AronG

I enjoy conversation starters, but this just doesn't make any sense to me. The riverside is an asset that should be developed, not hidden away under an unnecessary engineering marvel. Capping the interstates might be harder, but getting high-speed car traffic below the surface is a big payoff. Getting a random 300 foot stretch of river below the surface seems like a bug, not a feature. If we can muster the political will to do anything like this, we'd be better served designing beautiful park spaces on both sides of the river and connecting them with a deluxe pedestrian/bike bridge. I enjoy a lot of what NCDC puts out, but it seems like they sometimes waste their credibility on implausible/pointlessly extravagant proposals. I wish they would harness their design acumen with a similar effort towards laying out how these things could be financed. It seems like if they put in more work on what the resulting space could be sold for and/or how increased property taxes could be captured, they could create more of a turnkey starting point for politicians to pick up and run with a big vanity project. That's one way to get off the ground with a big inner-loop cap project, or our own BeltLine.

The pace really picked up at Cayce a year or so ago; it's been impressive. Is that because of the extra funding that Briley announced a while back, or has that come into play yet? I also wonder if we're getting close to breaking ground on Napier and the other ones. At Cacye I'm looking forward to the street grid getting reconnected, and the market-rate units getting occupied, so we can see how this is going to work out. I'm hoping with more people at different income level, there will be more interest from retailers and places like the closed family dollar on shelby will perk back up.

I don't think this is totally subjective. Occupants that stink up the vicinity, dump pollution into the air, and generate loud and annoying noise are not good neighbors in a densely populated area, independent of aesthetic tastes. I suppose one can appreciate them as a cool visual backdrop from across the river, but I bike past PSC (and the mulch company on South 5th) every week and I can vouch for the fact that they make the whole area around them an unpleasant wasteland.

I am absolutely astonished that this green wall did not come to fruition. Who in the world could have seen that coming?

Yeah OK, how's this: A better comparison might be the overall MTA ridership, which is around 9,000,000 / year. Achieving 20% of that number in one year with no real investment from Metro seems pretty remarkable. Gotta wonder how far it could go if we provided infrastructure for it.

From Walk Bike Nashville:

Zoning in America is such a cluster, and Nashville's as bad as anyone. I'll live and die amazed at how many people can visit beautiful cities throughout the rest of the world, rave about their walkability and quality of life, then come home and join a pitchfork mob viciously fighting to keep it impossible to build anything even remotely similar here. Somehow we've gone down a path where the loudest political constituencies believe they face an existential threat if their neighborhood isn't strictly preserved in the single-use, car-required, income stratified suburban model that has locked so many people into sedentary, socially isolated lifestyles over the last 60 years. If we were rational at all about the best land use policy to maximize livability in Nashville - for everything from health to sustainability to affordable housing - the minimum zoning within 3 miles of downtown would be 4-plexes and townhomes.

Bill introduced by CMs Glover, Bedne, and Hagar to ban scooters from Nashville. https://www.nashville.gov/Metro-Clerk/Legislative/Ordinances/Details/4a7097ec-b23b-4145-8063-02350e7e5018/2015-2019/BL2019-1707.aspx

I expected a bunch of fluff, but this looks like some pretty substantive commitments to me. I wonder if this will be enough to get through the backlash. In my experience there has been some improvement downtown lately. Gonna be tough rowing though, the mayor said on CNN he has a friend that went over the handlebars on one of these and lost his two front teeth.

To me the east side has always had really peculiar gaps in ethnic restaurants (even considering our lack of ethnic enclaves), with a baffling excess of options in other categories. For example, it seems like it seems like we have sushi and ramen places appearing (and sometimes disappearing) all over the place. Nomzilla, kawai, maru, sushi circle, battered & fried sushi (shudder), two ten jack, otaku, etc. Why? Do we really have some kind of elevated demand for sushi over here? We also have really good tacos for some reason (mas tacos, 5 points tacos). Meanwhile we have basically no indian food (which, to my knowledge you can't really explain bombay/sitar/woodlands based on ethnic enclaves, so why can't we have at least one? At some point I'm gonna break down and do a kickstarter.), a single mediocre chinese place (less surprising, not a regional forte), and, for my money, the worst thai food per capita in middle tennessee. Smyrna has better thai food than us for gods sake. Since we're kibitzing, our favorites these days are kawai poke, mas tacos, babo, and far east. Also pomodoro > nicolettos (although the people seem really nice at nicolettos).

I'm all in favor of introducing new form factors, adding to our housing stock, etc., but this looks pretty awkward. Pedestrian access looks bad, and what the heck is a "parking bosque"? The whole thing would be a lot easier to put together if you just did a couple of rows of townhomes. I'm constantly amazed by how far we contort ourselves to avoid building townhomes, which is how growing cities have handled increased demand for housing for a thousand years. But for whatever reason, persons of the NIMBY inclination seem to be more accepting of "cottages" even though they're a worse end result from a dozen different angles, from green space to utility bills.

Yeah, mass timber is a great new trend that makes a lot of sense up to a certain height. I saw they're about to kick off a 21-story tower in Wisconsin. The energy/carbon costs of concrete and steel are not well-known, and the benefits of wood construction are even less appreciated. We're all used to getting angry about trees being cut down, but the real consequences of cutting down trees have a lot more to do with how the land is managed during and afterwards. Forested lands are actually really resilient, they're evolved to respond to periodic semi-massacres (i.e. naturally occurring forest fires) and will regrow like weeds if left to nature. It's when forests are clear cut for agriculture and/or development sprawl that we incur long-term negative consequences.

Just watched some of the "infrastructure delivery" meeting they had last Wed on sidewalks and bikeways. CM Henderson did a great job chairing it, and tried to get to the bottom of who decided to delay the downtown bike lanes (around the 1 hours 25 minute mark). Briley's director of public works basically won't answer the question. https://www.nashville.gov/News-Media/News-Article/ID/8610/Special-Meeting-of-the-Public-Works-Committee-May-29-2019.aspx

Has anybody come up with a plausible candidate other than Apple? They've got deep pockets, central urban showpiece locations in other cities, a propensity for glass construction that would explain the teardown, a history of keeping announcements close to the vest, a thematic motivation to maintain a visible presence in "Music City"... What's the second most likely candidate?

Yeah, I'm always appreciative of the council members that try to dig into the structure of our incentives and budgets, make sense of them, and make constructive recommendations to improve them. Bob Mendes does a great job on this (e.g. http://www.mendesfornashville.com/a-better-budget-for-nashville/). The problem with Cooper is he seems to spend more effort demagoguing anything that gets any traction, regardless of whether it has any merit or substance. Recent examples would be the cherry trees and the parking plan. It's probably a smart strategy in this day of social media outrage, but it rubs me the wrong way. It's too bad; I definitely have my problems with Briley and I'd love to find an urban-friendly alternative.

I ride them regularly, and 95% of the time they replace lyft or me driving somewhere. The other times I probably would have biked but I was feeling lazy. My house is like a lot of places in Nashville, in that you can walk to about 3 places within 15 minutes, but you can bike/scooter to hundreds of places in that amount of time.

Lotta interesting tidbits on potential updates to scooter regulations, enforcement, and amenities here: https://communityimpact.com/nashville/southwest-nashville/city-county/2019/05/23/mayor-david-briley-calls-for-30-day-notice-on-scooters-as-metro-nashville-companies-work-to-regulate-usage

Yeah it's tough to defend all these hear-say density buffoons, but I'll say that it's a lot easier to exaggerate them into ridiculous caricatures than it is to engage with the actual ideas behind that passion. Maybe there really are a bunch of people that want to drop Dubai in the middle of Mayberry. More likely they grew up in the isolated neighborhood pods we've built over the last 50 or so years, had an opportunity to experience the negative consequences, and are passionate about finding a better way. The whole crux of this is that we don't have anything like an even playing field for density vs. sprawl (much less do we incentivize density). Every time I pay my electric bill, or my water bill, or my internet bill, I subsidize exurban sprawl residents who cost orders of magnitude more to provide service for. When I pay my taxes I subsidize an enormous and underutilized road network that requires constant repaving, policing and emergency services, and winter management. When I pay my tab at a restaurant that's required to build and maintain 50 parking spaces, I'm helping to foot the bill even if I walked there. Before 1950 we knew how to build towns, big and small, without enormous parking lots or farm-to-subdivision residential development. Even small towns were "dense", in the sense of walkable. Think old downtown Franklin or Murfreesboro. Farmers lived on big plots of land, but everybody else lived in or near town, and was able to get to basic life necessities without a vehicle in a pinch. Now there's somehow a whole segment of the population that is both (A) nostalgic for that time period and those places, and (B) considers the whole idea of building that way a fru-fru urbano-phile fever dream.

I think the bonus height is an OK way to encourage certain patterns that you don't want to point blank require in every development. My biggest beef with it is that it's used as another hidden subsidy for parking. If they would get rid of the two items related to parking and increase the starting floor limits it seems like it would be an OK tool for stuff like high-level LEED certification.

CM Elrod mentioned a million and a half rides in his facebook post: And he should know because the scooter companies are required to report detailed info to metro. That's an insane amount of usage in less than a year on a brand new form of transportation. They've had less than a year of service right? I tried to look it up. Bird showed up last spring, then everybody was banned for a few months until they passed the regulations. Really seems like a bad idea to shut this down and dump all that traffic back into cars. For those that aren't shaking their fists at the new-fangled gizmos, you have to wonder how high this could go if we actually provided any infrastructure for it. Like, right now you have to choose between riding on the sidewalk and feeling like a jerk, or riding on the street and taking your life in your hand with distracted and/or angry drivers. But despite this we're running somewhere pretty far north of 4,000 trips a day? How many people would use them if we had a few protected bike lanes downtown? How many people would use them if we had a single safe bike lane to get into the inner loop? 10,000 a day? 20,000 a day? When is it enough to admit that it's real and useful and much less expensive to support?

Driverless cars are already operating in carefully restricted areas, areas with clearly defined streets and year-round good weather. Most of the time they do still have safety drivers in the car. Everybody knows about Waymo in Phoenix, but there's also Voyage in Florida, Optimus in Boston, Drive.ai in Texas, etc. etc. Here's a good writeup on the different strategies being pursued. They're going to spend the next 10 years removing the safety drivers and the next 50 slowly expanding the territory and weather conditions. What's interesting to me is that it's going to be viable a lot sooner to use this technology for a transit-style system than it is for an anywhere-to-anywhere personal vehicle replacement. The tech is a LOT simpler and safer at low speeds, and with a local operation center watching over it. It's easy to imagine a smart city setting up a 5 mile loop on well-maintained and marked streets with a max speed of 25 mph and only right turns. Since there are no drivers it will be economical to run small shuttles, spaced every few minutes circulating around this loop. Add a couple more interlocking loops and you have a transit system that could move a significant number of people around, with labor and fuel costs (assuming they're electric) an order of magnitude or two lower than current systems. The question is, how will municipalities interact with the tech companies that are building these. The business model for transit is very different than ride-hailing, much less personal car ownership. Prediction: Europe will do this right and we'll do it wrong. Their cities will get even better while we find new ways to choke on cars.

It's true that we need to understand more about what the statistics tell us about scooter safety, but the irony of this is that we're not even actually talking about deaths caused by cars vs. deaths caused by scooters. Even the so-called scooter deaths are caused by cars, regardless of who made the last ill-advised decision. Cars are enormous fast-moving objects, controlled by erratic, distracted humans. It's a bad fit for squishy humans in close proximity in urban spaces. Cars kill scooter riders, bikers, pedestrians (dozens in Nashville every year!), and other car drivers. It's a farce to pretend like the safety risk is the tiny little scooter. Low-speed, low-mass urban transportation (so-called micromobility) is not a fad. As this city, and all the growing urban centers in the US, continue to bog down with single-occupant car traffic, people are only going to get hungrier for ways to get around with less friction. And the efficient motors, high-energy batteries, and smartphone apps that made these things possible is a real technological leap that represents a new way to move light-transit-level numbers of people around sub-3-mile distances without a huge up-front investment. Look at Paris for an example of a city that's channeling this in a positive direction. A rational program of action for Nashville would involve A.) providing dedicated space for scooters to get around and park (again, a tiny fraction of what we provide for cars), and B.) a mild tune-up of our regulation and enforcement. I'd advocate dialing down the speed limit on the things from 20mph to 15mph and starting a limited enforcement effort to punish the worst offenders. We should already have a funding stream from the permitting process, and fines can help. The cities that take constructive steps to incorporate these things into their transportation options are going to have a much more attractive urban environment in 5 years than the ones that stick with the status quo and are ever-more bogged down in traffic.

Scooters are wildly better for the city, for a dozen different reasons. They can move a lot more people around in way less space, require little-to-no public investment, and present virtually no safety risks to others relative to cars, which we've all just somehow priced in will kill or maim tens of thousands of people in Tennessee every year and it isn't even a topic of discussion. They're enormously better for the environment, more available across income levels, and they incentivize more inclusive and resilient development patterns. If we gave them a tiny fraction of the public infrastructure we dedicate to cars it would be relatively straightforward to address the concerns people have about where they're parked and ridden. It seems insane to me that we would instead respond to this new option by regulating them out of existence. And lock ourselves into the preexisting pattern that necessitates everyone getting everywhere in a car, perpetuating a self-reinforcing cycle of more traffic, more space wasted on parking, wider roads, more deaths, more pollution, and a generally more unpleasant urban environment. But I guess that's where we're headed with all the griping and the negativity. The mayor called them a "failed experiment" this morning at the Nashville Walk Bike forum.

I always used Yelp for one thing and one thing only: to scroll through real pictures of food people were served. It's not perfect - you can't always tell how good food is by looking at it - but it was close enough to be useful. The problem I find now is that most restaurants stuff the page as soon as they open with a bunch of staged pictures of their food. It's annoying to scroll through, and some of them are smart enough to make it look spontaneous.

We need a restaurant review thread on here. Yelp is trash now and there's so many new places it's hard to keep up.