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Monthly Archives: April 2015
Day 100-Walk and talk
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Day 99-Skeletons
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The new Citation Road is also visible from this subdivision, just west of where it crosses Greendale Road. Citation Road is being managed by the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, which has has details on the project.
Day 98-Sum of Products
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The key learning for me came from a short discussion I had with one of the denizens of the area while waiting for a light. I commented on the difficulty of riding along Versailles on a bicycle, as she was doing. She was very matter-of-fact about it. She shrugged and said “you get used to it.” And this is true. Really, this stretch of road isn’t much worse than some streets I walked along frequently not long ago. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t improvements that could and should be made here. It does point out that, terrifying though they may seem, the perception of danger may be amplified by thinking too much about it. It is at least possible to get around by walking along streets like Versailles.
Day 97-Nicholasville Rd Dead Ends Part 1
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This winds up being a story of two streets. Suburban Court is nice enough, but not as luxurious as Cherokee Park, which sports larger lots, a wide grassy median, even taller trees. Both streets are long dead-ends (some of the streets further south connect within small neighborhoods even when they don’t provide an easy way across the tracks). But while Cherokee Park ends in a loop with houses backing to the CSX right-of-way, the end of Suburban Court is less subtle, with a couple of warning reflectors and a few thin shrubs. Houses on the other side of the track are tantalizing close. It’s interesting how design decisions made 80 years ago are still apparent today. Good design is undervalued even now–for example, consider two neighborhoods, one with trees placed in the tree lawn by the developer, the other without. How much will the difference in curb appeal be worth, relative to the cost of the tree today? The core of the issue may be an agency problem. The developer has no interest in planting trees without recouping the cost; it’s difficult to justify such things in a cost-cutting environment. Still, the end result is needless differences in structural design between neighborhoods. (Could we ask whether building in such stratification by neighborhood is necessary to begin with? I think so, but that is a question for another time.)