jjakucyk

I get the impression that you ‘re unlikely to see any sort of urban liberal values in any city much less than 100,000 people. In today’s paradigm of “happy motoring” you need much bigger cities to get any sort of true urban functionality, so rural cities and towns are more like disfunctional suburbs than anything, which are nearly as conservative as true rural settlements. They think they’re the backbone if the economy while being tremendous leeches in reality.

Isn't it illegal to demolish a building downtown for a parking lot? That's why The Dennison is now an astroturf park. Or will Cranley just make that issue "go away"?

Statements like "nobody wants to do <insert job here>" or "we have a shortage of workers in <industry>" almost always mean companies are cheap and don't want to pay fair market salaries for those positions. Yes it's difficult to take the high road when other companies can undercut you through various shady means, but that's a whole other issue. Sure there are some jobs that command very high salaries and still go unfilled because the skill set is just so esoteric and high-level, but those are rare beasts. The medical industry is the only one I can think of offhand where the education and accrediting system is deliberately constraining the employee pool to keep salaries high. As a cyclist and pedestrian (granted everyone is a pedestrian at some point, even if just walking from their car through a parking lot), I find the notion of autonomous vehicles quite unnerving. Even low-speed local delivery vehicles pose concerns. For instance, who unloads them at their destination, the customer? Will there be micro-delivery robots to take them to the door? Will they be able to double park, block bike lanes, pull over curbs? The knee-jerk answer to those questions is "of course not!" but there's markets like NYC and SF where the consequence of 100% law-abiding AI is that the delivery fails when no legal drop-off location is available. But when an autonomous vehicle is allowed to bend the rules, can someone walking or biking by confront it? You can tell a UPS driver "don't park there" and there's a chance they'll take it to heart. Does an autonomous vehicle even have an input for such interaction, let alone programming to process it? Acts as simple as opening doors can have safety impacts. Is that factored in? I guess what bothers me the most is that the only solution appears to be perfection. More sensors, better cameras, faster processing, more elaborate algorithms, brute-forcing the problem. There doesn't seem to be a keep-it-simple-stupid option, so instead engineers are chasing the long tail of complexity, needing to analyze and account for every possible scenario, but never actually getting there. Will it be better than flawed humans? We may already be there, but it's a very fragile arrangement whose problems are going to be magnified as the fleet grows. Yeah those problems can be fixed, piling on yet more calculations. Because of this, there's already some push to try to simplify the environment to accommodate the vehicles. Better lane markings, more understandable intersections, fewer conflicts, the types of things highway engineers have been using to destroy our cities for nearly 100 years now, only taken to an even more absurd level (complex design, simple function, expensive to build, and unpleasant). This is also happening right when we as a culture are starting to realize just how important complex streets for multiple granular uses are (simple design, complex function, cheap to build, and pleasant). That's just "too hard" for the current AI though, and we have to keep fighting to not lose the small gains we've made in reclaiming our streets for people instead of vehicles.

I was just there two days ago taking photos of the historical details on the 2nd floor. I haven't heard of any doubt about the project happening.

Still cheaper than the dorms.

Well this is the city where pedestrians are given early DON'T walk signals in preference to turning vehicles.

Peel and stick pavement decals? Hell, they could just use regular road paint (rather than thermoplastic) and pressure wash it off later. Granted painting the whole lane red would be ideal, but at least put down the stencils.

That's where transit is important, and why Northside might actually have a better go at it. It's much easier to stop in at the store multiple times a week when you're already walking by on the way home from the bus/train. Once you need to get in the car, then it becomes a weekly stock-up and it's just as easy to drive to Kroger.

Units in Alumni Lofts cost a lot more than that and parking is still extra. In an urban location like this, no matter the unit cost, there shouldn't be (and for the most part isn't) an expectation that parking is included in the rent.

It could also be due to a power outage or surge. The default fail state seems to be to go to flashing mode. It could also be a clock issue wherein the controller thinks it's the middle of the night. There's apparently a citywide telephone or fiber-optic interconnect that is used to synchronize all the controller clocks. I've wondered if there's some issues with that lately because the very closely spaced signals outside my office at Sycamore/Central and Sycamore/Reading have been out of sync with each other all week.

Physically destroying our cities for aesthetic/social engineering reasons (forcing us to drive just to survive) can have adverse consequences that far exceed any perceived benefits.

Perception is all it takes to scare people away. It's a big reason why pedestrian malls have so much trouble in the US. Our streets are simply too wide so there's not enough people to fill up the space and keep it activated. That makes what may actually be decently busy feel creepy and foreboding. Two or three strangers are scary, but two or three hundred is a party.

So they haven't even determined if the road diet contributed at all, but they're going to report on it and use a bunch of scare quotes anyway. No concern for trying to prevent people from being killed and maimed on such roads on a daily basis. Talk about fear mongering, and the danger of "but sometimes."

Glazed brick is so difficult to repair or replace and not look obvious. Once a building stops being heated the freeze/thaw wreaks havoc on it. Normally in these old buildings the heat from inside bleeds out enough that it keeps the bricks warmer and drier. That's why the parapets are the first to go, which you can see even in the 1981 photo. They aren't kept warm and are more exposed, so ice shatters the glazing. There's a house at Victory Parkway and Francis Lane in a similar state. The body of the house is fine, but the front porch and chimneys (which I'm sure haven't seen fires in years) are in a bad state. https://goo.gl/maps/aRfs1QbMiiD2 There's some very similar detailing and overall compositional elements between the house and the theater, I wouldn't be surprised if they came out of the same office. All that said, the theater really doesn't seem all that bad when you look close. Yes the south parapet has fractured brick, and the blue/green tile accents are rough (they look like green tiles that were painted blue at a later date), but the rest of what makes the facade look bad is the peeling and rusting pressed tin detail work on the cornices and balustrades. If that was painted and the windows uncovered then it wouldn't look all that much different than the 1981 photo, save for the loss of the tile roof and the Metropolitan name, which was probably tin as well. In fact, the roof tiles could also have been tin, I've run into that on a building from the same time period.

Clifton, especially the Burnett Woods part of Clifton, is too urban for a natural wooded park. It's already known for being dangerous because of poor visibility and lack of activity. That's what people don't understand. Parks suffer from a LACK of use and activity, not an excess of it. Eyes on the street are just as important in parks as on sidewalks. Urban woods aren't a natural oasis, they're a place that's scary to be in, where people have sex in bushes, and where you can't even walk your dog because they'll step on drug needles or eat discarded condoms. I would argue that to "save the park" more buildings are needed, but not also surrounded by large parking lots either.

The Nashville transit failure was due in part to a massive astroturfing campaign by the Koch brothers. They make COAST look like the sombrero guy in comparison.

Memphis is definitely southern rust belt, as is Birmingham like ColDayMan said. There's no shortage of moribund southern cities, and Tennessee has several. Knoxville and Chattanooga aren't really on anyone's radars, like memphis. Winston-Salem, Norfolk, Richmond, and Mobile could just as well be Buffalo, Milwaukee, South Bend, or Toledo. The states that have some booming cities and some under-performing cities are the interesting ones. It illustrates that it's not so much about state-level policies, but it's very likely due to the developmental legacies of the cities in question. Greensboro doesn't seem as rust belt-y as Winston-Salem, and the two cities have similar population histories, but Winston-Salem seems to have more in the way of the cotton/tobacco industrial legacy, and its growth per decade is much less consistent that Greenboro which has been able to march past it. I think there's certainly something to be said for the ability of smaller more aspirational cities to "shoot for the sky" and actually succeed when they're not encumbered by decades or centuries of legacy infrastructure or service costs, and fewer entrenched special interest groups and culture. They just need to get lucky with the timing and other factors at play. When the local economy is so good, then those special interests have a harder time getting a foothold too.

"What's making these industries move to Nashville"? industries moving to Nashville is what's making industries move to Nashville. With a critical mass of growth, that growth itself becomes the driver of more growth, since much of our economy is based on sprawl-building, whether that's housing, roads/highways, cars, and the manufacturing, financing, and servicing thereof. So you can say they're growing because they're growing, just like some people are famous because they're famous. This is the typical MO for much of the sunbelt.

You've made some absurd statements in the past but that takes the cake.

^ That's "vehicular cycling" in a nutshell.

All that proves is that you're an anomaly. Otherwise the world would be flooded with cyclists.

That's...actually kinda nice.

Ah one of my all-time favorite moments in The Simpsons. If you've ever seen Men in Black you know what Pierogis are.

Except that black car is illegally parked. I don't recall if it was there before they started working or not, but it just got ticketed rather than towed.

Higher voltage service makes running large banks of lights, refrigerators, and air conditioning compressors/fans more efficient, and 3-phase is better for anything that moves. 3-phase motors are mechanically/electrically simpler and less expensive, and especially under stop/start and modulating loads they can have a significant efficiency gain over their single-phase equivalents. That can make a big difference in your HVAC install and operating cost when you have two dozen rooftop units, on top of the chillers for refrigerated and freezer display cases.