jjakucyk

Even sprawl with growth spreads limited resources too thin. It's not that you can't have suburbs, but the amount of infrastructure and services we insist on building for those suburbs is more expensive than the tax base can support. If you want a financially stable suburb without it having to be super wealthy or with crazy high taxes, then you may find that you can't have things like curbs and gutters, sidewalks, street lights, sewer, municipal water, 5-minute fire response times, or 1-acre lots. Many streets might even have to be unpaved. These aren't necessarily bad things either, especially if you're interested in supposed "rural character."

Are there any statistics out there that compare where the spending per pupil goes in different districts? I'm thinking mainly academics vs sports vs busing. Consolidated suburban and rural districts spend a lot of money on busing kids to their isolated school campuses that are impossible to walk to, and I suspect they also spend more on athletic facilities (gyms, pools, ball fields, and all the maintenance associated with them) on top of the programs themselves. I wonder how those factors would play into a unified funding scenario.

You can still have individual units with a shared cooling tower. The issue with completely individual units like these is that they're not usually able to pump refrigerant more than 30'-40' vertically. When it's more than that you need special compressors or totally separate refrigerant pumps or both, and that's more to break down, more energy use, etc. That may be one reason you see so many PTAC's in NYC high rises, aside from limited roof space. Yes they're cheaper, but they really limit your facade designs because of the huge grilles they need. They're not very efficient either, but you do have the benefit of room-by-room control/zoning, which is more difficult and expensive to achieve with a residential split system.

Yup. Gotta have as little shared infrastructure as possible.

Anyone complaining about riding two abreast doesn't get it. If the lane isn't wide enough for a car to pass a single cyclist safely without crossing the yellow line or violating 3-foot passing laws (which on the Natchez Trace Parkway it's not), then there could be two or three or five cyclists all riding next to each other and it doesn't change anything, passing is still illegal and cyclists are not required to put themselves in danger by riding on the edge of the pavement or encouraging a following vehicle to make an unsafe pass. In fact a bunch of cyclists riding two or three abreast is easier to pass than a single-file string stretching far down the road. There's no shoulder on this road either, so even if Tennessee has a law requiring that slow moving vehicles make way after a certain number of vehicles are backed up behind them (one vehicle is not enough), or if like Ohio they allow passing very slow moving vehicles on a double yellow line, there's still zero fault on the cyclists part whether riding two abreast or not.

I don't think that was ever the case. It's more about wear and tear on the starter.

I believe BMW and Mercedes use the auto shutoff for IC engines pretty regularly. I'm pretty sure, however, that they do NOT keep the A/C running (the fan yes, but the compressor no) because the compressor in an automobile isn't an electric device as it would drain the battery in no time, it has a mechanical linkage to the engine.

Southshore is Newport.

The speed limit question needs to be evaluated based on the disparity between three properties: design speed, posted speed, and desired speed. This is a major problem with our streets today, irrespective of self-driving cars. Design speed is the speed at which the roadway is engineered. It's what the subtle cues of lane width, curvature, presence or absence of parked cars, trees, buildings, pedestrians, sidewalks, etc. communicate to the driver about how fast they should be going. The design speed for most interstate highways is 80 mph, regardless of the posted speed. Wide one-way city streets with no parking say "I'm a highway" and encourage speeds of 45+ mph even if it's just drag racing between stop lights. In many states in the country, the design manuals dropped anything below 35 mph setting a floor even on residential side streets. An alley on the other hand, even if it's fairly wide and dead straight, tells you to go slow because of all the garages right up to the sides, the many doors and accesses where someone could come out unexpectedly, and even the rough pavement. Posted speed (speed limit) is used to try to counteract the flaws in the design speed. Unfortunately that means people go faster than the limit because the cues they're getting are telling them it's ok. If you have a self-driving car going the posted limit of 25 mph on a street engineered for 45 they're going to be extra frustrated, especially if the desired speed on that street is really 35, but it was posted at 25 because they assume people are going to go 10 over anyway. That said, in many states the posted speed is required to be the 85th percentile speed. So if you have a residential street with lots of speeding motorists, doing a speed study may actually see the limit increased because "that's the standard." The desired speed is the somewhat subjective but still probably the most important. I call it the speed people should be driving, and it's what the posted speed tries to do but may fail at because of the 85th percentile rule or because it's a "through street" or any number of other automobile-centric policies. One can argue that any street with sidewalks, pedestrians, or cyclists shouldn't have a speed limit higher than 20 mph. That's because an unprotected person hit by a motor vehicle at 20 mph has only a 10% chance of dying, whereas at 40 mph they have only a 10% chance of surviving. Compare this to an interstate highway, where even in an urban setting a limit of 75 or 80 mph could actually be appropriate instead of the usual 55 that nobody obeys. In a self-driving car situation, I can see speed limits being raised in many places even if that's not the best idea. I like to compare the situation in the US with the situation in Mexico. In the US it's assumed that people will be going at least 5 mph over the limit, if not 10 on most streets, and even more on interstate highways posted at 55. In Mexico however, if you go over the limit at all you'll quickly get a ticket, so they usually drive a bit under. That would suggest their posted speeds are probably more in line with their desired speeds due to more aggressive enforcement, which may make self-driving cars doing the speed limit a bit more palatable.

^ That's the kind of thing people remember forever, but never the corrections that come later. Like the subway tunnels are too small, or Obama is from Kenya.

Life should be fair, but I know it's not. Why is pointing out how it isn't grounds for ridicule and dismissive condescension on your part? You stated before that you think non-drivers subsidizing drivers is somehow "very right and very fair" when it's demonstrably not. Even if the ends justify the means, the means can still be unfair.

Just because something's done all the time doesn't make it fair. It's NOT fair to have the poor subsidize the rich, or to have the working class subsidize the middle class. It's not fair to give only fuel points as customer rewards when many customers can't use/redeem them because they don't drive. It's not fair that a city resident on a small lot pays the same rates for gas/water/electric/sewer/telephone/cable/internet as someone in the suburbs with 500 feet of frontage. It's not fair for a parking lot owner downtown to pay next to nothing in taxes because their property is next to worthless without buildings, while there's half a million dollars of infrastructure under the street that still needs to be paid for through everyone else's taxes. But these things are done all the time and nobody bats an eye, that still doesn't make it right.

Also, even if a store wants to prioritize free parking as an amenity, ignoring any government subsidies for the moment, it still means non-drivers are subsidizing drivers. That may not be illegal or anything, but that doesn't mean it's right, and it's emphatically not fair.

They're completely new windows. The old ones had no operable sashes and these do.

The rent doesn't seem out of line at all. $1/square foot/month still seems to be about typical for run of the mill apartments in ok neighborhoods, but that's been creeping up over the years so you can be paying that in more questionable buildings/neighborhoods now. $1.25/sf gets you an older courtyard type apartment in Hyde Park. So $1.50-1.80/sf sounds pretty reasonable for brand new units in a building with on-site staff and which (I assume) includes garage parking.

Or to be more specific, doing something that's not dull and plain would be nice or desirable, but it won't net back an increase in rent enough to cover the additional construction cost. Plus, with stagnant or declining wages, while construction remains pretty expensive, not to mention being in a not too desirable location, I'm not surprised something had to give.

The question is, how many people really want to live in an industrial setting? I assume some market research found that tall ceilings and big windows sell, but too much concrete and steel doesn't. New residents are going to be scrambling for window treatments in this place.

The casting shadows argument is bunk. Central Parkway is so wide, and from March through September the sun is so high that you don't get those shadows. When you would, in the morning or evening in winter, it's usually either cloudy, or you'd need to draw the blinds because the sun is at such a low angle and would come roaring in otherwise. At our 2nd floor office on Central Parkway and Sycamore we needed to get blinds for the south facing windows, despite the Justice Center right across the street, because of the low morning sun angle in winter. For the past three months or so the sun is so high in the sky and rises so far to the north that only a tiny sliver of sunlight comes in through the windows anyway. As for balconies, operable windows, and starchitecture, for one there really aren't all that many starchitects out there. The ones who get hired are usually hired for the signature one-off buildings like condo towers, museums, and university buildings. This project is a bit too market-oriented for that, same with a lot of hotels and other office buildings, apartments, etc. It's not usually the architect driving anything, it's the financiers/developers who made many decisions from the start. This is especially true with anything branded like hotels, which come with pre-designated prototypes and standards that need to be met. I'm sure someone ran the numbers in the preliminary planning stages that balconies and operable windows would not only be more expensive but not worth the tradeoffs. For one thing, on high rises there's pretty strict wind design loads and air/water infiltration requirements that need to be met. Those are a LOT harder to meet with operable windows or balcony doors. The same goes for sound isolation, where operable windows and doors can only achieve marginal performance at best, which isn't usually good enough in a downtown location. Plus, because high rises are subject to so much wind pressure, any operable windows, even ones that only open a few inches, can wreak havoc with the HVAC system, especially common exhaust or fresh air intake ducts. Even plumbing stacks and the elevator shafts can start to act like wind tunnels. That doesn't mean there aren't ways to do it, but $$$.

And do we even have a final cost for the MLK interchange? Where's all the headlines over that?

I do like the idea of making it more of a park/plaza. Even if you did have to keep the parking though, it would probably make more sense to tighten down the time limit, like 30 minutes max.

This is great news, and honestly I'm not too surprised about the parking garage. This corner of downtown is surprisingly parked full with the county administration building, the courthouse, and job and family services, all of which are very 9-5. The A&D Parkhaus garage on Sycamore for instance closes to daily parking before 9:00, and getting a monthly spot anywhere near here is not easy. While it's great that this is right on the streetcar line, especially with the Vine Street Kroger closing to be redeveloped, I do hope that the garage space might take some pressure off other surface lots so they can get redeveloped. Having garages downtown isn't great, but can be looked at as a necessary evil, while IMO surface parking is criminal.

Here's some of the houses being built in River's Edge where the old Highlands School used to be, about ten miles back from the sidewalk. So not only are there garages in back, there's also this big interior street in front. SMH

Wow

This incident wasn't in the city. It's Anderson Township on a highway under the authority of ODOT. Of course that doesn't make it ok, or nobody's problem.

Last I checked though, the world doesn't drop off a cliff at 12th street.