I am back in New York after a week back in Louisville. It was great to see so many new and familiar faces while I was back in town, the time always flies by so quickly.
Our last sidewalk photo from over a week ago was correctly identified by D Jason Crowder and Jeff Noble as Shelby Street between Liberty and Marshall Streets adjacent to Liberty Green. Here’s a new photo ready for guesses in the comments. Because the news piled up since the last roundup, I divided it up into several smaller categories and placed most of it after the click.
Local News
- New nightclub, ‘Spin,’ to open at former City Block property Downtown (C-J)
- Former Main Street club to become New Orleans style jazz bar and restaurant (Biz First)
- After 85 years in Germantown, Heitzman Bakery expanding on Dixie Highway (Fox 41)
- A rundown of all the new businesses in downtown Jeffersonville (N & T)
- Jeffersonville’s Carnegie Building still vacant after Remnant Trust left (N & T)
- Iroquois Gardens owners given extra time to find project investors (C-J)
- Lou only required to pay minimum $6.9 million next year for new arena (C-J)
- New Albany grappling with unapproved sidewalk vending machine (NA Confidential)
- With looming mayoral race, city leaders cannot ignore the West End (C-J Oped)
- There’s a new scholarly book about Louisville’s architectural history (C-J)
- Bob Hill explains how Floyds Fork, site of new park, got its name (C-J Oped)
- Mario Lopez loves Lou’s festive charm & ‘little main street’ (USA Today via Ville-Voice)
- A few new great photos of Lou: here (via V-V), here, here, here, here, and here.
- And one last look at the crazy sidewalk art from Idea Festival (The Edit)
Transportation: Peds, Bikes, Buses
- Pedestrian struck by motorist going 50mph on Bardstown Road (C-J)
- Lou installing new paint symbols to show cyclists how to trigger a green light (Bike Lou)
- Lou’s bike commuting rate lagging behind other cities at 0.4% (Bike PGH via Urbanophile)
- How to increase bike ridership? Design for what women want (SciAm)
- Thoughts on how bikes should behave under laws that weren’t designed for them (Slate)
- Should benches with advertisements be removed from area bus stops? (C-J)
Transportation: Trains & Cars
- A response to anti-train forces and a call for a 21st century system (Citiwire)
- Kansas City proposes vast commuter rail line, could be ready in 2 years (Transport Politic)
- Study: Generation-Y shifts perception of need for cars (LA Times via CEOs4Cities)
- Proposed new Interstate 66 likely dead due to lack of funding (C-J, StreetsBlog, Unusual KY)
- Watterson on-ramp at Preston Highway could be closed for safety reasons (C-J)
- Study: Auto travel creates $56 Billion in external health costs a year (StreetsBlog)
- New PSA encourages teens to police their friends’ reckless driving habits (CART)
- Are potholes good for anything? A creative art project (Potholes via GOOD)
- An idea to turn single-lane ‘heritage highways’ into slow-touring-routes (Time via GOOD)
- In Melbourne, they’re planting trees in the street to calm traffic (StreetsBlog)
Sustainability & Environment
- LEED-Platinum rated Bernheim Arboretum building wins EPA award (Biz First)
- 2010 Bingham Fellows to study how to make Louisville a ‘green leader’ (C-J Letter)
- New roof technology changes color depending on temperature (Fast Co, WFPL)
- Economists say reducing carbon emissions is a smart investment (Yale e360)
- Study: U.S. loses $120B annually from burning fuel, mostly coal (Fat Lip, Grist, TreeHugger)
- Scrubbers at coal power-plants cleans air but harms waterways (NY Times via TreeHugger)
- Leftover land from mountaintop removal failing development expectations (Fox 41)
- ‘350’ event planned in Louisville to raise awareness of environmental issues (LEO)
- Recession & rain helped improve local air quality in 2009 (C-J)
Architecture
- Great video of a German housing block re-imagined as a game of Tetris (Archinect)
- Architect Rem Koolhaas talks about architecture in the trailer to his movie (Archinect)
- Are these the world’s ugliest buildings? I’d say some are, some aren’t (T & L via P-zen)
- What’s modern architecture look like now-a-days? Check out these award winners (Bustler)
- Have architects abandoned the search for utopia for more pragmatic ideas? (Lebbeus Woods)
Suburbs
- Strip mall vacancy rates up to 17-year high across U.S. (Reuters via NRDC)
- Some experts predict today’s existing sprawl could be tomorrow’s slums (MSN via NRDC)
- A few ways some suburban towns are going green (NY Times via Twitter)
- Can ‘bypass trails’ help to connect a disorganized suburban street system? (StreetsBlog)
Everything Else
- ‘Localism’ on the rise as fewer Americans relocating since 1962 (Newsweek via Archinect)
- Do cities held up as urban models really represent American diversity? (Urbanophile)
- In post-recession America, is renting gaining over home-ownership? (Citiwire)
- How is Atlanta dealing with panhandling and begging in its downtown? (AJC via Twitter)
- An outsider’s epiphany on the allure of skateboarding as act of imagination (C-J)
- Majority of the world economy is driven by 40 mega-regions (WSJ via Twitter)
- Finding shelter for the homeless can save taxpayer money (LA Times via P-zen)
- The new issue of GOOD has a roundup of quite a few interesting topics (GOOD)
“Lou’s bike commuting rate lagging behind other cities at 0.4%”
I’m not sure we’re “lagging”, I just think most of our peer cities haven’t got a merged city/county government. You can see a huge drop in Louisville’s ACS data from 2000 to 2005 (see http://www.bikeleague.org/blog/2009/10/bicycle-commuting-trends-2000-to-2008/ ), when either half of us stopped bicycling without anybody noticing, or merger flooded the statistics with McDriveThruFume sucking suburbanites. Of our regional competitors, by far the best numbers come from St Louis, with 0.7% … St Louis? … Yeah, they’re sampling only their most cosmopolitian 350,000 people, so they dominate Louisville, Nashville, Indy, Cinci, and Lexington. I imagine if we used the old city limits, we’d do pretty well too!
But the real story in the ACS numbers are the frankly huge walk-to-work numbers. Check out http://cartky.org/node/402 . Walking dwarfs cycling, and may pass transit ridership in popularity.
I’m just guessing that is somewhere in Strathmore Village, on the east side of Bardstown Road. But it is only a guess.
I am thinking that this sidewalk is somewhere in St. Matthews, based on the fact that the road is very narrow and doesn’t have any curbs. But I don’t have a more specific guess because I don’t know St. Matthews well at all.
I spent this past weekend at the excellent Bluegrass Pioneers program (with links from Bioneers in San Francisco) at UL. I was moved and motivated by many of the talks and presentations – particularly, by the way, by the smart and clear documentary Coal Country. I was irritated, though, by a local discussion of transportation led by a man who became apoplectic ranting about his perception of evil in the hearts of just about anyone who didn’t ride a bike or the bus.
It seems nearly impossible to have a calm discussion about biking. On the one hand there is the very real self-righteousness of some bikers; on the other, the nasty power obsession of some drivers ( I recently had a, well, … obscene… argument with someone on HotBytes who had boasted about running bikers off the road). But the man at Bioneers was not helping the cause by quoting Scripture about ‘Justice.’
I may not be helping the cause by making a distinction I seldom see made: between the rainbow-clad lizard in spandex speeding down the road, and the guy in a helmet with a day-glo vest riding his Schwinn to work. I love seeing more and more of the latter. That’s the direction we should be going in: visible, careful, eco-friendly… and greater and greater in number.
The former is a bit more of a problem. Some, I know, are also on their way to work. But for many, the road is their spa, their exercise room. That’s a good thing, of course, especially in a town that is as fat and out of shape as this one… but it’s a DIFFERENT thing. Those people should feel safe on the road, but they can’t really shake their fists when they surprise people, when folks get annoyed, when they are riding in packs and slowing traffic and irritating drivers. They must admit to themselves that right now they are almost anomolies, and therefore, well, a little dangerous. Caution and patience on both sides is necessary.
What I want to see is some clear articulation, suitable for riders and drivers, of what is now supposed to happen on the road. I sure don’t know. When I drive I try to be careful. I keep a safe distance. I signal (now THAT, dammit, is an anomaly in this town!). I slow down a bit and decide what the best action might be.
But there are few guidelines. Do I swing away? Do I slow down to his or her speed? Do I imagine he or she has a little personal lane and ride beside them, a little to their left? Dunno.
And can’t I, when biking, do the Idaho Rolling Stop (what a sane take that is)? Do I swing over to the sidewalk a bit when I just get scared? How the hell do I make a good, safe left-hand turn?
It’s time, I’m saying, to leave the grand philosophies – Bikers are Saviors… Bikers are Dangers – and talk practicalities. How do we DO this?