Why the party busses?

The city of New Orleans, like a lot of American cities, is hard up for money.  State and federal budgets don't offer as much support to cities for infrastructure or transit or social services as they once did. Even the $2 billion in FEMA road work assistance we've been sitting on is insufficient to meet the need.

We're apparently not allowed to take the money we need from the tourism cabal.  We aren't about to stop handing out tax breaks to real estate developers or to movie productions or to industrial concerns in "opportunity zones."  We're definitley not going to tax any property held by any politically important local non-profits.   Instead, we're going to see if we can squeeze more out of poor people and those who aren't on the ball enough to defend themselves.

This is why we're sending your name to a collection agency over your water bill even if we still don't know how to make that bill accurate.  It's why we're playing games with traffic cameras to see how many people we can entrap. It's why we're still saddling defendants with excessive bail even if we have to defy a federal judge's order to do it.  It's why we're taking advantage of legitimate concerns with motorists who obstruct bike lanes by jacking the fine for that up to an absurd $300.  And it's why we're in the process of exploring other concerns over bicycle safety to find excuses for police to also write tickets to bicyclists.

In short, we are governed according to which policy choices are most likely to generate the highest amount of revenue in the shortest amount of time from sources least likely to fight back.  Which is how it came to be that we suddenly wake up one day and discover that "not a single New Orleans party bus in in legal status."

Smith said there are some party buses that could obtain the certificates with proof of proper insurance, registration and “minimal modifications.” According to rules the city issued in 2017, party buses are considered “Charter Party Carriers" and must have working fire extinguishers and display the CPNC number on the back of the vehicle.

No doubt quite a few of these fly by night operators could stand for a little more scrutiny.  But let's not pretend your city leaders are primarily concerned with anybody's safety and well being here.  If that is the motivation in this case, it would certainly be unique.

Mostly this is about punitive enforcement for the sake of revenue generation. To some degree it is also a chance for the mayor and our more right-leaning councilmembers to exercise a favorite hobby horse and pander to the neighborhood association busybodies who comprise a large part of their base.  But, again, mostly it's about making money... not by taking it from those who can spare it but from those who are most vulnerable to coersion.  The party bus operators are one such opportunity. But one among several.

Just get a bike

You don't need anything super fancy just to get around town. Usually you can get something perfectly serviceable for $80-$100.  I realize that isn't nothing. But if you're going to be using it a lot then that one time price is certainly a better deal than this is.

New Orleans’ bike-sharing program is permanently dropping its prices, in the hopes of attracting new riders as city temperatures cool off this fall.

The program, called Blue Bikes, also wants to turn people who rode for free under one of its recent promotions into longterm customers.

Riders will pay 10 cents a minute or $6 an hour starting in October, down from the original roughly 13 cents a minute or $8 an hour. New riders will also pay a one-time $5 registration fee.

The prices of monthly and annual plans will stay the same. Those are $10 a month for college students, $20 a year for low-income riders and $15 a month for other riders.

It's nice to see the city invest in better bicycling awareness and infrastructure.  But  it seems sometimes like nothing is allowed to happen unless some private company is making a profit. So efforts that should go toward promoting better facilities in general get channeled into ensuring that the contractor can operate.  For example, we could just make sure it was safe for people to ride where they needed to go and park when they got there regardless of whether they paid $6 an hour to ride that day. But instead we're doing subtle things to make it more difficult to bring your own bike.  Why is that?

Streetscapin'

Oretha Castle Haley Blvd August 2008

Here comes the beautification crew.  

The city began construction Wednesday on a $1.8 million project designed to make it easier and more inviting for people to walk and bike on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in Central City.

The project, funded by federal grants, is the latest in a series of "streetscape" beautification projects officials have unveiled since Mayor Mitch Landrieu took office in 2010.

The work will stretch along O.C. Haley from Calliope Street to St. Andrew Street.

Crews will remove the neutral ground from Felicity Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, repair damaged sidewalks and install handicapped curb ramps at intersections. They also will add a bike lane and new crosswalks, plant new landscaping and repave the asphalt roadway, among other improvements, officials said.

That last paragraph offers more detail than did the mayor's press release yesterday. The only specific it offered was the bike lane.  I started to ask for more information but the mayor's office just tweeted the same press release back at me.

tfw they answer your question about a press release by tweeting the same press release back at you.

A photo posted by @skookses on Aug 24, 2016 at 11:48am PDT

Oh well.  Anyway, one reason I wanted to ask about the bike lane is, although the city is quick to advertise the progress it has made in installing painted lanes in recent years, the so-called best practices have already moved beyond this style.

BOSTON (AP) — Bike lanes are evolving. Cities are increasingly changing them to make them safer in light of fatal crashes involving cyclists and cars.

From Boston to San Francisco and New York to Tokyo, traditional bike lanes running alongside vehicle traffic are being replaced in favor of “protected” lanes or “cycletracks,” where physical barriers like concrete curbs, planters or fences separate cyclists from vehicle traffic.

“For 50 years, we’ve just been putting down a stripe of white paint, and that was how you accommodated bikes on busy streets,” says Martha Roskowski, director of People for Bikes, a Boulder, Colorado-based advocacy group that’s calling for better designed bike lanes. “What we’ve learned is that simply doesn’t work for most.”

Basically, we've been doing it wrong and other cities are already finding ways to do it better. This OCH project might have been an opportunity for us to think about how to make a better bike lane. Instead we're just gonna keep congratulating ourselves. 

“Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard is one of our city’s great boulevards, with a rich and diverse history that is uniquely New Orleans,” Landrieu said. “Today, this corridor is seeing a resurgence, and our streetscape project will complement the major public and private investments that have already been made here and trigger even more development for Central City and beyond.”

Also, notice the way Mitch can't help talking about the "public-private" nature of the corridor's gentrification resurgence. It's nice of him to overlook the grifting but that's also a factor. In reality, the benefactor here is the federal government. 

Federal Disaster Community Development Block Grant money will pay for the project, which was designed by GEC.

This week marks ten years plus one since the flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.  And we're still benefiting from the CDBG-DR investment delivered as a result. On Tuesday the Governor informed President Obama that his staff would be requesting CDBG funding to help South Louisiana recover from this year's devastating floods. The size of this request will be critical.  As long as we're running around making suppositions like this one by State Sen Francis Thompson, we might as well capitalize on them, right?

Sen. Thompson says he thinks that #laflood will end up being more expensive than Katrina or Rita. #lalege

— Elizabeth Crisp (@elizabethcrisp) August 25, 2016

The more money we pull down from Washington now, the more streets we can "beautify" ten years from now.  Who knows, by then, we might even know how to make a proper bike lane.