PruneTracy

The existing rail line past the Lebanon station is about a third of a mile away from the site. They could add a spur to the site, or a station on the existing line if they want to give people the Disney World style walk twelve miles a day experience. This site also has a big cedar glade on it, not sure how I feel about that. They ought to include a nature-type section highlighting the cedar glade and the flora/fauna within.

In Tennessee the markings are valid for 15 calendar days, but typically one would make an 811 call for any digging, not necessarily construction. It could also be for a utility project on Peabody.

Is he the patron saint of suppositories?

I'm not trying to start something but I don't know if I would contrast AirBNB with big-money lobbies. Its revenue puts it at the same level as the mid-sized hospitality companies. It's a bit like saying Uber provides a political counter-point to the big-money interests of the taxi lobby; while not exactly inaccurate it paints a picture of David vs. Goliath when in reality it's more like Godzilla vs. Mothra (with not-so-subtle implications to the fate of the city and its residents). Besides that, many of these Silicon Valley companies who began life with what I'll generalize as "don't be evil" mission statements are not really living up to their creed. I don't really trust AirBNB to act in the best interests of Nashville residents any more than I trust, for example, Hyatt Hotels Corp.

Putting the main entrance of your new restaurant on a viaduct that's about to be reconstructed? Wow this movie is 18 years old.

It could be supported by regular appearances by Chris Gaines. As it stands, if the aforementioned "Low Places" is not referring to Paradise Park this has all been a gigantic waste of time.

I know this is a flippant response but you'd be surprised. I've been on several road projects in very rural parts of the state in the past few years where we had to do commercial ROW takes because the property owners were operating them as STRs. Airbnb, et al. market their services as facilitating vacation rentals (and we obviously see that side in Nashville and other urban areas) but it seems like people are using them for more mundane purposes. We are relocating a family right now where the dad moved here to take a job from out of state and they are staying in an STR in the middle of nowhere until they find a house (not an easy task right now). We had one that was a legit mobile home a couple of years ago, which I thought was against the terms of service of many of these companies. One guy was in effect running a timeshare near Kentucky Lake where he had a couple of houses set up for boating/fishing and apparently had regular "customers" who were coordinating when they would be able to use them on the side. Some of these I imagine are not STRs in the legal sense but they are using STR companies, if inefficiently (the timeshare guy especially did not seem to be getting much out of his deal other than coordinating housekeeping, which I think was with Marriott or at least not one of the "retail" services). I have not been on the owner side either so I'm not sure how helpful or profitable it is. But the moral of the story I guess is that in today's world the urban/rural divides are becoming less clear and I could hypothetically see how state legislators would have a dog in the fight. It could have just as easily gone the other way in different circumstances where the state would look to restrict STRs in areas where residents/homeowners were fine with them, with a little money from, say, hoteliers greasing the skids. Of course that's all irrelevant as this is simply an issue of politicians getting paid to do what they do, as always.

Part of the problem (and one that is shared by all cities looking to upgrade their bike infrastructure) is that the preferred applications for bike infrastructure change frequently. Generally if you are driving and turn on an unfamiliar road you know where to go: stay between the yellow and white lines. Similarly for pedestrians, you're on a sidewalk or mixed-use path. But if you're on a bike you might be in the travel lane or on a path or in a bike lane either one-way on the right side of the road or two-way on the "wrong" side. This is not to mention bike boxes and other features that may or may not be present. So it's hard to keep up consistent infrastructure and consistent expectations for what is and isn't a bike-friendly street, especially on retrofits on limited ROW.

This confused me too so I clicked through to the section where they discuss it. It seems their criteria is having a large area with open space close to the stadium or downtown area where fans can gather to watch the action on video screens and otherwise mingle. KC and Cincy both proposed in the bid book to use their large downtown parks for this function. LA on the other hand doesn't have such a space separate from their stadia. And as we all know there's nowhere in downtown Nashville where groups larger than 30,000 can assemble to watch sporting events. I personally counted 29,999 people in this image. Also the airport ranking factors in annual passenger volume and distance from stadium at the airports listed in the bid book, the latter of which being what killed DC's rankings.

Not to split discussion from the new stadium thread but I went to the hockey game and walked around the Car Hole with an eye towards needed repair and renovation. The big question mark to me is still the idea that the concrete substructure needs to be replaced; as far as I could tell there was no sign of deterioration and in fact most of the concrete looked pretty good for its age and for being somewhat exposed to the elements. Of course I had also drank approximately $862 worth of adult beverages* at that point and after a Preds loss (or at all) most of the other fans on the ramps weren't particularly interested in my real-time and loud structural inspection. * An alternative strategy would be to reduce the cost of concessions. Metro could subsidize 20 years worth of concessions, it would be cheaper and attendees would either be happy enough with the value to overlook the state of the stadium or too drunk to notice.

Construction on the Buckner Road extension and interchange will be starting soon as well. There's EPSC up on the western segment of roadway, should start seeing dirt move next week.

Maintenance by itself would be much cheaper than a new stadium, but the framing presented by the Titans for cost comparison is between the planned renovations and a new stadium. I don't really buy some of the arguments for needed core maintenance (such as having to replace the concrete substructure with steel). We know the Car Hole was built as an entry-level stadium but there's a difference between renovation and maintenance as well as the form each take. The Titans don't really have much incentive to approach renovations from a cost-conscious standpoint because a) it's very much possible to get Metro to finance it directly or indirectly and b) it makes it easier for them to throw up their hands and say, we just can't make the numbers work unless we get a new stadium. In theory Nissan Stadium should be fairly easy to expand or renovate: it has two structurally separate seating towers, the end zones (especially the south end zone, which does not have back-of-house facilities under it) are basically a blank canvas, and the entire stadium has easy access to the substructure via lack of architectural cladding. I like the plan for renovations presented but there are several items, such as removing and rebuilding whole sections of the upper deck on the corners, that are going to be expensive regardless of inflation or supply chain issues. Is there an easier and cheaper way to provide the same gameday experience? What have similar stadiums of age and configuration around the country done? Gillette Stadium closed their south end zone by connecting the upper deck concourses and put in a field-level club on the other side. M&T Bank Stadium has new party decks and club areas in the corners. Raymond James Stadium just has a pirate ship and that alone is a ton better than the fake houses left over from the LP Field era (a time in Titans history that everyone wants to forget for a number of reasons). Another good template for thought here is how college stadiums build and expand. Obviously their funding model is completely different, but generally universities work with what they have instead of tearing down and rebuilding. If Nissan Stadium were home to an SEC powerhouse both end zones would have already been filled up by premium seating towers and, having been to several SEC stadiums, they rival their NFL counterparts. They're definitely nicer than current amenities at the Car Hole: I'm not even sure it's the nicest stadium in the state, but the other contender is a hundred years old. Again I'm not against a new stadium but I don't buy the notion that it's a competitive choice purely from a financial standpoint. Whether it's worth it to attract more events and the extent to which it accomplishes that is a different matter.

This was my point about the new stadium costs versus renovation. We know that the cost of building materials has skyrocketed, but you have to build new stadiums with the same materials. We are easily in the $3 billion range for a new stadium if planning started today (meaning construction is at least 5 and more likely 10 years of inflation later) and that is not necessarily a state-of-the-art stadium like SoFi (which, it should be noted, hosts two NFL teams, was intended to be a centerpiece not just for LA but the league as a whole, and is in the second-largest metro in the country). We don't have to take the Titans' reasoning for revisiting the issue at face value, we know they want a new stadium and always have. That's what all professional teams want regardless of what they say. As far as the Super Bowl goes, it's continually getting pushed into a better time for Nashville. The average highs in the second week of February are 50 to 52 degrees, lows are right at freezing. In any other context this is called football weather. There have previously been talks to push the Super Bowl to Presidents' Day weekend (solving the Monday morning after issue) which adds a couple of degrees to both values. I'm not against a new stadium but we need to take a step back and look at the big picture. We built a new baseball stadium on Metro's dime 7 years ago, we just issued bonds for a new soccer stadium that had to be built because we were told NSC couldn't possibly play long-term in the aging, not-perfect-for-soccer Car Hole. Bridgestone is older than Nissan and I'd argue is more valuable to the city as a multi-purpose events destination; the Predators may say they want to keep it but they may also change their mind when every other pro sports team in the city has a shiny new venue. And by the way the city is somehow broke. This is a pretty big investment to make at a time when we don't even know whether governments and leagues are going to suspend play, cancel games, or play behind closed doors now that that's on the table. This is all to get in the rotation for the Super Bowl, CFP championship, or Final Four, all of which have 15-20 other locations to choose from. But setting that aside I don't think the city has to chase anything. The NFL has already made concessions for playing the Super Bowl in open-air, cold-weather venues because they wanted to be in New York City; they put a draft on Broadway for the first time because they wanted to be in Nashville. The superspeedway was dead to rights but there was a full NASCAR weekend there last year, and will be this year, and we might even have two dates at two tracks in the near future, because NASCAR wants to be here. IndyCar put a race on a frankly marginal street circuit, and they're going to do it again, to be in Nashville. If the SEC or NCAA want to come here they'll find a way to make it happen (by the way climate data for the first week in December is similar to the second week of February).

That makes a lot of sense, I know that many building material suppliers are offering a massive discount for new stadiums only.

You all have to stop posting engineering problems on here, it ruins my productivity. But unfortunately it's not deep enough, the minimum draft of the USS Nashville is 23 feet and the locks downstream of Nashville bottom out at 15-20 feet. Dredging is cheap, just putting that out there. Or, with 48,000 shaft horsepower (out-muscling any barge tow or riverboat) you could park it at the Ohio River, wait for the next high water event, and make a run for it, the premise of which would be a great action movie. (Vin Diesel is a down-and-out river pilot looking for his chance at redemption after sinking the General Jackson. Michelle Rodriguez is a hard-partying bachelorette taken captive by East German riverboat pirates. They have the nuclear codes and they're holed up in Fort Donelson! It's The Lockmaster, coming this summer.) Ironically, the much larger light cruiser USS Nashville (scrapped in 1985) would have been much closer to making it in an extreme draft situation (15 feet, 6 inches) and had both the powerplant (100,000 shaft horsepower) and armament (15 6" main guns) to, uh, overcome any obstacles along the way.

I had a post yesterday about building a new performing arts campus in and around Legislative Plaza, thought I would crunch the numbers on it. I go in the Polk Building regularly and have seen a few shows in the Polk and Jackson theaters but know nothing about TPAC's back of house outside what one can surmise from wandering around the ground floor of the building, so much of this is based on speculation and comparisons with other stand-alone (i.e., not under an office tower) venues. The surface parking lot adjacent to the Snodgrass tower could serve as a location for a new opera house (a main theater comparable to Polk). At 41,000 square feet it compares favorably with newer venues around the country in terms of area and dimensions, so unless I'm missing something it seems to work. I'm not wild about it fronting the Capitol Hotel but it is what it is. For the rest of this we can assume that Legislative Plaza gets torn out (as noted it is in poor condition and probably faces the same deferred maintenance as the Polk tower) and Capitol Boulevard is extended all the way to the Capitol, as it was previously. It can be a pedestrian walkway, it's all the same to me. But we'll preserve the terminating vistas. This would require some fill back to existing grade but there could be tunnels linking the venues. I wouldn't advise trying to use the space for floor area because if there's one lesson we should learn from all this it's don't build stuff under other stuff. On the southeast corner we can put a theater or theaters comparable to Jackson. Or it can partially include TPAC admin space or whatever. The square footage is favorable with comparable theaters but at 110 feet the site is a bit narrow. I think it could work though. The northeast corner is a black-box flexible space similar to Johnson. As far as I can tell there is plenty of space for this, these theaters are typically smaller. Maybe it could include admin space or a flex event/lobby area similar to how TPAC uses their existing space. In between these could be an open-air portico or peristyle similar to the existing one at War Memorial (but open at both ends). That would preserve the views up Deaderick and allow for pedestrian circulation. The Vietnam and Korean war memorials could be left/moved to the open space to the south of the auditorium, or maybe they could be moved to Bicentennial Mall (where the WWII memorial already is) along with the military wing of the state museum. There is plenty of grade change throughout the whole site so there are opportunities for street activation with cafes, retail space, etc. as well as the ability to hide loading docks and provide above- or below-ground connections between venues for back of house. And of course it goes without saying that these should all be built in the Ionic school of Greek Revival style rivaling the nearby Capitol in terms of architectural quality.

I always thought Elmington Park on West End would be the ideal location for Nashville's Major League Cricket oval. It's about the right size and Elmington Park already sounds like a cricket venue. Plus the surrounding neighborhood just screams we would watch cricket.

So a couple of things going on. First as PHofKS mentioned previously the design of the tower (where the floors are suspended from the trusses at the top) is the primary issue with regards to maintenance and replacement. I think it's the last building of this design in the world. The floor is noticeably sloped towards the outside on some floors. It's getting a little weird to make trips to TDOT headquarters, makes you want to send your more expendable employees. Outside of the structural problems the whole building could use a facelift. I was there at a meeting a couple of years ago and the service elevator (which was on a wall diagonally from our conference room) randomly fell a floor and a half. No one was in it but it made quite a racket, I thought it was curtains for me. General Services had been renovating some TDOT floors but stopped a few years ago when I assume they realized it was a lost cause. That being said, the core of the building (the narrow part you can see from the exterior immediately above the ground floors) is the only structural part of the building extending down, so theoretically it could be demolished without affecting what's below. You would have to strip it down then remove the floors in portions from the bottom up. This would obviously be very slow and very expensive and it's not guaranteed with the structural state of the building that it would remain stable while this was going on. And then you would still be stuck with the core. Honestly seeing Belmont build the Fisher Center makes me think we need a proper opera house in the city. It would be neat if the state could tear out Legislative Plaza (which needs substantial repairs as well) and use part of it and part of the space around Snodgrass to build a performing arts campus with an opera house and smaller venues.

It's time for another (or the only) installment of Things Prune Tracy Thinks About on His Lunch Break. 505 (formerly 505 CST) often advertises the Aerie penthouse as the tallest residence in Nashville. While this is true, it's carefully worded. Is it the highest residence in Nashville? I went back and measured the ground elevation at 505, a topic long debated on that building's thread. The elevation of Church Street in front of 505 is about 503 feet, and the building is 523 feet tall. We'll be generous and say the penthouse is 1,026 feet ASL. I worried for a minute about being inexact, but in the end it doesn't matter. There are two houses in Oak Hill immediately north of Radnor Lake that sit at about 1,140 feet ASL and are thus the highest residences in Nashville. These are higher than both 505 and other high-rises in the county on hills, such as Wessex Towers and Skyline Medical Center. They are also higher than the architectural height + ground elevation of the AT&T Building, which made me wonder for a minute if they were the highest structures in Nashville, until I remembered that broadcast towers exist. (So that honor goes to the nearby WSIX-FM transmitter in nearby Forest Hills, at 1,804 feet ASL.) As an aside, the higher (and larger) of these two houses would go for about $7.8 million according to Zillow, at 6 bedrooms, 7 baths, and 10,600 square feet. If you combined the two penthouses at Aerie 505 (one has already sold, so hypothetically) you'd have 6/7 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms, and 8,100 square feet, but it would set you back a little short of $13 million. We really need to do something about the affordability of living in the stratosphere in downtown Nashville. As a second aside, I did not realize how prominent the hills around Radnor Lake really were, especially given they are in the middle of the basin. I think Nashville's high point might be the highest between here and the Ozarks, it seems to be tied with Flanigan Hill in Maury and Giles County as the westernmost point of this height in the state. In any case odd that it rises above the western Highland Rim.

I don't know what the stormwater looked like for that project but that is primarily what is driving up the cost of Public Works / NDOT sidewalks. MWS is having their way with them in regards to stormwater requirements; many of these are requiring a complete rebuild or new installation of storm sewer. The current one is there because there was one there before the Briley interchange rebuild. I imagine the original one was there because the Interstate cut off Newton and there were several important destinations on Charlotte immediately to the south, namely Richland School. I have no idea though.

Generally speaking, it's not an issue. Coordinating construction projects in tight confines happens all the time. But there are complications that can make construction harder, which means more expensive. Are roadways going to be closed at the time you need deliveries of material? Is it possible to coordinate traffic control? Are you going to have to schedule around loss of utilities, namely power? Timing is also an important issue. If you are a private developer who has financed a nine-figure development, then you have to be able to have control of when you can start leasing/selling, when your building opens, etc. or else you stand to lose a lot of money. It wouldn't do to spend most of your loan on getting to 75% completion of a building then have to stop for an adjacent utility project to be completed, even more so when they have no incentive to finish sooner. There are plenty of projects, and developers by extension, that get broken on unexpected changes in the middle of construction.

The main issue I think regarding the crooked sidewalks is that Metro's guiding documents for sidewalks (i.e., walk/bike plan, major thoroughfare plan, etc.) are contradictory and/or open to interpretation. For example, on a specific Metro sidewalk project we did a couple of years ago, we could have used a 10' sidewalk with no furnishing zone or bike lane, an 8' sidewalk with a 5' furnishing zone and no bike lane, or a 5' sidewalk with a 5' furnishing zone and a bike lane. In this case, neither the back of sidewalk, curb/gutter, nor edge of traveled way line up with another option. This is not a big deal for NDOT (née Public Works) projects, where the typical section can be coordinated for several adjoining projects (although even this seems to be difficult such as on Harding Place), but individual developers are bound to choose the cheapest option for their respective projects. It also doesn't help matters that anything that comes in front of Planning, the Council, or other groups are liable to change based on personal or contemporaneous preferences. I'm not sure there is a good answer. The private developers can build sidewalk much cheaper than Metro, who turns most sidewalk projects into stormwater infrastructure rebuilds. It's not really practical for Metro to create very specific guidelines, as there are always going to be site-specific constraints that mess up the plan. Creating street-by-street (though it would really need to be block-by-block) guidelines is a cumbersome task and one with a short shelf life given changing conditions of local streets; many of the specific sections given in the thoroughfare plan don't work well as anything but general statements of design intent.

All of the I-840 interchanges are unnecessarily complex, I'm not sure why. It makes sense at each end as they were designed to allow for future extensions to the north, less so at I-24 and I-65. My understanding of the I-40 interchange in Wilson County is that the flyover ramp from westbound I-40 to westbound I-840 was originally supposed to go over the I-840 mainline as it would be extended to the north, but when that was dropped the alignment for the flyover remained with the bridge simply filled in. This causes issues for this extension as construction of the I-840 mainline must either close down the flyover or bridge it (a tough task as it's quite a bit higher than the surrounding area). Even so, this concept doesn't utilize the built-in features of the existing interchange, like dropping the cloverleaf ramps for flyovers. It's all in the middle of a cedar glade too which is going to cause environmental issues.

Well, the #1 seed means that Nashville gets spotlighted in at least one additional, possibly two (though I've been a Titans fan too long for that) nationally-televised and high-profile home games.