Here’s a humorous little nugget from the Journal Star Forum today:
New Urbanism making it tougher on Peoria drivers
The Journal Star has often touted Greater Peoria as a 15-minute city, where getting around town is so much easier than in Chicagoland. That claim has been eroded by selfishness and the New Urbanism nonsense.
Years ago, the Peoria Public Works Department was proud of the fact that Knoxville Avenue traffic lights were timed so motorists could go the speed limit and not hit a red light all the way to Downtown. Have you tried to drive Knoxville, from the northern city limits to Downtown, lately? See how many red lights you get to wait at.
North Prospect Road drivers are assaulted by speed humps. Prospect south of War Memorial Drive has driving lanes taken away. Do motorists enjoy following those slow drivers now that they cannot get around them?
May I also mention the closing of old Big Hollow Road to eliminate another route to Glen Hollow shopping? Are motorists appreciative of all of the traffic lights on Sterling? Peoria traffic is looking more like that of a Chicago suburb. Now the city of Peoria wants to take U.S. Highway 24 and narrow it.
New Urbanism is the latest fad that is being used as an excuse to make older parts of Peoria less driver-friendly, in spite of millions invested by IDOT to help motorists, not hinder them.
John Doering
Dunlap
Mr. Doering decries “selfishness,” yet goes on to contend that he personally (or, at best, automobile drivers in general) should never be inconvenienced. Stoplights, pedestrian safety, neighborhood quality of life — all should bow before this mighty Dunlap motorist who wishes to breeze into and out of Peoria without ever having to stop or slow down. Ah, the picture of selflessness and altruism, no?
By the way, IDOT’s mission is not, as Mr. Doering says, to “help motorists.” It is, “to provide safe, cost-effective transportation for Illinois in ways that enhance quality of life, promote economic prosperity, and demonstrate respect for our environment,” according to their website. In other words, it should benefit all people, not just automobile drivers. When planning transportation solutions, IDOT considers the needs and concerns of residents, homeowners, businesses, advocates, and other stakeholders — not just automobile drivers.
And why the New-Urbanism bashing? Of the annoyances he lists, only the proposed narrowing of Washington street was the direct result of New-Urbanist planning. Speed humps went in on Prospect because residents were sick and tired of motorists speeding through their neighborhood. Big Hollow was closed because the Union Pacific bridge was falling apart and needed to be removed. The traffic lights on Sterling and elsewhere certainly have nothing to do with New Urbanism. And while Washington may be narrowed, I-74 was just widened considerably so those (like Mr. Doering) who want to bypass Peoria at high speeds can do so more easily.
So, in the spirit of hospitality, all I have to say to Mr. Doering is, “would you like some cheese with your whine?”
I have to agree with Mr. Doering. I don’t know who makes the traffic signal/traffic control decisions in Peoria, but I can state this: whoever it is, he or she obviously does not drive in Peoria on a regular basis with any common sense.
Several years ago we used to live in a southern city similar to Peoria. This place had the worst traffic I’d ever seen. The lights were not synchronized, stayed red for ever and long lines of traffic built up. Then we came back to the Peoria area and I kept remarking to my wife how well the traffic flowed back then. Now days it is just like that southern town and as I’ve asked before, does it have anything to do with Peoria having a city manager from the south?
Also, it has been researched and proven that cities receive more tax revenue from a lot of stops and goes. Again, while in this southern city, the city leaders were pushing for more synchronized signals and the local gas stations put a stop to it because it would decrease fuel sales.
And here is one item of proof that shows how wacked these planners are: try driving up SW Adams street. Almost all the lights from MacArthur to I-74 are synchronized except for one – the light a Persimmon. That thing always is red and there is hardly any pedestrian traffic around that intersection.
The Heart of Peoria Commission, and other New Urbanist proponents would be wise to be mindful of such criticism even if very misguided. To those not overly familiar with New Urbanism, his complaints may well resonate strongly in the coming city elections. There needs to be better education on what New Urbanism is and what it is not.
That the Journal Star saw fit to print such a misguided piece should be a cause for concern as well.
Sctobrien: I think the timing of the traffic lights should be better, too. I’m not trying to defend poor traffic signal timing. There are places where disrupting the flow of traffic is warranted, and other places where it is unwarranted. Having a traffic light at Glenwood and Main that changes immediately when a pedestrian hits the “push to cross” button is warranted. The light at Thrush and Knoxville that changes to red in the middle of the night even though McDonalds is closed and there are no cars or pedestrians in sight is unwarranted. The light at Persimmon that you mention is another example of bad timing.
But the letter writer wasn’t just complaining about bad timing of the traffic lights. He was criticizing the residents of Peoria neighborhoods — calling them selfish — and taking potshots at New Urbanism, even though it’s clear he knows nothing about it. Plus, he lives in Dunlap yet criticizes our city planning. If Dunlap were able to meet all his needs, one would think he wouldn’t have to drive to/through Peoria so often.
Mr. Doering is correct about Peoria looking more like a Chicago suburb, and how we need better traffic light management. If he’s looking for a scapegoat maybe he should try the ex-Peorians who moved north into soulless, leveled cornfields. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why he is so terribly inconvenienced on his trek down Knoxville.
The Journal Star published a letter from another nutjob today — the annual “There is No Global Warming” letter. The simple fact that there is ice and snow on this nutjob’s driveway does not mean global warming does not exist. Just as a 100 degree reading in the middle of a July does not prove global warming does exist.
Gee I wonder if a park n ride trolley would alieve this gentleman’s problem?
I think the “there is no global warming” guy forgot that it had been in the 60’s for a week. It was 65 degrees at the Christmas Parade, for cryin’ out loud!
Sctobrien, I’ve never heard of a gas station lobby for unsynchronized lights. Sounds a little far fetched to me.
So if there is global warming now, then who caused the last global warming period followed by the various ice ages? It is more likely yet another of the natural progression of climate changes that have ocurred since the planet was formed.
People that live along far North Knoxville do not live “in Dunlap”. That is simply a mailing adress. More than likely, most of those people now live inside the City of Peoria because large amounts of land has been annexed by the city.
It appears that the writer lives in the village of Dunlap (based upon the phone book) and to go downtown, would more likely utilize rt91, rt 6 and I74. He is simply telling us how poorly the city engineers have tried to keep traffic moving in a expedient, economical and environmentally friendly manner along Knoxville. I agree with him.
Having traffic signals on a major thoroughfare immediately change to RED when a single car pulls up to the signal on a side street makes zero sense. that lone car on the side street can wait up to a minute.
Fine … the lights are poorly synchronized. That’s a traffic engineering problem. To blame New Urbanism for these problems is ignorant.
Re: global warming (completely off C.J.’s topic, but OK)
Here’s the thing about global warming. Fact – we’re pumping immense amounts of CO2 and other known greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Fact – average temperatures are rising. Fact – Glaciers and other icepacks are shrinking rapidly. Fact – these shrinking icepacks expose more bare ground and ocean which absorb solar energy than ice & snow. Fact – Areas of permafrost are shrinking. The last fact is especially concerning in light of new data that shows as permafrost melts, especially in Siberia, it tends to release LARGE amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times as potent as CO2.
Has it been “proven” that we’re causing these changes? Of course not. To “prove” it, you’d have to take two artificial earths and manipulate greenhouse gases over the course of millenia, then compare your two experimental results. Anybody know how to make two artificial earths and have a couple million years to spare to run the experiment? Didn’t think so.
So, we have to go by circumstantial evidence. Do we keep compiling concerning data and ignoring it until Manhattan is underwater? Or do we do something about it now? I’ll pick the latter, thanks.
Besides, a lot of the things that can be done to curb greenhouse gas emissions also have the added benefit of increasing our energy efficiency, reducing emissions of other pollutants and decreasing our dependence on foreign petroleum. I just don’t get how this is a bad thing.
PI,
Believe it or not, while living down in that southern city there was a push by the city government to synchronize all traffic lights and the local fuel merchants fought it long and hard and won at that time. Better synchronized lights less stop and go traffic, which means less fuel is burnt.
And I’m not talking about one gas station but the entire group of fuel dealers.
I wish I had thought of keeping the articles from the paper back then, but did not.
Hell, it might sound bizarre and far fetched, but this crap doesn’t have to be made up.
PI… SCTOBrien is right. In many towns there are retail interests that fight for slower lights and more lights. They also lobby to keep highways running through towns rather than around them. Slow traffic going through a town is great for business. Those that get bypasses see their business districts collapse.
I didn’t intend to drag this thread off-topic. My point was that I’d like to see the Journal Star publish letters that advance public discourse, not misguided rants about New Urbanism or global warming letters based on “evidence” collected from one man’s driveway.
Do we really want the PJS deciding what letters “advance public discourse”? I say print as many of them as they can. Let everyone have their say. Why dismiss someone’s views because you don’t agree. Regarding global warming, Mother Earth has been around for 4 or 5 billion years. Can you state with certainty that on any given day, month or year it wasn’t warmer during that time than during a meager 100 years or so that we have weather records?
I don’t know why the author is complaining about Knoxville so much… I take Knoxville about once a month from Dunlap to downtown, and it is about the same time as taking Rt 6/I74 or Rt24. I have to stop at several lights, but still, it isn’t bad for a 10 mile drive all the way through the city.
Mahkno, I understand businesses would want to slow down traffic and keep the highways going through their town, but to screw up the lights so the drivers run out of gas quicker is a new one.
Observer,
“Regarding global warming, Mother Earth has been around for 4 or 5 billion years. Can you state with certainty that on any given day, month or year it wasn’t warmer during that time than during a meager 100 years or so that we have weather records?”
“Global Warming” is something of a misnomer, although a general warming trend is one of its effects. A better name might be “breakdown in the planet’s ability to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide” due to loss of plant mass and burnt release of long-dead fixed-CO2 from organic matter (i.e. coal and oil) releasing unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the air at the same time as we have DRASTICALLY reduced the number of organisms available to convert it to oxygen.
If you know about plant respiration, it’s a relatively simple “math problem.” There is ONE type of organism capable of converting the earth’s sole source of external energy — the sun — into sugars, and those are the photosynthesizing plants. These same plants breathe in carbon dioxide and take up water from the soil (CO2 and H2O) and, using the sun’s energy to power the complex chemical reaction, convert the carbon dioxide and water into sugars (C6H12O11) and Oxygen (O2). (They also respire out — and clean in the process — an awful lot of our. My front-yard hackberry probably respires about 60 gallons of water per hour in the summer, cleaning it as it draws it up from the ground and uses impurities as mineral building blocks.)
Basically all energy on earth comes from the photosynthesis reaction. Animals eat plants for the sugars. Fossil fuels are “trapped” photosynthetic sugars (and the various more complex molecules that result from those reactions, or from what other organisms do with the sugars.)
If you have a little biodome with 2 trees photosynthesizing and two animals eating exactly the amount of fruit they produce and breathing exactly the amount of oxygen they create, and you kill one of those trees, CO2 in your biodome is going to skyrocket, inadequate food production will occur, and at least one of those animals is going to die. (Or they may both die, fighting for the limited resources. Or by degrading their remaining “habitat” tree until it can no longer support even one.)
If you have a giant earth biodome and you clear 1/3 of the planet’s photosynthetic material while simultaneously releasing massive quantities of STORED plant energy (fossil fuels) back into the atmosphere, you’re not only trying to support the same size (or in humanity’s case, ever-increasing) population of animals with ever-less available “air-exchangers” and “food,” but you’re now making the deficit worse by releasing stored energy the air-exchangers have to do MORE work to exchange.
There are a handful of species that produce food without photosynthesis (like fungi), but they’re pretty calorically useless to higher animals. (Mushrooms have hardly any calories.) If you want oxygen to breathe and energy to eat, you need photosynthetic plants. It’s a simple, quantifyable chemical reaction. If you decrease the “plant” side enough, one of two things will happen — animals (and their “works” — like modern fossil fuel consumption, say) will have to decrease proportionately, or organisms that do well in excess carbon dioxide will thrive and species that require current oxygen levels will die. You know which one we are.
Earth is essentially a closed system (barring the occasional asteroid, etc.). Resources are finite. Waste products can’t be “thrown away” because they have nowhere to GO. Closed system. The only outside “power source” we have is the sun, and photosynthetic plants are the only organisms that can make use of it to create food to support the rest of us.
(If you wanna really scare the crap out of yourself about “global warming” (and why modern methods of increasing crop yields are not long-term sustainable in our closed system), go read about the nitrogen imbalance. Making greener and better and higher-yield plants won’t help the problem if it “costs” more in energy to make the plants yield more calories than you get back out of them in calories.)
And of the 4 or 5 billion years Earth’s been hanging around, primitive organisms and later plants were spending an awful lot of time creating an atmosphere we could breathe and calories we can make use of!
Earth itself will recover from our depradations just fine. Organisms will doubtless evolve that can make use of our waste products. But WE can’t survive our current depradations and I’m personally fond of me.
McGee: Well done! It’s unfortunate, it seems to me, that so much emphasis is put on the “global warming” theme. Your breakdown of the problem makes infinitely more sense than simply saying earth is getting warmer and the polar ice cap will melt in x thousands of years.
E. M. – is there any topic that you’re not an expert on? Dear lord, woman. If I ever need a lawyer, I know who I’m calling.
PI,
Go to google.com. Put in
traffic light synchronization and gasoline consumption
And away you shall go.
Now, I looked at a lot of these and while I couldn’t find the same of what I saw happen in Fayetteville, NC, the battle did go on over better light synchronization and the battle was led by gasoline stations, dealers, truck drivers, et cetera. I didn’t imagine the paper articles.
How come I have seen several recent studies that determined that there are more trees now in North America than 200+ years ago?
Observer: “It’s unfortunate, it seems to me, that so much emphasis is put on the “global warming†theme.”
I think it’s because the warming is the mostly likely to screw us in the near term. (And because one of the major effects of too much CO2 in the atmosphere is the failure of excess solar heat to dissipate from the earth.) If enough of the ice caps melt, it’ll stop the major ocean currents that exchange warm and cold water. The one between the US and Europe is colloquially called the Conveyer (more generally worldwide it’s the thermohaline system), and if it gets too desalinated because of freshwater polar ice melting into it, that changes the density of the water, the cool and warm interact differently, and the thermohalines will either stop, slow down drastically, or be diverted.
The most immediate danger is that Europe owes its mild climate to the big warm current that goes from Africa to about the Carolinas, then back to Europe from New Yorkish (then sinks back under as it cools and the cool water cycles back south until the equator warms it). If the thermohaline current is diverted even a little by melting ice caps, European agriculture could become totally impossible.
Since the thermohalines are a primary driver in worldwide climates, it’ll wreak havoc on all of us, although much more unpredictably. Arizona could become a fertile green land; the midwest could be a desert. Can you imagine the entire EU as climate refugees and a major agricultural region completely destroyed, while the rest of the world simultaneously suffers drastic realignments in climate and ergo in what agriculture their regions can support? (How pissed would you be to have a lettuce-specific $80,000 harvesting machine and suddenly only be able to grow sugarbeets?)
From what I gather scientists think with the thermohalines (as with many earth systems), there’s a wide range of variation that the system can comfortably tolerate and will self-adjust, but when it reaches a “tipping point” where it can no longer self-adjust, everything will change suddenly, drastically, and irreversibly. (You’ll have to push a lot farther back to get to a tipping point the other direction. The system will try to maintain the new status quo.) Some scientists believe we’re tiptoeing on the edge of the thermohaline tipping point and a frozen Europe could be a reality within a couple of generations. Others think we have more time and more wiggle room left.
There’s all these other projected effects that then happen on ocean shipping, air travel, sea oil drilling, etc., and be relatively economically catastrophic during the realignment, but that presumes we have a relatively intact political system so we’re still caring enough to ship things. Humanity could survive the predicted (they’re not 100% sure what will happen or how severe it’ll be) ice age if the thermohalines shift, but agriculture would be drastically curtailed and probably couldn’t support six billion of us. Plus I really just don’t want to live through that kind of sociopolitical upheaval!
MDD: “How come I have seen several recent studies that determined that there are more trees now in North America than 200+ years ago?”
*Probably* because everything from the Rockies to the Appalachians was basically grass before Europeans got here, and the US government mandated tree planting as a condition of granting claims to settlers in many frontier land-grant areas. You couldn’t “prove up” your claim without X number of 10-year-old hardwood trees, or X number of fruit-bearing trees (that’s what Johnny Appleseed was so busy with, starting trees so settlers could buy his saplings and prove up faster). That’s my best guess.
Also North Americans are somewhat insulated from wholesale environmental destruction — we’re really spread out, and we don’t tolerate some farming practices that are routine in the third world. (That’d be an interesting study — the US contributes massive amounts of greenhouse gases per capita; do we contribute similarly massive amounts of “plant respiration” per capita because we have so much greenspace? Should countries get offsets in their Kyoto treaty cap amounts for the amount of plant respiration they’re providing?)
Knight: I read a lot. 🙂
PI it is not about them running out of gas per se… its about making them stop and look around.
“Again, while in this southern city, the city leaders were pushing for more synchronized signals and the local gas stations put a stop to it because it would decrease fuel sales”
MDD,
Well, think of it – huge large old growth trees cut down, huge areas of land cleared and what can go in? Many, many small scrub trees.
Also, one common ploy by conservatives (and I’m not saying you are or aren’t one, it’s just a trick they use – one of Limpball’s favorites by the way) is to use the figure of US forest land the year before the US acquired Alaska and compare it to the after the Alaska acquisition. They then go, “Since 1959, the acreage of US forest land has went up “whatever” percent.”
So both are pretty much meaningless statistics.