"As a rule of thumb, places create wealth. Non-places consume wealth."

The very concept of sprawl is pre-determined by available space. No space, no sprawl. It leads to a larger point, about place versus non-place.

My, how I detest auto-erotic automobile supremacy.

Visualizing Place vs. Non-Place, by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

It started with an actual, attention-grabbing point. Then, as is the way of all things Internet, it became a snarky meme. As is also the way of all things Internet, the meme has more to it than meets the eye.

A few years ago, our good friend Steve Mouzon (author of The Original Green) shared this graphic on his blog: a juxtaposition of the Renaissance-era core of Florence, Italy with a single freeway interchange in Atlanta, Georgia. It has made the rounds repeatedly in various urbanist and transportation circles ever since.

Mouzon’s graphic (above) is intended to make a point about the gargantuan amount of land consumed by automobile infrastructure, particularly when it’s intended for high-speed driving. Speed requires wider turn radii, wider lanes, wider medians and shoulders, and buffer space to separate people and buildings from that fast, deadly traffic. The result: the same land area that could accommodate a bustling urban district of tens of thousands (Florence in 1425 had an estimated population of 60,000) is easily consumed by a single interchange.

Supersize that to the scale of a metro area like Atlanta’s, with all of its similar freeways and subsidiary feeder stroads, and you have a place where the actual destinations people want to get to are pushed so far apart by all this road space that it becomes inconceivable to travel between them without a car—necessitating even more land-hogging car infrastructure, in a vicious cycle.

Whatever “human scale” is—one imagines medieval Florence qualifies—it sure ain’t our modern highways ...

Just an off-the-cuff rumination about taking our sweet time to get it right.

Being a contrarian is a house specialty of mine. I persevere, but it's a thankless task.

My resolution for the year 2019 is that whenever prompted to breathlessly participate in our short, social media-driven collective attention span, I'll do my very best to opt out, remain calm and seek space sufficient for deliberation.

Want me to hurry up? Sorry, this only encourages me to stop and think harder about it. Pour yourself another drink, because my musings might take a while.

Want me to scroll through the image carousel and indulge in the national flashcard kaleidoscopic consciousness? Nah. I'd rather slow down and mull the topic in depth -- and look at the pictures later, once I'm familiar with the context.

I'm embracing the notion of waiting and getting it right, of thinking carefully for the long haul, rather than for scattershot short-term gains. This isn't political or intended as veiled commentary about anything at all apart from who I am as a person, because I don't care for what we're becoming as a people.

Calendars don't lie, and this may seem ironic. I'm 58, and there's far more time elapsed than one might reasonably expect to come. Perhaps I should be racing to cram as much as frenetic activity as possible into the time remaining.

But sheer volume and the logic of the tilt-a-whirl don't matter to me. It's about value and content, and as always, it's about what is undervalued, because what is undervalued can only gain in value.

Let's not frantically run somewhere for a beer.

Let's walk there, and make time to drink three while meticulously solving the world's problems.

Let's establish an ethos of timelessness, rather than the ephemeral.

Life is short, and the counter-intuitive way to lengthen it is to go for the deep vein, not the surface sheen.

LIVE TO EAT: My friend Jeff Mease on Papa John, independent local business values, and the ideology of the cancer cell.

Strictly speaking, Jeff Mease isn't a hometown boy made good. He came to Bloomington, Indiana from Ohio to attend Indiana University, never left, and the rest is history.

Jeff and I were aware of each other for a long time, and chatted here and there, but it was only when he was a director on the Brewers of Indiana Guild that we had time to form a closer acquaintance. I have deep respect for what he's accomplished in Bloomington.

One World Enterprises is the umbrella for the local businesses pictured above, and to my way of thinking, Jeff and the folks who work for him are a wonderful, living example of independent small business success.

Today on Facebook, Jeff commented about the "Papa John" Schnatter situation. To me, it's an important and insightful riff, so with the author's permission ...

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Back in the early 90's I was upgrading some pizza dough equipment. There weren't many companies that produced the sort of mixers that make hundreds of pounds of pizza dough at a time. 

As it happened, the salesman that I ended up dealing with was an expert in the field, had spent his career in baking equipment sales and had sold the same sort of dough equipment I was looking for to Papa John's, which John Schnatter had started in Southern Indiana a couple years after I'd started Pizza Express in Bloomington. 

Having jumped into franchising early on, Papa John's was already a large and fast growing company. My curiosity about Papa John's meteoric growth was piqued during my conversations with the salesman, and near the end of a series of meetings I had the chance to ask the question I'd been forming.

"Bob," I said, "You've visited my company in Bloomington, met most of my key people and have gotten to know me a bit, tell me, what are the key differences you see between me, running this small and successful restaurant company and John Schnatter?"

"Oh sure," was his answer. "John Schnatter is ruthless. There's nobody in that company that was there at the beginning. I doubt there's anyone at corporate who's been there more than a few years." Bob's words from nearly two decades ago have always stuck with me.

Obviously, there are lots of customers who like what the papa does. But here in Bloomington, I've watched those franchises change hands numerous times. Their store management positions are a revolving door and there is no culture that I can sense, just branding, pressure and dollars, as is typical of the genre. 

Contrast that to Pizza X in Bloomington -- Papa John's most direct competitor. Our people are paid well and taken care of, and our managers hardly ever turn over. Each year at our manager awards dinner we're handing out service awards to managers and staff for 5,10, 15, 20 years of employment. One of our manager's is going on 30 years with the company. 

Pizza X employs over 100 people in Bloomington, 46 of whom are full time. We've had a first rate health insurance plan for our staff for many years (more than a decade before Obamacare) and it costs us less than 30 cents per pizza--WHAT AN INCREDIBLE VALUE. 

While none of us are getting rich, together as an organization we've created a great deal of customer value and through that a lot of good jobs, where good people can excel, and where all of us continue to learn about the value of service almost daily. 

I'm not trying to blow our own horn so much as to say this: There are different ways to do things, and the more conscious we ALL are about where we spend our money, the better world we'll create. Institutions and companies need to grow, we all need aspirations and inspiration, but do some things get too big too fast? Cancers and explosions come to mind. 

Visiting a friend in Freiburg, Germany a few years ago, I spent a beautiful fall afternoon at a farmers market that happened every day of the year but one, just as it has since 1514. At the center of the market was a cathedral that took 300 years to build.

Shared points of value: "Taking Sides? With Walkability, There’s No Need."

Given our own perennially miserable Rosenbargerian experience locally, it's an almost revolutionary idea.

To get walkable places, advocates of good urbanism have to answer “What’s the value to me?” for both developers and the public.

The author's three-part format identifies the topic and provides points of value for developers and the public alike.

Walkability
Quality Building Fabric
Open Space and Trails
Frontages
Variety of Housing Types

It is clear and concise, and accordingly, there's almost no chance Deaf Gahan can hear it.

Taking Sides? With Walkability, There’s No Need, by Arti Harchekar (Opticos Design)

As advocates of walkable, livable places, we’ve been involved in urban design discussions around the country and worldwide, observing, learning and understanding firsthand the key steps to successfully creating walkable places—and supporting existing ones.

Form-Based Coding is a key tool to unlocking walkability, but we’ve found simply having empathy for all parties at the table can be paramount. While almost always interested in building the long-term value of a community, administrative staff may be facing certain political pressures in the present. At the other end of the room, developers are often focused more on a near-term gain than long-term assets. Working through design alternatives that positively impact both of these interests can be challenging.

A rule of thumb? To get walkable places, advocates of good urbanism have to answer “What’s the value to me?” for both developers and the public. Here are some of the top discussion points we’ve seen gain traction with both “sides” of the urban design discussion.

Walkability

What Is It? Having amenities and jobs close to housing; building activity geared to the public realm; a physical environment that’s nice to be in, not just pass through

Developer Value: Walkability adds long-term value by catering to the 50% of the population that considers being able to walk to daily goods and services a high priority. Near-term value is gained through narrower streets in well-connected networks by generating better access to the lot and adjacent lots, reducing traffic speeds, reducing stormwater runoff and reducing cost for construction and maintenance. Reductions in traffic speed can potentially increase adjacent residential property values. Long-term value is gained through the ability of such a network to be able to adapt more easily to unexpected market shifts.

Public Value: An interconnected network of streets with pedestrian-oriented characteristics adds long-term value by creating a better balance of land uses and economic generators. Narrower streets in well-connected networks decrease accident rates, facilitate mobility choice, and enable the reduction of vehicular miles traveled.

Tuesday Heresy Quartet 1 of 4: Validating American values by scrapping the Pledge of Allegiance.

At meetings, I'll stand for the pledge for only one reason: My father's military service, and by extension, the service of all others.

That's a matter of individual conscience, not mandated public compliance, and one's individual conscience extends to the wording of the pledge, which I don't repeat aloud.

That's because the addition of "Under God" is my personal deal-breaker; however, you're free to comply or dissent as you please. Just know that coercion as it pertains to the exercise of conscience has a tendency to negate the values purportedly being espoused.

The pledge of allegiance must go: A daily loyalty oath has become a toxic, nationalistic ritual, by David Niose (Salon)

We make students salute national greatness for 13 years. No wonder Trumpian anti-intellectuallism is on the march

The final straw came when a teacher accused Alicia, a high school sophomore, of treason.

Alicia (not her real name) hardly comes across as subversive. She’s not one of those kids who is intrigued by anti-American propaganda from ISIS, for example, nor is she one who has been duped by homegrown anti-government groups calling for a citizens’ rebellion. She’s pretty much an ordinary, intelligent teenager—interested in politics, current events and government, but hardly a fringe radical.

Her offense in the eyes of her homeroom teacher, however, was that she chose to sit out the Pledge of Allegiance. This act, for Alicia and countless other young Americans, has brought on the wrath of authority, with teachers and school administrators unleashing mean-spirited accusations and hostility toward students who dare to question the wisdom of a daily loyalty oath. We may be a free country, but any kid who chooses to sit out the collective exercise of exalting America runs a risk of official ostracization.

Delightful heresy: Urban values as accommodating automobiles in an environment dominated by people.

To rethink implies having the first thought, and as this pertains to New Albany's traditional ruling class, it's where the problems rend to start.

As you read, consider how the Gahan team already has commenced botching the rethink by refusing to THINK first: What sort of urban area do we want this to be? Here's the crux of it, and a ready-made mission statement for getting down to first principles.

We need to rethink our urban areas. They need to be redesigned around a new set of values, one that doesn’t seek to accommodate bikers and pedestrians within an auto-dominated environment but instead does the opposite: accommodates automobiles in an environment dominated by people. It is people that create value. It is people that build wealth. It is in prioritizing their needs – whether on foot, on a bike or in a wheelchair – that we will begin to change the financial health of our cities and truly make them strong towns.

By all means, read the whole essay.

BEST OF BLOG: FOLLOW THE RULES, BIKERS, by Charles Marohn (Strongtowns)

I spent much of the year working on the sequel to the Curbside Chat that has come to be known as Transportation in the Next American City. Where the Chat explains why our cities are going broke and how embracing an incremental approach to growth can put us on a path towards building productive places once more, Transportation in the Next American City explains why our auto-based approach to transportation is yielding negative returns and how our cities, to be prosperous again, need to be built for people, not cars. It is a radical rethink that I initially struggled with but have found a voice for as I've been forced to explain it to multiple audiences.

I've been wondering, too.

Torture ... from John Manzo's blog.

So, our current President ran on values. They certainly aren't the values of Christianity, they certainly aren't the values of mainstream ethical philosophy, so it makes me wonder just whose values he ran on and by whose values he governs.