Aaron Gower

Guess it's too much to hope oracle will lose interest and sell it to someone that actually wants an urban campus...

So much hand wringing as if this is some massive test of our capacity. Meanwhile there are simple, inexpensive ways to immediately start changing the way this street is perceived and used. If our institutions and leaders really give an Amy Grant...

Lol good eye! Ran it with my 12yo, while my 10yo ran ahead and finished in 25.

I'm Wesssley fan club. JWesss for mayor.

If the mayor endorses a four-lane design for East Bank Boulevard, it will be a home run. We have the data. The public overwhelmingly opposes the six-lane concept being proposed.

Of the 881 responses to Metro's survey, 69% wrote a comment explicitly concerned with the number of lanes or width 1/

What a mealy mouthed quote from @freddieoconnell.bsky.social spokesperson:

"Freddie will take in a series of information and advice from advisers and give input on his interpretation of the facts knowing he is one piece of the pie. But at the same time, knowing that his opinion holds great weight.”

The East Bank design @nashvilledot.bsky.social would be building if they actually wanted a walkable/transit-friendly neighborhood instead of an interstate traffic sink:

Has anyone seen anything on whether @nashvilledot.bsky.social has any plan at all (other than paint) to keep cars out of the bus lanes? If there isn't a specific concrete-based plan for this, then we're 100% going to end up with 6 lanes of car traffic. This idea would definitely be better than that.

It just seems like sidewalk extension is a better mental framework for what the actual goal should be here, which is to take excess space back from cars for people. And sidewalks have the benefit of being a more widely understood, popular commodity. Maybe there's something I'm missing.

I guess nothing would be different in terms of painted lines and posts (preferably w/some curbs). But right now they call it a bike lane, paint bicycles on it, and put it on the bike map. 99% of the normie population that encounters any of that concludes something like "bike lanes are wasted space".

But why a bike lane rather than a sidewalk extension? When they sign it as a bike lane, a whole lot of people see the highly visible, unused space and write off bike lanes in general. And the theoretical "next steps" seem to be running decades (at least) on these highway-style roads.

We keep painting off so much space for this kind of "bike lane"; it makes the whole idea of bike lanes look ridiculous. Almost no one will (or should) bike on this. Really wish @nashvilledot.bsky.social would reframe all of them as multipurpose sidewalk extensions. It's a mitigation of overpavement.

Everyone needs to memorize our Complete Streets Implementation guide:

I would genuinely like to know, even if (or maybe especially if) it's the second one. Why am I wasting my and my family's time trying to participate in @nashvilledot.bsky.social and @metronashplan.bsky.social public feedback processes that doesn't actually carry any weight?

Where is @freddieoconnell.bsky.social on any of this? Like, are we losing these two battles but we're going to try to make up for it elsewhere? Or was all the talk and engagement he did on these topics before he was elected complete BS?

What if it's more like synthetic diamonds though? As the content becomes more freely available, the consumer values it less. Drunk on power, they inevitably sew the seeds of their own demise...

The East Bank Boulevard is being proposed to have a 110-foot ROW, with SIX travel lanes. This will be an incredibly dangerous, high-injury network that the city is choosing to build from scratch. This is ridiculously absurd, foolish, and inexcusable on so many levels.

Here is the full text of @ginnywelsch.bsky.social's epic takedown of business as usual in Nashville's planning apparatus.

East Bank Boulevard We want your feedback on the East Bank Boulevard Project, a key piece of infrastructure through the reimagined East Bank! Please help us by May 15 at East...

Actually, no, you can’t. Engineers & elected officials hoping/pretending they’ll make everyone happy (or mostly ppl driving not mad) undermines a city’s purported health & safety goals. Pushing against, rather than acquiescing to, car dominance is exhausting. www.nashville.gov/featured-ini...

East Bank Boulevard Project Take this survey powered by surveymonkey.com. Create your own surveys for free.

Then, take the survey and say NO to six-lane highways in the East Bank!
Questions #4 and #5 ask if we support the proposed designs. We do not. They'd be dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, and drivers and a huge missed opportunity for Nashville.
www.surveymonkey.com/r/EastBankBo...

Hey @freddieoconnell.bsky.social & @nashvilledot.bsky.social, you're better than this. Why are you wasting my and my family's time with fake feedback meetings? Why are you of all people failing this hard when we have a blank page opportunity to come up with a walkable street design?

picture of a quickticket validator showing icons for visa, mastercard, and discover

if you look closely, you’ll see three new icons at the bottom of the quickticket validator

that’s because WeGo buses now support contactless payments using most credit and debit cards, as well as mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay.

www.quicktickettn.com/contactless/...

Transit options in Nashville center on downtown, where the region's employment is concentrated. This map shows the location of the city's planned all-access corridors, which were funded by a 2024 transit referendum, and which will provide considerably improved bus service.

Our new research on Nashville @urbaninstitute.bsky.social examines how the city can adapt its land-use policies to accommodate growth around future transit lines.

There is a big opportunity for the city to take advantage of its new bus rapid transit routes for housing: www.urban.org/research/pub...

Aron G on X: "Apparently @NashvilleDOT is revamping their bikeway map and renaming it from "The Groove" to "uGo". I love the idea of this map, so this is a great opportunity for me to renew my perennial begging campaign to turn this into something that's actually useful for people.🧵 https://t.co/glbKcm4kbr" / X Apparently @NashvilleDOT is revamping their bikeway map and renaming it from "The Groove" to "uGo". I love the idea of this map, so this is a great opportunity for me to renew my perennial begging campaign to turn this into something that's actually useful for people.🧵 https://t.co/glbKcm4kbr

Love the idea of an actually useful bike map! Here's an old thread when they were redoing The Groove: x.com/arong2050/st.... The main things to me are (A) admit which of our "bike lanes" are insane and don't send people to those and (B) try to direct bikers to low-speed neighborhood streets.

Multifamily housing support/opposition in Nashville by income

Fascinating new article that shows that "urban highways are associated with decreased social connectivity," especially over short distances.

Gives strong evidence for the importance of the Reconnecting Communities program, designed to connect neighborhoods divided by highways.

MHZC is a zombie organization that is actively making our neighborhoods worse. The developers of 10th & Fatherland were going to build a nice neighborhood addition with corner shops and townhomes, but thanks to MHZC we got a pod of airbnb party houses instead. Please fix this @claycapp.bsky.social!

Investing in school HVAC systems is very good —>

This is a much needed fix. Please carry it through @freddieoconnell.bsky.social @claycapp.bsky.social!

Not saying I agree, but isn't his point that AGI will invent tech to make arbitrary amounts of pinto beans & petroleum, but no amount of intelligence/technology could create new surface area on the earth. Not like, residential space, which can be vertically stacked, but sunlit pastures & forests.