owners or occupants of commercial or residential buildings located within the city limits should be and are required to conspicuously post their address so as to be easily visible from the street on which the building or home lies.

   (B)   The address shall be in standard arabic numbers no smaller than three inches high and shall be posted either on the improvements or on a sign or mailbox on the street.

   (C)   The numbers shall be of a color in contrast to its background so as to be easily read.

(Ord. G-93-156, passed 8-19-1993)

The city of New Albany has opportunistically spent "free" state monies, as intended to be used for future maintenance, on a showpiece project, the engineering of which contradicts most of what paid consultant Speck is about to advise us to do.

With the remainder of the city increasingly disgusted at the attention lavished on one neighborhood to the exclusion of all others, a few functionaries have fanned out to privately issue promises that given time and someone else's money, they'll botch Spring Street (for example) in precisely the same way as Main, meaning that traffic will not be calmed, walkability will not be enhanced, and bikers will be provided street access by means of sharrows symbols drawn on every uncalmed street.

Victory will be declared, and nothing will have changed. Our own Jeff provides his usual succinct (and damning) summary.

The distance between the parking lanes and median on Main Street is indeed 13 feet. With those wide lanes in place, the median itself will act as a buffer against oncoming traffic, further reducing any sense of car-slowing friction that would normally occur from pushing sufficiently narrow, opposite direction lanes closer together. Bike lanes have proven effective at helping to slow traffic (not to mention providing a transportation alternative), but they're absent as well. In short, there's little reason millions of dollars later to slow down on Main Street.

My biggest concern with the City's potential implementation of Speck's plans for the remaining grid isn't that they won't do anything but rather that they'll do a lot of something, inserting their own stunted reasoning into it instead of just following directions. If Main Street and other recent projects are any indication, there's a strong likelihood that they'll spend an enormous amount of money building something ineffective in a way that will make it much more difficult to correct in the near future. To do Main Street well, for instance, would likely involve removing or at least substantially reducing the median. Who's going to pay for that having just built it?

So far, it's area residents who are eating crow and the City that's serving it.

If you ask me, "stunted reasoning" is a polite way of referring to a steaming cow pie, but for once, perhaps I might profit from some semblance of ironic detachment.

Trucks, speed, children and institutionalized moral cowardice.

Arranged in no particular order below are eight photos I snapped from a seat on the front porch, while smoking a cigar and drinking coffee, on Wednesday afternoon, September 24. The first four look left (east) on Spring Street, and the second four face to the right (west).

They don't do the scene justice, so I'll supplement them with background.

The rental properties across the street from our house (south side) currently house several small children, and in just a block and a half stretch on our (north) side, three new homeowners also have kids, albeit older than the ones in the rentals.

It's the most children we've glimpsed in this vicinity since moving here in 2003, and being kids, they're often out playing on the sidewalks -- and yes, there usually are adults nearby, so they're not entirely unsupervised.

The sequence below was taken in a couple of minutes. You can see a guy walking his dog, but not the children across the street on the east and west, who were out on the sidewalk just moments before the cavalcade of heavy trucks began speeding past, and to the east, during it.

I know this is tiresome, but hear it again: Truck traffic has exponentially increased, they should not be on this street in the first place, these trucks move very fast, we have lots of kids near the street, and while Mayor Jeff Gahan persists in advocating the demolition of buildings here and there on random public safety grounds, his perplexing refusal to acknowledge that escalated truck traffic, when entirely unregulated by ordinance enforcement or simple civic common sense, is just as much or more a threat to public safety is a red flag of epic dimensions.

Why is Jeff Gahan and his minions being so willfully blind to this?

Who are they serving, anyway?

Is Is it the citizenry, or Tiger Trucking?

These kids playing within yards of flashing steel, or J & J Pallet?

Why the silence, arrogance and refusal to acknowledge what their own eyes would reveal ... if they decided to climb out from behind the controlling stone wall, take the smallest look around, and actually see what's obvious to the rest of us?

We'll just wait a little bit longer for Jeff Speck's political cover, won't we? I suppose we'll have to, because we don't possess the collective cojones to take action before the Democratic Party is appeased.

Let's hope no one gets killed before it finally is proffered ... and that the prescription isn't ignored.

The difference between Bruges and New Albany? It depends on Jeff Gahan's definitions of "ruining", "quality of life" and municipal impotence.

Think of Bruges, Belgium this way:

photo credit

Then there's New Albany:

Finally, this quote from a story about "quality of life" in a place where the words actually have meaning.

Tired of delivery trucks rumbling near its mythic canals, Belgium's medieval town of Bruges has approved the construction of a beer pipeline to link a five-century-old brewery to a bottling factory nearby.

The two-mile underground pipeline will link the De Halve Maan brewery in the heart of the "Venice of the North" to an industrial park where the beer will be bottled and shipped to drinkers worldwide, company director Xavier Vanneste said.

"The idea is born of environmental and quality of life concerns, and not economic ones," he said.

Bruges to build beer pipeline to stop traffic ruining locals' lives; The pipeline will link a five-century-old brewery to a bottling factory nearby (The Telegraph)

Savvy reader civic slogan submission: "New Albany, we're truckin' great!"

Thanks to AG for the submission of both photo and phrase.

We ask: He's captured the essence of it, hasn't he?

Crowd responds: "Truckin' A!"