GregH

Yeah there was a big pushback campaign when something similar was proposed for 8th. A shame, IMO, the need for some walkability there is even more evident now with all the new development. But at least rich people that live in Williamson county still have their (traffic choked) alternate route home.

I WFH and almost the whole company is remote. I'm customer facing for clients across the country so if I wasn't on Zoom they'd have to fly me all over the place and waste tons of my time with travel (and also I'd quit). IIRC there are a lot of physical problems with converting office buildings to housing. Stuff like, in an office building a lot of the plumbing infrastructure is in a central core and not spread across the whole floor, HVAC isn't necessarily designed to be segmented by small units, etc.

oops!

For all the talk about the Oxford House's impending demise, I haven't heard a peep about the other permanent fixture on that site.

A huge dropoff queue for cars seems like an incredibly wasteful process for a school right in the middle of the city.

Looks like maybe it's tied in to fixing the 51/centennial corner on that side. "To coordinate with Bikeway and Signaling projects"

Sounds like maybe the mayor's office has done something executively https://www.newschannel5.com/news/a-new-permit-policy-will-keep-nashville-sidewalks-and-bike-lanes-clear-from-construction

I had a Nashville sidewalk experience this evening that was a reminder of both how bad the Charlotte ave pedestrian experience is, and how inadequate the "Don't block my walk" ordinance ended up being. I was jogging up Charlotte and encountered one of those "Sidewalk closed, cross here" signs that are basically all that "Don't block my walk" created. But I didn't see any sidewalk closed anywhere ahead or behind or across the street or anywhere as far as I could see. So I just ignored the sign and kept on going. a full 1/4 mile later and past the crest of the hill I found that the sidewalk was completely torn up and being rebuilt by the developer of those townhomes at Charlotte and 440. I'm pretty sure the developer was doing exactly what they're supposed to do and putting signage at the nearest place to make an alternate crossing (even doing that seems to be unusual), but I don't think it's helping much in that instance. And more importantly, it's insane how far apart opportunities to cross the street are on Charlotte just a couple miles from downtown. That stretch, 37th to 31st, appears to be 2200 ft between crosswalks. Anyway, my proposed solution to builders closing public space for extended periods is simple: make people who want to close public space pay a reasonable price for using it. Right now permits are like $10 a day to close streets or sidewalks. Make it $1000 a day or something otherwise meaningful, with exceptions for for public events like street fairs or whatever. Make the space valuable and I'm sure builders will be plenty able to plan around it to minimize cost, instead of just closing indefinitely for their convenience for relative pocket change.

Looks like there’s demo equipment arriving at the Camden-owned site at 51st and Tennessee in the Nations

https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/region-3/i-40-donelson-pike-interchange.html I guess "better traffic flow" plus it gets BNA a bit more real estate to work with west of Donelson.

That's kind of neat but seems extremely premature for something that doesn't have FAA approval...or a single non-prototype product in use anywhere in the world.

I don't think the in-lieu portion of the sidewalk bill is the Nation's major problem (though it's not helping). I think it was just bad timing for the neighborhood and there was no sidewalk requirement at all until a large portion of the new builds had already happened. It was even called out for that in the Walk Bike Nashville news post celebrating the bill's passing.

Some kind of permitting / zoning shortcut I'm sure.

I'd like to think it has a good chance but I really have no idea. On reddit people are already misunderstanding or misrepresenting what it would accomplish as "omg they're banning parking". Really IMO it's a small thing that aligns with both conservative and liberal values, won't have much immediate impact, but will set the stage for slow improvement. However, "People who drive cars" might be the biggest single political constituency in the US and that defies all other political orientations so...who knows.

I guess if new development had a pedestrian option so you could connect Delaware to Delaware and get to 40th without walking all the way down to Indiana and back, that would be almost as good.

If a development there could reopen-and/or clean up the pedestrian path under the interstate next to the railroad tracks, that would be great. You can just see it here https://goo.gl/maps/28HQSgc9ETGMrGGb9 but it's too overgrown to use and I think the new development on Alabama on the other side of the interstate blocked off the exit.

Yeah. Fun fact, they held a back-patting ribbon-cutting ceremony for the 51st "Complete Street" despite there not being sidewalks on either side for most of the last few blocks of the street. It's kind of a bummer that the new construction sidewalk requirement was so late in happening, if it had been in effect in 2010 the Nations would probably have like 80% coverage. Luckily this new project will fill in part of that sidewalk gap. And maybe someday enough spots on centennial will be redeveloped to get a long continuous sidewalk. Pretty sure those are intended to be off-street parking spots, not sidewalk. A clever way to prevent people parking in front of your house (and mostly in the city-owned right-of-way, I imagine).

If housing was $50 a month all of those people could be housed because it would be easy for a loved one or charity to pay house them.

The way I think about it is that there are a variety of issues that can make it difficult for someone to find and keep housing but the king top obvious one is money and everything else is sort of a comorbidity that makes that worse. As a semi-ridiculous example, think of the plenty of rich celebrities found dead of drugs in their mansions or luxury hotel rooms. They had no problem staying housed despite being just as mentally ill or drug addicted as someone on the streets of Nashville. We can't and don't want to fix homelessness by giving people millions of dollars, but we can make housing cheaper and lower the bar of what it takes to be housed. Can we fix mental illness and drug addiction? I don't know, plenty of people with lots of resources still struggle so maybe we can't. But we can build housing, we know how to do it and the cost to do it is knowable.

I think most of these weirdo bike infrastructure decisions make sense through this lens: They are primarily (for political reasons) only able to do things that do not remove lanes of car traffic and only rarely are able to reduce street parking, and they do not have a lot of budget for actually reconfiguring curbs / sidewalks etc. (which we all know is fantastically expensive for...reasons). So when your only tools are paint and flex posts...that's what you get. When there's not enough space to make a bike lane without cutting into car space...you use the gutter or end it completely. I'm sure NDOT (or at least some people at NDOT) aren't looking at this like "hell yeah we did the best thing", they're thinking "we did what we could do and it's better than it was". We're never going to get actually good bike and pedestrian infrastructure without taking space away from cars (or I guess spending billions to acquire more right of way) and right now there's not the political will to do that.

Slip lanes are a bane but I'm happy about the bike lane on the other side coming up the hill (I think I see it). I always feel more exposed on bigger streets going uphill because the speed differential gets more pronounced. I think Metro got it wrong further out Charlotte where it goes under 440: I guess there was only "room" for bikelane on one side of the street and they put it on the downhill side.

I think going small would be a great way to save retail in the US and bring down operating expenses for potential business owners. There's tons of things that can only be done profitably if the expenses are low enough and I think a lot of niche retail (and food) falls into that category. Right now in the US you kind of need to be either big (wal mart) or have high prices (bougie fashion etc) for a lot of businesses to work, which sucks for people with good ideas and passion but not a lot of resources. I don't know if commercial landlords would really be interested, but for example I went to the Canal St. Market in NYC a few weeks ago which has a lot of small, farmer's-market-y spaces for retail https://canalstreet.market/ and it was pretty cool.

Man, the Oxford House and (not quite as bad) MAB were hopelessly dated when I was working for VUMC 10 years ago, I'm surprised they even lasted this long.

Yeah I feel like that's potential low-hanging fruit. Does the Star compete with freight traffic? I'm wondering, if the passenger volume was there for more-regular service, would it encounter challenges with freight conflicts.

I am repeating myself in here but Airport-Downtown seems like a big mistake if you're trying to build support locally. How am I supposed to benefit from that as a local? Downtown would be the worst-possible starting place for my trip to the airport. The only thing I can think of is maybe wishful thinking about reduced traffic on I-40 but I think that's a stretch. If you want locals to like transit you need transit a lot of locals will use a lot and realistically that means something going from somewhere close to where a lot of people live to somewhere close to where a lot of those people work.