PruneTracy

https://maps.nashville.gov/sp/2009/2009SP-001/1_SP_2009SP-001.pdf Don't shoot the messenger!

Once they dropped the Pizza Hut co-branding it wasn't worth saving.

This is not exactly relevant to the transit funding in particular but it's worth noting that every other state on this list has an income tax as well. People notice that even if the sales tax is high.

Someone was on the former Mapco site at 4314 Harding Pike doing geotechnical exploration this morning. Last I heard these parcels were supposed to be developed together (although they are owned separately) along with the former Picnic Cafe building (which is to be demolished).

re: the NEC. Washington, DC to NYC is approximately 225 miles and NYC to Boston is approximately 230 miles. These are roughly analogous to the distances between Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville, but the NEC has about ten times the population surrounding the corridor. There are not many other corridors in the US, much less the Southeast, which approach this population density.

That greenway behind the development is going to follow Aenon Creek under June Lake Boulevard and all the way out to the subdivisions north of Duplex at full build-out of June Lake. SEV pushes it heavily in their marketing so I would expect it gets built sooner rather than later.

I looked at doing this several years ago for a planning project. The problem with shifting Nashville Terminal Subdivision traffic to the Radnor Cutoff is the interchange lines north of Radnor Yard. Southbound Nashville Terminal traffic can only enter Radnor Yard from the cutoff; any other movement requires reversing on the "J" line to the Bruceton and Chattanooga Subdivisions. This is a very busy area to reverse trains on. Northbound terminal traffic is also forced through the yard instead of using the "B" bypass line that follows I-65. I don't blame CSXT for not wanting to do this, it would mess up their traffic badly. The other option would be building new interchange lines to the "J" line to allow all movements. Even though this area is mostly light industrial, it's hard to see this going through. The biggest issue on my end is that it takes out Tex's BBQ, this is a non-starter for me.

You're thinking too small. We need a six-story Waffle House, like The Diner. Just the same Waffle House footprint on every floor. Billion dollars a year.

The grants (TAP and MMAG) are agnostic as to the agency proposing them. It can be DOTs, public works departments, planning departments, transit agencies, regional development agencies, etc. This is particularly true for municipalities, because as @nashvillain_too said the roles of city departments even of Nashville's size frequently overlap. You just have to show that you have the capacity to manage the administration of the grant (or can hire someone who can manage it).

I'd be more sympathetic to the street vendors if it wasn't 90% CBD and t-shirts being sold to Broadway tourists. Don't care if they sell stuff on the street but not exactly a produce stand either. Wasn't 2nd Avenue originally called Market Street?

This is the intended path for westbound I-40 traffic entering the airport, as well as for overflow traffic from the discrete access (which should not have the present queueing issues once the project is complete). There's just not that much traffic coming in from the east relative to that coming from downtown. The "exits" from the new Terminal Drive onto Fly Nashville Way allow access to parking from this route. It's an overpass and the only access to Fly Nashville Way from northbound Donelson Pike is at the ramp here.

TDOT's ten-year plan is out: Build With Us (tn.gov)

Bizarre that they spend all the time/money they do making their academic and residential buildings look the way they do, then do this to their athletic facilities.

I realize me answering a question directed to @MidTenn1 is much like your server asking "Is Pepsi OK?" The height of the JRP bridge as it crosses the CSX spur on the east bank is about 470 feet ASL. Ground level underneath the bridge is level at about 417 feet ASL. Typically TDOT wants to see a max grade of 8% on this roadway type (multi-lane arterial). That means you need about 660 feet to run out the elevation difference, and we need to add about 240 feet for the vertical curves on each end. So 900 feet to get down to ground level, which puts you at about 100 feet east of what would be the intersection with First Street. So First Street would need to be raised slightly to make that connection. Note also that although the ADA has an exception for sidewalks adjacent to roadways, to be ADA compliant the max grade would have to be 5% or less. This would make the distance needed to come down from bridge level about 1,250 feet, which is right about where Second Street is. This may be why the graphic @Bos2Nashposted mentions Second Street as a connection but not First.

We know when a vehicular lane is fully utilized; it's when there's congestion. In fact, a traffic jam is demand exceeding capacity, which is partly why the I-24 SMART corridor, for example, includes variable speed limits: lane density and therefore capacity is maximized at 30-40 miles per hour. You will be hard-pressed to find a non-congested roadway along an existing or proposed transit corridor at peak periods, especially considering that reducing traffic congestion is often one of the purported benefits of a new transit project. As for the duration of service, the highest annual ridership of the New York City Subway, the oldest and perhaps most well-known transit system in the country, occurred in 1946. It almost returned to the post-WWII high in the 2010s but halved during covid and has not much recovered. (On the other hand, the city is looking at congestion pricing for downtown Manhattan roadways starting next spring, with the proceeds adding to the $9 billion MTA already receives from government funding annually, so there is hope yet.) I worked on the Amp and it was a vanity project, particularly when it came to the light rail and streetcar options operating in dedicated lanes. The BRT-lite option had similar ridership projections to the other options for far cheaper; this is a common issue in transit planning and I would bet came up in Tempe as well. (The motive behind the push for streetcars or LRT-style vehicles, even buses that mimic the look of either, is the perception by planners and citizens alike that only poor people ride the bus, which is, if not the textbook definition of vanity, at least the same for a self-fulfilling prophecy.) And I'd like to point out again that the roads aren't "free", much like public schools aren't "free". You and I are paying for both with taxes; gas taxes in the former case and property taxes in the latter. The use of choice lanes or similar models to supplement/replace the tax income shouldn't change the fact that you and I are paying into the system and want our money's worth any more so than people who send their kids to private school (among corporations, childless people, and others who pay property taxes) aren't also paying for a public school system they don't personally use. And if you want to say it's a public good then that ought to make their stake in it that much more important, but if they are fed up with it to the point where they are willing to not only pay for it but pay not to use it, I'm not sure the answer is just to make them use it even when they don't want to just to prove a point. Let's suppose it costs TDOT $10 million per year, annualized, to maintain, for example, the four-lane stretch of I-65 between US 412 and I-840 south of town. We'll say this is currently funded through the gas tax. A private corporation or JV shows up at TDOT's door, says that they will build two reversible lanes with dynamic tolling in the median on this stretch of I-65. It's going to cost them $100 million to build, but they believe they can generate $10 million in revenue each year from the tolls. They want to build it on their own dime, then operate it themselves and collect the tolls for 15 years. TDOT contracts with them to do it. Gets built, the corporation/JV gets their money back in tolling as projected, turns the facility over to TDOT when the contract period is up. At this point TDOT has two extra managed lanes on I-65, that they didn't pay for, that they can generate $10 million in revenue from each year. In other words the toll revenue from the managed lanes is functionally paying for maintenance for all of I-65 in this area, which means that you get to drive in the GP lanes for free, real free and not "free", and the gas tax that would have gone to maintain it can now be used for capital improvements elsewhere or, inconceivably in any state but this one, be reduced. Or, let's say the corporation/JV says they will build two managed lanes and two GP lanes for 25 years of tolls. Now you have an extra free lane that you didn't have before, and the tolls in the other lanes that you don't have to use are paying for it, meaning your level of service went up for, again, real free. That was my point: you can argue that utility customers, who are in certain cases equal stakeholders in a partnership, shouldn't get unequal service even if one party is willing to pay a little extra, but the game changes if said party is covering the service altogether. I am positive that most people wouldn't appreciate not getting their power reconnected in a timely fashion because others paid a little extra to get theirs, yet I'm also positive this contingent would dramatically shrink if they weren't paying anything at all for their power in the first place. Actually, they'd probably still complain, but their moral advantage would be reduced. You can call them whatever you want, but they aren't a utility in the sense that your electricity, gas, telephone, or cable/Internet provider is a utility. DOTs don't control their own revenue streams, gas taxes and the like aren't user fees, and their capital improvement plans are based on political considerations rather than maximizing their user base and level of service. There was a guy named Phillip Tarnoff who wrote a book a few years back called The Road Ahead where he advocated turning DOTs into privately-operated corporations. They issue their own licenses to drive on their roadways, they police their own roads with their own highway patrol, they collect fees from users in the form of a VMT or tolls, and they control their own revenue and capital expenditures. The problem with this approach is that it's too large of a leap from what we have; it's far too easy for those with skin in the game (i.e., politicians and government planners) to convince the public this is not in their best interest. It would also kill transit options on these roadways in the same manner that CSX et al. impose prohibitive conditions for passenger service on their privately-owned rail lines. You can argue the social, environmental, etc. benefits of transit, but a profitable venture it is not.

That's fine, but neither TDOT nor the state can afford to place streetcars throughout Nashville, much less all urban areas in Tennessee. Using your example, the entire TMA would pay for 45 miles of streetcar service; for comparison I think WeGo's local bus lines add up to something like 150 miles. And the Tempe streetcars, at least through the end of the year, are free to ride. The maximum capacity for transit only matters if: a) the agency is running cars at that rate; and b) if they can fill them. The rolling stock for the Tempe streetcar can hold up to 32 passengers seated or up to 150 standing, and they are running on 15-20-minute headways currently, which means at best they can move 600 passengers per hour right now. If they ran standing-room-only cars at five-minute headways they could potentially exceed the capacity of single-occupant vehicles in a lane, if the demand were to exist. If you find a transit system of any vintage nationwide that is carrying this volume in dedicated ROW on surface streets let me know. So you have a moral objection to DOTs building new tolled lanes to pull people out of the general-purpose lanes but it's fine to take up ROW with vanity transit projects carrying a fraction of the people? There are P3 arrangements with tolled lanes such that it's possible to have the toll revenue pay for maintenance/operation of the entire facility, including general-purpose lanes (i.e., you get to drive on the GP lanes for free, not just "free" because the gas tax isn't collected at point of use, thanks to the revenue generated from tolls in a few choice lanes). Would you be OK with people jumping line at the DMV if they paid your registration fee? Priority service during a power outage if they covered your light bill? I can guarantee you there will not be any transit projects existing now or proposed in the future that involve using transit fares to pay for vehicular lanes. Personally if we are going to consider roads as a public utility then we need to give TDOT the power to set usage fees on all state roadways, manage the demand for their roads 24/7, and develop their own revenues and budget. Scrap the gas tax, put the THP and DMV aspects of TDOS under them, and let them cook. I'm not being facetious in saying this, it would almost certainly lead to an improvement in service and more efficient use of the money involved, but it's a paradigm shift that I don't think most people would like.

I would think so, but that is the mandate given to the department. They can deemphasize the county seat connectors all they want, but when a state legislator wants them to include a project in their plans because it falls under that program, he is technically correct in doing so. I promise you all, I am as anti-government as they come, but TDOT does the things they do for a reason. I'm on here using a dick joke from The Simpsons as an alias precisely so I can criticize them when I want to, and I have plenty of that to go around, but especially at the executive level you all are not saying much they don't already know.

The Tempe streetcars carried 800,000 passengers from opening in May 2022 through August 2023, which is an average of less than 1,700 riders per day. A single vehicular lane at max density can carry about 1,700 passenger car equivalents per hour. Right now TDOT can build from 40 to 60 miles of a one-lane highway widening for $200 million. The county seat connector program is a legislative priority, it was part of the 1986 gas tax increase. The point of the choice lanes is that you don't want everyone to be willing to pay to use them. If you did, there wouldn't need to be a toll at all. The point is to be able to manage demand on the lanes to keep them free-flow at all times, even during peak periods. If you keep them moving, as mentioned above, you take 1,700 passenger car equivalents per hour per choice lane out of the general-purpose lanes.

Frankly, because the demographics of IndyCar fans are more palatable to new Nashville and Wedgewood-Houston residents than the demographics of NASCAR fans. Same reason soccer is embraced in spite of the same traffic/noise concerns for 17+ weekends a year instead of two, or why EV drag racing (which has minimal local or national presence compared to any of the aforementioned events/sports) is considered a viable replacement that satisfies the charter. If you want to talk about who doesn't care about the history of Nashville it's the people who don't have a history in Nashville.

https://www.wegotransit.com/ride/maps-schedules/bus/18-airport/

NWCTS_Final_Report_Oct2017.pdf

The existing Buckner Lane (or should I say the pre-construction Buckner Lane) will be abandoned.

Most of the indoor football leagues are regional in nature and this reincarnation of the AFL seems to have pulled from the Midwestern ones (unlike the Kats, most of the announced teams have been operational recently). Indoor/arena football is interesting because there have been a number of coexisting leagues with similar levels of investment/talent since the original AFL folded. Aside from the regional nature of the leagues many teams will jump ship from one league to another after the season is over. Very similar to college football conferences. Some of the leagues will also schedule against each other or play exhibitions.

The bridge is 700 feet long and there are no protected bike lanes on either side. I'm not sure what you guys were expecting to get out of a bridge replacement project.

I think a multi-lane highway makes sense in terms of creating a corridor from Clarksville to Florence and Muscle Shoals; it would connect five county seats as well (and the county seat connector program is a worthwhile endeavor even though, or perhaps because, some are remote). There is also a feasible corridor all the way across the state using the Buffalo River and other river/stream valleys. Whether or not it is an immediate priority, I don't know, but should be an ultimate goal. I'm not a fan of using infrastructure speculatively for economic development because: a) sometimes that development, or the infrastructure itself, doesn't follow through to completion; and b) there's a larger point to be made about whether we should be scattering employment bases across the state and creating conditions where regions are dependent on a single large employer (this is the reason Perry County was in bad shape at the time this project was studied in the first place; when the Siegel-Robert Automotive plant closed with 500 jobs lost it sent Perry County to the top of the unemployment list in both Tennessee and the ARC). That being said, Tennessee has done very well in recent years partially by being responsive to employer needs for infrastructure (cf. Blue Oval City), and even Perry County has added jobs and population with unemployment at background levels in spite of zero-point-zero miles of multi-lane highway in the county. Ultimately, as long as our highway system uses tax money, it will remain beholden to political interests. There is an alternative model to treat state and local DOTs as public utilities, allowing them to replace gas taxes or public earmarks with VMT taxes, tolls, etc. and thus bring their own funding under their control. The long-term ramifications of this are unclear, and seems unlikely in any case that even the deep-red Tennessee legislature would relinquish control of the largest single landowner in the state and their $2 billion $5 billion budget. However, the TMA allows TDOT to create P3s that base funding models on viability of long-term revenue streams and this is going to have to be the future of highway expansion in urban areas in Tennessee and elsewhere.