the good city

If you drive by one of these “Share the Road” signs along a Fort Wayne street, do you in any way adjust your driving? What should you do when you see such a sign?

Do you even notice the signs?

I really appreciate the intention of the bicycle signs. But I’m not sure drivers get good, firm instruction from them.

Now, my dear wife tells me that the signs remind her to keep her eyes open for bicyclists. That’s great!

But it looks like Utah and other states have tweaked the idea and come up with something better. Check out the photo below that I discovered on Flickr:

Very nice! Now drivers and bicyclist have a shared understanding of their relationship on the road.

My only suggestion is to replace the “Share the Road” portion with something like “Allow 3 Feet.” The words would be easier for drivers to read and “Share the Road” doesn’t add any important information.

Such signs would help the relationship between motorist and cyclist be a little less rocky.

– Sign image is from the Manual of Traffic Signs, by Richard C. Moeur

A test of the minipost feature!

Where have I been? Well, I’ve been the same place you have been: Looking at this blog, wondering where the next post will come from.

I’ve spent most of the past week thinking about the focus of this blog, and I’ve decided to follow what readers have been most interested in — local commentary and photos. I get many more comments and interest in hyperlocal coverage rather than links to stories elsewhere that I find interesting.

The down side is that I will likely not be able to post every day. To make it easier for you to follow, you can now get emailed updates via FeedBurner whenever a new post goes live.

For those savvy, the RSS feed still operates, of course. Have you heard of RSS, but wondered what it is? Check out this easy-to-understand video from Common Craft.

You can find Google Reader here. And the links to the update services are at the top right, and right here for your convenience.

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Be sure to check these links:

• The New York Times Magazine published an architecture issue titled “The Next City.” It tackles questions such as why are sidewalks essential for democracy and can an instant city ever feel like the real thing?
• City Journal features a story about how New Orleans is rebuilding from the bottom up, and avoids the pitfalls of master planning.

From Time magazine:

The average U.S. citizen completely ignores the regularity with which the automobile kills him, maims him, embroils him with the law and provides mobile shelter for rakes intent on seducing his daughters. He takes it into his garage as fondly as an Arab leading a prize mare into his tent. He woos it with Simoniz, Prestone, Ethyl and rich lubricants — and goes broke trading it in on something flashier an hour after he has made the last payment on the old one. …

By last week, this peculiar state of mind had not only sucked thousands of American oil wells dry, stripped the rubber groves of Malaya, produced the world’s most inhuman industry and its most recalcitrant labor union, but had filled U.S. streets with so many automobiles that it was almost impossible to drive one. In some big cities, vast traffic jams never really got untangled from dawn to midnight; the bray of horns, the stink of exhaust fumes, and the crunch of crumpling metal eddied up from them as insistently as the vaporous roar of Niagara. …

Congress and state legislatures had appropriated millions to build super highways on which speeders could kill themselves at higher speeds. The traffic light, the yellow line, the parking lot, the parking meter, the underground garage, the one-way street, the motorcycle cop and the traffic ticket had all blossomed amid the monoxide fumes—and traffic had gone right on getting thicker and noisier year by year.

Published in 1947.

– Photo by respres on Flickr. Hat tip: Jollyblogger

But Charles Krauthammer wishes the money were staying in the U.S.:

Some things, like renal physiology, are difficult. Some things, like Arab-Israeli peace, are impossible. And some things are preternaturally simple. You want more fuel-efficient cars? Don’t regulate. Don’t mandate. Don’t scold. Don’t appeal to the better angels of our nature. Do one thing: Hike the cost of gas until you find the price point.

Unfortunately, instead of hiking the price ourselves by means of a gasoline tax that could be instantly refunded to the American people in the form of lower payroll taxes, we let the Saudis, Venezuelans, Russians and Iranians do the taxing for us - and pocket the money that the tax would have recycled back to the American worker.

Read his column here.

– Hat tip: Streetsblog

Be sure to read the column Kevin Leininger wrote after his interview with the new president of the Downtown Improvement District.

Lots of good sense coming from Richard Davis:

“I’m alert to the ‘Big Project’ syndrome, where the ‘titans’ decide what should be the thing to change the face of downtown. But success never depends on just a single project,” said Davis … .

Davis … will be looking for projects that may seem small — until you put them all together.

“You’ll see (the district) target the kinds of businesses we’d like to be here, like a pharmacy, and we’re putting data together to make that case (to would-be downtown businesses),” said Davis, who succeeded Dan Carmody, now head of Detroit’s Eastern Market. “We need to pay attention to how suburban amenities can fit in an urban format. We need to find a niche so downtown becomes a destination. You’d only find a place like Stoner’s (gift and novelties shop) downtown, and they were hurt by the closing of Harrison Street (to allow the expansion of the Grand Wayne Center).”

It’s nice to hear Davis talk about the little things that make a city more livable.

Read the column here.

So, how does the financing of Harrison Square fit together?

Here’s how the city’s Web site shows the relationships:

OK, that clears that up.

From today’s News-Sentinel:

When you drive on our terrible streets or drop your kids off at schools that are in dire need of repair, just think of all that could have been done with the money being wasted on downtown.

But don’t think about how the financing of Harrison Square actually works. From the city’s Web site (PDF):

Q: How will Harrison Square be financed?
A: The initial Harrison Square development will have a development cost of approximately $125 million with a 50/50 private-public sharing of the cost. No general property taxes will be used to finance the project. The majority (78%) of the public dollars for the project will come from funding tools and revenue streams dedicated specifically to downtown development and are geographically restricted. Those tools are known as Community Revitalization Enhancement Districts (CRED) and Tax Increment Financing (TIF) Districts. The remaining 22% of the public dollars would come from unrestricted funds such as CEDIT. The numbers presented are the most accurate available based upon current information. Final numbers depend upon the outcome of project component negotiations.

Again: “No general property taxes will be used to finance the project.”

But I do have to lay the blame for the misunderstanding at the feet of the city. The Fort Wayne mayor’s office did a poor job communicating the complicated financing tangle behind Harrison Square when it was announced. The confusion that still exists shows that the city must do better in explaining these complicated deals so the citizens can agree and disagree intelligently

Pray that the cities you love may never become the topic of a photo essay like this. (Click the little gray boxes in the lower left to navigate.)

– Hat tip: Urban Planning Blog