Liberty Green has become a showcase of late for great paving techniques that dually make Louisville more beautiful and more sustainable. Crews have been working on Clay Street between Jefferson and Muhammad Ali to lay pavers in the development that replaced the Clarksdale Homes and the end result should be a model for the rest of the city.
The two block segment of Clay already features a wide park-like median that slows traffic and provides some green space for the neighborhood. Now, the stretch is also paved in pervious synthetic bricks. Besides offering a rich visual texture to the streetscape, these pavers feature a clipped corner that allows rainwater the chance to slowly seep into the ground instead of rushing to the city’s overburdened sewer system.
Workers have been placing the bricks by hand and filling the gaps with a fine gravel to create a smooth finished surface. The same system has been used in the parking lane in other parts of Liberty Green, but here the entire street gets the treatment. A similar system is planned for the parking area of the nearby LEED-registered Liberty Green Community Center.
This story was linked as a related to story to a Nov. 2015 update on the Liberty Green area.
In 2015, the “sustainable” brick pavers have proven a near-disaster. Many are loose or missing, as they move laterally when you drive on them. They also move when I you ride a bicycle over them, as I do frequently. There are deep ruts formed by truck tires along the high-traffic paths The junction of the brick sections with the regular concrete curb along Jefferson/Liberty had sunk so badly that people were damaging their cars trying to pass through this area. Recently the city put a nice wide asphalt ramp over the bricks near junction to smooth out the road. I predict that these bricks will either be removed entirely or simply paved over within two years.
I will say this for the bricks – they have made that road unpleasant enough to drive or ride on to the extent that I avoid it, reducing traffic throughput. Instead I just drive a little further and clog up the Market/Baxter/Liberty intersection even more thoroughly.
Also, I noticed last week that at least one of the small trees planted in the central grassy area on Clay had been broken down to a splintered trunk, perhaps by neighborhood kids who use the area as a playing ground. Or worse, maybe the tree was destroyed by a car that plowed right through the makeshift playground.