Strong Towns Throwback Friday: "We should not be asking engineers to design streets."

There'll come a time when the critique can be renewed. Until then, we'll live with the myriad errors.

design-streets">Engineers should not design streets, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Last Friday I was participating in the 5th Annual Mayor's Bike Ride in Duluth following a week spent sharing the Strong Towns message on the Iron Range. The friendly woman riding next to me asked me what could be done to to better educate engineers so they would start to build streets that were about more than simply about moving cars. My answer rejected the premise of the question: We should not be asking engineers to design streets ...

Look out your window at the one-way street, while absorbing this: "The Government Is Really Bad at Predicting Americans' Driving Habits."

Follow the link for the full grandeur. In essence, the miscalculated uppermost lines are the basis of various excuses to build two unneeded bridges, and in turn, are just as likely to preface calculations aimed at preserving New Albany's antiquated one-way street grid. That's because the same old faces doing the studies tend toward the accepted miscalculations, as above, which are more profitable for all concerned than actual truth. Thus, dysfunction is perpetuated amid shrugs that "after all, the numbers don't lie."

Except they do.

What was that?

This is just now coming to your attention?

The Government Is Really Bad at Predicting Americans' Driving Habits, by Emily Badger (The Atlantic Cities)

... What's startling about this latest chart isn't the difference between that thick black line and the 2010 projection. It's the fact that the government seems to have made the exact same miscalculation repeatedly, and despite growing evidence that something quite different is going on. These projections also aren't wobbling off course years after they were first produced (no one expects a prognosticator to perfectly predict what will happen 10 or 20 years from now). They've turned out to be grossly inaccurate sometimes months after their release.

Redevelopment Commission on traffic studies, and why YOU NEED TO GET INVOLVED with this.

Apologies for yelling.

It isn't splitting hairs to remind readers that the city council voted 4-3 on the third reading in favor of a traffic study. Two members were absent, and so the required five-vote threshold was not reached; had John Gonder not switched his "yes" to "no" at the last moment, for reasons that remain obscure ... well, I persist in thinking that no study is needed, and that action is preferable, but if it's the only way to get something done, I shan't oppose it.

People, it's time to get real.

If you believe that (a) New Albany cannot address its tolling-era needs within a principled context of two-way street conversions, traffic calming and complete streets, and (b) that either way, yea or nay, all of this can play itself out successfully WITHOUT you making your views known, then the conclusion is obvious: You're plainly acquiescing in the passive, reactive encouragement of New Albany dooming itself to a future NOT of renewal, but of renewed futility.

The way to fight back against the oligarchic imbecility of the tolling project is to immediately re-occupy our streets for our own stated aims, in forward-looking and creative ways that encourage indie economic development and neighborhood stability, as proven all across the country. We need not be lackeys to the Stemlerites. We merely need courage of conviction, and JUST DO IT.

BUT YOU -- that's right, YOU -- need to take part in this. Take my word for it: City government believes that most residents don't care about this issue ... and when they care, what the city hears is old-fogey negativity.

If you don't make your opinion known, it is highly likely that New Albany's default patterns of timidity, self-loathing, foot-shot conservatism and general dunder-head-in-the-sand-edness will carry the day, and we'll find ourselves five years from now with the worst of all possible worlds: Overwhelmed one-way streets, repellant pass-throughs, monster trucks, continued neighborhood blight and shrinking prospects downtown ... and palms out-turned: Gee, what could we have done?

Because that's the way it always happens around here, isn't it?

Sorry to be a nanny and a bearer of bad tidings, but you'l have to get involved with this. You'll have to get educated, get involved, follow through and do something. If you don't (surprise), you'll surely get nothing.

Bearing the load in New Albany: Traffic study issue resurfaces; City Council defeated ordinance to appropriate funding on Nov. 7, by Jerod Clapp (Paywall Picayune)

NEW ALBANY — If the City Council won’t pay for it, the Redevelopment Commission might.

Redevelopment commissioner Dan Coffey suggested reviving the idea of a traffic study in New Albany to see the impact of bridge construction and tolls after completion in late 2016. The City Council defeated an ordinance to appropriate $30,000 for the study on Nov. 7.

“We need a traffic study for this town,” Coffey said. “Especially with the fact with the bridges going in the way they are, I assume we’ll have more traffic coming into downtown.”

Traffic studies are bullshit. Just do it.

Why? Go here.

Last evening in the romper room, the entirely unnecessary downtown traffic study being sought by a bunker-bound City Hall as craven political cover for chronic two-way street grid timidity was promptly scotched by a wholly redundant city council, in part owing to the council’s chronic absenteeism this term, but mostly because elected and appointed officials in New Albany believe the only thing they have to fear is every last aspect of modernity that somehow managed to occur, in spite of their efforts, since their graduation from high school.

Welcome to New Albany, where we’re all here because we’re not all there, and so into this gaping, barren chasm of a leadership vacuum eagerly steps 2nd district council seat occupant Bob Caesar, who is to sheer cranium vacancy what Imelda Marcos was to shoes, and to an extent so egregious that he surely is the only so-called “Democrat” party member in the whole whacked-out United States who exalts the Thoreau Institute as reputable scholarship.

The Koch Brothers thank our own bejeweled blitzen, and so here’s Bob Caesar for attribution last night:

“(Two-way streets) are being driven by about a handful of people that want to be able to turn right onto Bank Street from Elm Street."

Ouch!

What was that twinge I just felt?

Wait – it was an intellectual pygmy gouging a toenail with the planet’s tiniest set of 1920s-era tweezers. Where the hell is Balso Snell when you need him most?

Of course, this is the same Antediluvian Bob who insisted to me that he be quoted thusly, back in 2011:

"Change every street to two way -- not Pearl Street. Pearl Street will NOT be two way."

Come to think of it, antediluvian might not be the best word. After all, in New Albany, two-way streets actually existed before “our” flood.

Two-way thinking in New Albany: Those who say they’re for them mostly do nothing apart from assuring us they agree. Those who are against them mostly don’t live here, except for Bob Caesar, whose head is somewhere in the vicinity of an 18th-century Mongolian yurt. For the sake of clarity, here’s a quick, informal, four-point list explaining why two-way streets matter.

Safety for the neighborhoods.
Economic development for local independent business.
A boost for walkability.
Protection against Kerry Stemler’s tolls-borne invasion.

Wham, bam, thank you Bob: When Caesar reduces the street grid discussion to accusing others of being just as myopic as himself, it may be amusing fodder for the retrograde elements who view our arterial one-way streets as so much Astroglide to facilitate their driving pleasure, but it insults and demeans every last resident of any city neighborhood not known by the moniker of Silver Hills.

The Democratic Party might choose to make Caesar pay for a slur this enormous, because as we've established, a walkable environment is a civil rights issue, but don't hold your breath waiting for it. You'll be blue by the time a worthwhile bicentennial event rolls around.

New Albany. It never ceases to amaze. Degraded and wasted for 30 years, and yet everyone in it is afflicted with Stockholm Syndrome, suitably terrified of efforts to alter a failed dynamic, and beholden to the superstitions that keep us down. It is breathtaking – and it distracts us from the vital task of devising ways to reforming, moving or outlawing Harvest Homecoming.

I wonder how many petition signatures the mayor needs to no longer be frightened of his own so-called "democratic" party?

It's simple. Either City Hall gives clear indication of its "plan" -- of what's to come -- or the guerrilla localism war starts immediately.

Too bad county government doesn’t come down hard against two-way street conversions.

We’d have them before the elephant ears get cold.

Great quotes along the one-way street to the enchanted kingdom.

I'm not a crook. -- Richard Nixon (1973)

I believe it is peace for our time. -- Neville Chamberlain (1938)

A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere. -- New York Times (1936)

Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan. -- Mary Somerville (1948)

The Beatles laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music while entertaining in this country during the early and middle 1960s. -- Elvis Presley (1970)

If the street grid works now, keep it and save your money. What do we need to do it for? There’s zero benefit -- Bob Caesar (1815)

Two-way street study eyed in New Albany; Councilman: Zero benefit to two-way traffic downtown, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune)

But while we're at it, let's not neglect councilman Scott Blair's contribution:

"I think we have to try to understand [the situation] the best that we can and not just run out and do something."

By all means; yes. And since we've been talking about this for YEARS, and you seem to have arrived at the discussion just LAST THURSDAY ... I really hate to be the bearer of bad tidings ... but you may just have to try to, well, UNDERSTAND what it is we're saying -- you know, APART from the numbers you're handed for the usual "cost benefit" analysis, and MAYBE with the help of some outside reading.

Homework? For bankers? Oy (grasps head in pain), don't get me started.