Spring, And Development Sprouts Again

I have been watching downtown for a while and now that Spring is here we have a lot of things shaking in the wind.

I think that we all know about the new Shakespeare and Co. coming at the corner of Short and Broadway. They have been taking a long time getting to where they are, but there was a lot to do. I have taken some photos of the corner since 2008 when the old Clark hardware building was painted and the former Wrokledge space needed a little fixing up.

August 2008

March 2008

First came the outside repairs of the windows and the tin mouldings at the cornice and gutters, 

then a matching paint job. 

And then we waited. And we waited.

Oct 2010

The construction barrier went up, the roll-off dumpsters arrived and a lot of things must have gone on behind the scenes. Dumpsters came and went. Materials arrived and disappeared inside with still no mention of what it was.

Late July 2011

The name became known, but little else and that gave little indication of what was to come. It was the foreign press that gave the best information on an interesting looking restaurant (and I hate to use the word) chain out of the United Arab Emirates. With a fabulous ethnic menu and exquisitely decorated facilities, Mrs. Sweeper and I could only wait with great anticipation of an opening date.

The end of the Thursday Night Live series last year brought thoughts of celebrating our anniversary there toward the end of 2011, but the concrete floor was still to be laid. Little did I know that almost the entire foundation and structural support system needed to be replaced. It is no wonder that it took so long.

They are working on the finishing touches in the past few weeks, as seen below.

 

On the other side of the parking lot, the Behr family is now quickly working on the former Metropol building, transforming it into The Village Idiot. 

A spruced up paint job and a renewed interior will bring this place right up there with Shakespeare and Table 310. I hope that they can influence someone to replace that dead street tree on Mill St by the right hand parking lot.

Aug 2011

Feb 2012

Mar 2012

Not the same as downtown but not so far away is the seemingly equally working time on the new version of The Jefferson Davis Inn. Announced with some fanfare and replacing another proposed development, a 7 story mixed use project not really accepted by the neighborhood, the block just stood there with a hole in the ground and a construction fence. I was even asked if the guy behind it was digging the foundation and pouring the footing was doing the job all by himself.

The builder told me the other day that sometimes “it seemed that way”. This project was started during the worst setback of a recession that most of us have seen and applying for and getting a small business loan took way longer than anticipated. After 14 months the loan has come through and the hard work of preparing foundation and steel is behind them. The walls are going up and an August opening date is being set.

Henry Clay Public House

Back downtown, across Upper St from the old Court House, is the third lot of Jordon’s row. A building being lovingly restored by only the fifth owner since it was built in early 1800’s for Henry Clay. It soon will be the site of Doug Breeding’s latest venture, the Henry Clay Public House. It looks like an opening date could be as early as late May or June. This building will still have the owner’s office on the second floor and a small apartment on the third, but it will be another site for libations and snack foods downtown.

Now can we bring on the rest of the retail and housing stock to revive a real downtown?

First The Trains, Then The Planes, Then The Roads?

Back in August of 2009, I wrote a piece about a little known Federal program called the Essential Air Service in which the government reimburses major airlines to serve smaller rural communities.  This year it runs to the tune of nearly $200 million and still our air carriers claim that they cannot make any money.  Today, Delta Air Lines announced that it “can no longer afford” to serve 24 of the rural airports that they picked up in the merger with Northwest Airlines.

From what I can gather, it is not all about the corporate decisions to leave folks high and dry but the "style" in which these passengers desire plays a factor.  Everybody, I guess, wishes that their airport be a modern and useful airfield, with the latest in air comfort and speed, but when you cannot fill the existing seats of the propeller type planes - then you will not fill a larger regional JET.  Nor can you fly to the 29 major hubs from just Anyplace, USA and expect to get good slots in the landing pattern.

The Essential Air Service subsidies are slated to expire in 2013 unless Congress decides to extend them but in this current fiscal state I would not hold my breath on that. The current Republican strategy is to cut out anything that does not help corporations but may do some good for the common man.  The highways that we cannot maintain will have to do for these 24 cities and probably a similar number next year - and the year after.

This is also just one decision made by one airline, how many more will be coming in the days ahead?  Deregulation was supposed to free up the airline industry to be responsive to the market demands and to foster more competitive scheduling and pricing.  The Essential Air Service subsidies were to equalize the opportunities for the rural cities which could not run with the big dogs, but also could not stay on the porch.  If things continue as they have in the past five years, even the big dogs may not be running like they have been.

Many of these small cities got a big boost from the railroad systems and some of them owe it all to the railroads. These railroads brought life into a lot of places in the expanding western territories.  For years they were THE way for people to come and go for long distance travel..  The automobile and the airplane helped bring those days to an end, so what is expected when these modes are no longer economically viable?  When the rural areas no longer have air service and the states and federal government can no longer build and maintain the roads.  What will we have then?

Other countries are considering (and building) systems of high speed rail with feeder routes of more moderate speed which connect to the more rural communities there.  Somehow, that doesn't fit in with our concept of a modern world...    yet.

Lexington's Air Travel Future

Last week, the Brookings Institution issued a report on air travel trends in America. Its general conclusion is that you can expect delays... more delays than you already have. Anybody that travels by commercial air these days will understand this.

The traveling public has grown used to the idea of speed and convenience of air travel since the first flights of the 20th century. The Interstate System came along in the latter half of the century which made it easier to travel those shorter distances, roughly 80-120 miles, in about the same time as scheduled air service and relegating some of the smaller airfields into non-players. Post 9/11 the TSA and other security changes have made air travel an even more time consuming endeavor.

The airline industry has, since deregulation, focused more and more flights into their central hubs and let regional carriers do the bulk of the short haul flights in the US. These centralized hubs have allowed smaller airlines to spring up, but the also have given the control of the air routes to the major companies.

Nearly 99 percent of all U.S. air passengers arrive or depart from one of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, with the vast majority of travel concentrated in 26 metropolitan-wide hubs.

These 100 metropolitan areas do not include Lexington, nor most points south and east until you get closer to Atlanta and the 26 hubs are usually located in the mega-regions that are forming the basis of American life under the present economy. How that economy will change in the coming reset will bear a careful watching.

Half of the country’s flights are routes of less than 500 miles

The really amazing thing here is that these flights only carried 30% of the total airline passengers in the past 12 months. It is highly likely that these flights are being flown from smaller airfields into a central hub and back out to a mid-sized airfield, both of whose communities could be reached by Interstate but being of sufficient distance as to create difficulty in driving in a days time.

Within the 26 domestic hubs, six experienced worse-than-average delays for both arrivals and departures: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Atlanta, and San Francisco.

The projected growth of our mega-regions would only assure that these delays will only get worse. It is assumed that the current recession has caused the reduction in the number of flights and its resultant improvement of on-time performance statistics. Likewise, it is also assumed that the travelers will return upon the rebound of the economy. Neither of these assumptions should be considered likely given the predicted economic reset and the uncertain length of our current economic status.

I would find it as no surprise that the inventive spirit that evidenced itself after the recession of the 1890s(the automobile and the airplane) would not again come forth and give us new methods of getting things done in the world. A paradigm shift of the magnitude of the pendulum swinging in the other direction is not out of the question.

Lexington does not seem to be prepared for anything other that the pendulum continuing to swing farther in its current direction and yet our momentum has slowed. Where do we go from here?

What High Speed Rail Can Do To Regional Air Travel

Back in March I posted about an old document on Kentucky's high speed rail thoughts of 1999. In that post I linked to a projection that Spain's short haul air travel would be affected.

Today I have a link to some more recent facts. People are getting around Spain in more comfort and more ease by train than by plane, and leaving a smaller carbon footprint.

High-speed trains pulled by aerodynamic engines with noses shaped like a duck-billed platypus are grounding aircraft across Spain. The year-old Barcelona-Madrid line has already taken 46% of the traffic – stealing most of it from fuel-guzzling, carbon-emitting aircraft. As the high-speed rail network spreads a web of tracks across Spain over the next decade, it threatens to relegate domestic air travel to a distant second place.

46% This is the kind of results that the US should be experiencing today, if they had started planning for high speed rail(or any kind of rail) following the gas crisis of the '70s.

From England we get a report that their new Secretary of Transport, Lord Adonis is advocating the end of domestic air travel and even the short flights to European destinations. The comments come as air passengers are having to contend with the scrapping of hundreds of flights a week by airlines and fact that domestic flights have been in steady decline in recent years, with the number of passengers dropping from 26.1 million in 2005 to 24.3 million last year.

How about Germany? Even there we see a sharp reduction in domestic air travel.

Germany's high-speed rail network has put pain to short-haul flights between several cities. Once, there were hundreds of flights a day transferring tens of thousands of passengers between Berlin and Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Bremen and Cologne. All have been closed down due to cheaper and faster rail travel.

Is it any wonder that President Obama and Transportation Secretary La Hood are talking about America's need to join the High Speed Rail community? Of the industrialized nations, only one has fewer planned HSR miles than the US. The tiny island nation of Taiwan. These industrialized nations are also charging ahead with expansion and funding that roughly equals what we spend in federal money on highways.

I won't even speak about the fact that their (Obama and La Hood) idea of HSR is less than half the speed of the those who are really doing something.


I also want to thank The Overhead Wire and Broken Sidewalk for the links. I had a record day for visitors.