Lexington Herald-Leader www.kentucky.com
Guest editorial
Tuesday, Apr. 14, 2009

by Van Meter Pettit

While most Lexingtonians are trying to make ends meet, our government has been sorting out a lawsuit filed against us by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Lexington is being sued because many of the creeks in Fayette County are regularly overloaded by pollution in violation of the Clean Water Act.

This comes from underdeveloped or ill-maintained sewer and storm water infrastructure. Urban flash-flooding caused by too much paving and too little water retention has made a bad situation far worse.

Lest some scoff that this is just government meddling, you might want to talk to the families with sewage rising in their basements, the horse farmer who spent $40,000 in one year hauling off garbage, or family and friends of the grown women who drowned in a culvert while trying to cross a city street.

We have neglected a vital, but little seen, public investment for a very long time. The fees and the work to be done are not a punishment; they are about deferred investment. If we do this right, we will have cleaner water flowing into the Kentucky River upstream from where we will soon draw our tap water.

Our dilemma is that since we are in a financial crisis, we are proposing a storm-water fee as frugally and expediently as possible, before all the facts are gathered and without adequate public input. By shooting for minimum cost at the front end we may blow a big opportunity that won’t resurface for decades.

The proposed storm-water ordinance addresses the management of rainwater. It directly impacts our urban waterways (the point of the lawsuit). Water quality has everything to do with how we use our urban environment. It is a complex issue that requires substantial citizen input.

The Storm Water Task Force was open to the public, but its proceedings were a closed loop of prearranged conditions. For example, the proposed ordinance set the fee at an arbitrary monthly rate of $4.16 and then made the staff and task force members back into what could be accomplished with this fixed funding (with considerable friction it has just jumped to $4.32 monthly or $51.84 annually).
Despite the last-minute rate adjustment, basic issues that affect water quality are only marginally included and, given the funding, may not be affordable.

For example, even though the EPA sued Lexington over water quality in our creeks, there will be little or no money available for stream restoration or landscape buffering along our floodplains.
Here’s where we are missing a big opportunity.

Lexington is one of few cities nationally where the rural landscape is our urban identity. A strong relationship with the environment is not just a nice thing to have, it is a necessity if you want people to believe you are who you say you are. And it is critical if we want to compete with Austin, Boulder, Madison, Portland or the like in attracting a talented work force.

Lexington is also one of very few cities of any size that does not sit on or near a big body of water. Since our creeks are the epicenter of the lawsuit, it seems pretty well justified to invest in our waterways directly, making them safe, clean and publicly accessible.

Landscape buffers along creeks are critical to improving water quality by slowing runoff and filtering out pollution.

Modern storm water standards call for a 30 foot vegetative buffer on each side of a creek. If we refocus our priorities so that 25 percent of the storm water funds are used to restore our creek corridors, we could directly address the water quality problem and give Lexington the scenic waterways it lacks and the recreational trails that are consistently identified as a top priority.

“One quarter for creeks” is a slogan meant to refocus Lexington on the crux of the lawsuit. This mayor and council have been exemplary supporters of trails. If we can connect the dots and restore our creeks with 25 cents on the dollar of storm-water funding, we can reclaim our urban creek corridors.

If we will see this lawsuit as an opportunity and not just a crisis, we can create a positive lasting legacy that all Lexingtonians can enjoy.

Van Meter Pettit is a licensed architect and president of Town Branch Trail, Inc.

What this story below means is that we will have the option of returning our streets to 2-way in the future. It does not force us to do so. After considerably more debate I believe it will be clear that it is what we need to do. It is the consensus of scores of cities across the country, two masterplans, 4 years of study, 1000’s of hours of public input, and nearly $1 million in professional consulting by outside planning experts. The last person quoted in the story is a lifelong downtown resident who lives and operates businesses in the core of the city. He knows first hand the detrimental effect one way streets have had on our quality of life and on our downtown economy.

story below
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“Council gives go-ahead for Main, Vine redesign”
Lexington Herald-Leader www.kentucky.com
Wednesday, Mar. 25, 2009

by Beverly Fortune

Urban County Council members gave the go-ahead on Tuesday for the city’s streetscape consultant to do a detailed design of Main Street and Vine Street that would allow both to become two-way in the future, or to maintain their present one-way traffic patterns, whichever the council chose.

Designer Clete Benken, principal with the design firm of Kinzelman Kline Gossman, was authorized at a council work session to come up with a design for 44-foot-wide streets with generous sidewalks, rain gardens and curb cuts that would give the council future flexibility to choose one- or two-way traffic patterns through downtown.

Tuesday’s authorization at times seemed in jeopardy as council members asked what it would cost to convert the streets. They asked repeatedly whether they were committing themselves to a future outlay of funds without knowing the final price.

Several times Benken said all he was asking for was their authorization to do a design.
Mayor Jim Newberry intervened to solicit council approval by calling design work “a time sensitive issue.” If the council wants new sidewalks along portions of Main and Vine done in time for the 2010 Alltech WEI World Equestrian Games, Benken needs to proceed with detailed design drawings now.

Councilman Jay McChord said after the meeting, “This is being a good steward for taxpayer funds because we will have maximum flexibility without committing ourselves today.”

At the same time, “it’s putting the city in a position to make a dramatic difference,” said McChord, a council member who has championed converting one-way streets back to two-way.
McChord called the one-way streets a holdover from the city’s Urban Renewal program of about 30 years ago, “a failed policy.” Downtown business owners have lobbied hard to get two-way streets, maintaining that they are good for economic development.

Benken said he would provide detailed drawings by early June.
The city’s downtown street-scape plan calls for phasing in the conversion of four pairs of downtown streets starting with Short and Second, followed by Limestone and Upper, then High and Maxwell and Main and Vine.

“You have to bring the public along, and you do that by creating a track record of success,” Benken said. “If you desire Vine and Main to be two-way, we strongly recommend you take an incremental approach and build a track rec ord of success.”
The easiest and least costly streets to convert will be Short and Second, because new signals are not required at intersections.
These can be converted before year’s end and can be “a case study for success,” he said, an idea that brought strong positive comments from several council members.

To turn all eight streets back to two-way traffic — as they once were — depends on several benchmarks. These include:
â–  Completing the Newtown Pike extension between West Main and Versailles Road.
â–  Increasing New Circle Road’s capacity in places and improving certain interchanges.
â–  Making changes to the downtown Transit Center.
â–  Completing the Newtown Pike extension fully before Main and Vine and High and Maxwell go two-way.

Newberry said the most recent state highway road plan indicated that the extension of Newtown Pike between West Main and Versailles Road would be completed in 2010 and the entire extension finished in 2014. Councilwoman Linda Gorton said she hoped there would be ways to speed up the process.

Gay Reading, owner of Greentree Antiques & Tearoom on West Second Street, said giving directions to people unacquainted with driving downtown was made difficult by the one-way streets.
“Please, on Second and Short streets, let’s do it this year,” Reading said.

From March 21, 2009 Lexington Herald-Leader
www.kentucky.com

“Clean streams are worth the price- Storm water fee will buy a better city, stronger economy”

Storm Water Fee Task Force.

The very title conjures up visions of long meetings where incomprehensible acronyms are thrown around and no one but a few lifer bureaucrats can figure out what’s going on and why it might matter. Throw in a few references to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a consent decree and it’s a recipe for adult nap time.

But it’s not. For three months a dedicated band of members of the Urban County Council and the city administration have been meeting to thrash out the intricacies of how to pay for cleaning the water that runs through Fayette County.

That’s where it gets interesting — not the fee, cleaning the water. For the water to be clean and healthy, it must be surrounded by land that’s clean and healthy. That means streams not surrounded by junk yards, pavement and abandoned industrial sites but by trees, parks and paths. Sounds like a unique urban paradise, especially when it’s matched with the exquisite Bluegrass landscape that already surrounds us.

That was the vision promoted at Thursday’s meeting by a few task force members urged on by Van Meter Pettit, president of Town Branch Trail, a group advocating for creating a greenway along Lexington’s historic waterway.

They reason that while we’re spending tens of millions cleaning up our dangerously filthy water to avoid being hauled back into court by the EPA for violating the Clean Water Act, we should push a little bit farther to create beautiful, clean places for people to enjoy being outside and near Fayette County’s streams.

That means more money, of course, a larger fee. A hard sell all the time, but particularly now.
But, ponder this question, all who want to attract better businesses and well educated, high-earning workers, who want your kids with big degrees to live here or who simply like to be outside: Which is more attractive, a place where streams hidden behind abandoned buildings, washed up tires and other debris, are so toxic you shudder when your dog gets near the water much less your child; or a community where it’s pleasant to jog, cycle or just sit and relax by small clean streams that thread through the city?

Tough choice?

From March 21, 2009 Lexington Herald-Leader
www.kentucky.com

Below is a recent article from Newsweek that shows us a path toward a Downtown where pedestrians and business are clear priorities above traffic management. Could this apply to our approach on Main and Vine?

article below
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“Where the Neon Lights Are Bright—And Drivers Are No Longer Welcome”
Under Mayor Bloomberg, New York City is embracing a controversial theory: closing down streets can reduce traffic jams.

By Nick Summers | NEWSWEEK
Published Feb 27, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Mar 9, 2009

As the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg usually takes the subway to work. When he travels by car, a police escort zips him through rush-hour congestion. But for a man who himself spends little time mired in Manhattan’s inch-along, horn-chorused gridlock, Bloomberg seems oddly obsessed by traffic—and as a committed environmentalist, he aims to do something to reduce it. “The midtown traffic mess is one of those problems everyone always talks about,” he said last week. “Well, we’re not just going to sit back—we’re going to try to do something about it.” His plan: to permanently bar traffic from large swaths of Broadway.

It’s the boldest example to date of an American city embracing the emerging—and controversial—theories of traffic science. While it’s tempting to see the logjams on Los Angeles’s 405 or Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway as inevitable byproducts of our car-based culture, writer Tom Vanderbilt observes in “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do” that congestion has plagued humans even as they migrated from foot to oxcart to bicycle. But a new generation of theorists is using economics to try to speed things up. For Bloomberg, who’s seeking a third term this November, experimenting with these theories carries risks. Early reactions have been favorable, with a few notable exceptions; one columnist wrote that the Crossroads of the World is “soon to be known as the Traffic-Choked, Tourist-Loving, New Yorker–Hating, Immovable Crosswalk.”

When it comes to New York traffic, Broadway has long been identified as a key culprit. In 1811, urban planners laid out Manhattan’s grid of north-south avenues met by east-west streets, an efficient system of right angles. But those mapmakers left Broadway slicing diagonally through the city, and it’s caused havoc ever since. “Every time Broadway cuts through the grid, it delays traffic,” says Janette Sadik-Khan, New York’s transportation commissioner. It’s especially bad at Times Square, where drivers on Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet heavy crosstown traffic—along with 356,000 daily pedestrians.

In general terms, traffic is caused by too much demand (from vehicles) meeting too little supply (roads). One solution is to increase supply by building more roads. But that’s expensive, and demand from drivers tends to quickly overwhelm the new supply; today engineers acknowledge that building new roads usually makes traffic worse. Instead, economists have suggested reducing demand by raising the costs of driving in congested areas. The best-known example is the “congestion pricing” plan London implemented in 2003. Drivers now pay about $11 a day to drive in the central city. According to one study, the program has reduced traffic by 16 percent.

In 2007 Bloomberg proposed a congestion-pricing plan for New York, but last year state legislators rejected it as an elitist move. In response, Bloomberg began tinkering with the city’s roads in ways that required no legislative blessing. He banned vehicles from Park Avenue for three Saturdays in August 2008. He closed two lanes of traffic on Broadway below 42nd Street. “Bloomberg is taking the position that as long as it’s within the two curbs, it’s [city] property and he can decide how to use it,” says Sam Schwartz, the city’s former traffic commissioner.

These pilot projects fit in with a larger counterintuitive theory that’s gaining traction with urban-planning wonks: that closing roads can reduce congestion. During the 1990s, a British transit engineer named Stephen Atkins read about how San Francisco congestion decreased, rather than increased, after an earthquake knocked out a key freeway. He observed the same phenomenon in other cities that closed roads, too. “In a lot of places, the traffic was not just displaced—a lot of it disappeared,” he says. In a 1998 study he commissioned, researchers studied 60 cases of road reductions and found that when roads were closed, drivers took steps to avoid the area. In economic terms, closing roads raises the perceived costs of the trip (because drivers anticipate hassles), reducing demand.

Green growth advocates, who have gained much influence in Bloomberg’s administration, originally thought about closing all of Broadway below 59th Street. That was deemed too radical, so the plan unveiled last week closes only seven key blocks of the Great White Way. Last month Sadik-Khan unfurled an enormous map and pointed to the horrible intersection outside Macy’s, at 34th Street. Under the new plan, Broadway is closed off one block above and below the intersection, creating adjacent pedestrian malls and allowing Sixth Avenue and 34th Street to meet cleanly. A similar five-block no-drive-zone will border Times Square; together they should reduce congestion by 37 percent on Sixth Avenue, 17 percent on Seventh and some 20 percent on Ninth.

Manhattan is a one-of-a-kind city—an island with its streets in a grid, minority car ownership and a superb transit system. But if the Broadway shutdown works, the scheme could spread to other cities, too. San Francisco last week announced it would study barring cars from a portion of Market Street in order to get bicycles, buses and pedestrians moving more quickly. “I think that 21st-century cities are looking at their streets differently,” Sadik-Khan says. “They’re saying, ‘We need a fresh look at how we’re getting people around, and it’s more than just pushing as many cars into a city as possible’.”

For Bloomberg, 67, a politician who retains an entrepreneur’s love of big ideas and risk-taking, there’s no doubt it’s a plan that makes sense. Based on current polls, he seems likely to win a third term, so it’s time to think about his legacy. Ultimately he’d like to leave New York a greener, more livable city—and one with a lot less honking. That’s a wonderful vision indeed.

By Nick Summers | NEWSWEEK
Published Feb 27, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Mar 9, 2009

A quick note to explain why Town Branch Trail cares about downtown planning so much: our project envisions the trail as a catalyst for and vehicle to a revitalized and bike/ped friendly downtown. If we fail to make downtown the urban core that it could be, then the trail is just not as compelling. In order for Town Branch Trail to fully succeed, we need a worldclass city to connect with our already worldclass landscape.

Editorial below:

“Downtown Planning Gridlock”
Lexington Herald-Leader Editorial
3.5.09
www.kentucky.com

Lexington’s fragile downtown is at risk of collapsing under the crushing combined weight of huge studies and good intentions.

The fate of plans to convert our outdated, highway-like, one-way street system to a more navigable, pedestrian, retail and restaurant-friendly two-way street system is exhibit A. Consider recent history:

â–  “Converting one-way to two-way streets is an integral part of this master plan study.” 2006 – Downtown Lexington Masterplan.

â–  “Perhaps the strongest attribute of a two-way street network is its ability to allow drivers to find alternative pathways through the downtown.” 2008 – Draft Downtown Streetscape Master Plan.

â–  “Foreseeable future — am I going to be alive?” Urban County Council member Diane Lawless Tuesday to Harold Tate, president of the Downtown Development Authority, about when downtown’s one-way streets will be converted to two-way.

“I just can’t say,” Tate’s reply.

Enough, already, let’s do it. That was the message of several council members Tuesday who are fatigued with studies and frustrated with a future that never arrives. We agree.

Council member Jay McChord pressed the issue with a resolution asking the landscape firm that’s planning downtown’s streetscape to come back in two weeks with a schedule for conversion.
The council must keep the pressure on. As Vice Mayor Jim Gray commented, we’re in danger of killing downtown with “terminal incrementalism.”

There are issues to work out, for sure. Changing traffic patterns is disruptive but it won’t become less so by waiting. It’s been done other places, we can do it here.
Why does it matter so much?

Downtown is the economic engine of this city, this region. A lively, successful downtown is one of the key drawing cards for the young professionals we know we need to drive our economy. A successful downtown, as we’ve seen in hundreds of lovely renderings, is a place where people like to sit at sidewalk cafes, stroll from shop to shop, sit and people watch, are comfortable riding bicycles from place to place.

Those dreamy renderings will never become reality while cars zoom by on one-way streets designed only to move them through downtown as rapidly as possible. If you don’t believe this, go take a stroll on Vine Street. It is not a welcoming experience.

The city must work with the state highway department, which controls the rights of way on Main and Vine, to convert those streets. But there’s no reason not to get going on the other paired one-way streets slated for conversion as quickly as possible.

Keep talking, keep studying but don’t substitute either for doing.