Weird bike ride
So like, in Louisville's quest to be a bike-friendly city, they've decided to add bike lanes to all major streets and launch an aggressive program to educate drivers and bikers on how to share the road safety. No wait... that's just me thinking wishfully again... the city has actually continued doing million dollar road projects with no thought given to bikers, and so they can claim to be bike friendly have apparently figured out where the most useless place to put a 26 mile bike path would be, and promptly put it there.
A lot cyclists work downtown or in Hurstbourne, and a lot of them live in the Highlands, the East End, and the South End. So naturally, a useless place to put a bike route would be along the river from the west end through Rubbertown out to the depopulated trailer park country of southwest Louisville. Yeah... because people who work with harsh chemicals 40 hours a week and who live in flood plains are exactly the demographic that would be absolutely least likely to ever get from point A to point B in anything other than an American pickup, much less in a bicycle. Seriously, the city has identified the demographic most likely to throw bottles at random bicyclists and put a bike lane right in their front yard.
At any rate, that's where the city has put their multimillion dollar bike path, so this weekend I decided to go see what an inept Democratic city government hath wrought.
Now, the riverwalk trail has run from Waterfront Park to Shawnee Park since time immemorial (aka the early 90s). It's okay... it is a glaring reminder that we demolished our riverfront in the 1960s to put in an expressway (I-64), but for what it is, the Riverwalk is somewhat well designed and especially when it goes into Shawnee Park, pretty nice.
Past Shawnee is what is apparently called the "Mill Creek Trail", which basically connects the Riverwalk to the Levee Trail. It opened recently, so there is a lot of confusion about it, bikers I'd asked had said they'd gotten lost trying to find it from the Riverwalk, and indeed I got lost too my first time and just went home.
But Saturday I found it. This new trail is just... bizarre. Millions of dollars went into this, and it's supposed to be part of this flagship "city of parks" initiative to create a 100 mile greenway around Louisville. The "greenways" it goes through aren't landscaped or even wilderness forest, they're land that's been stripped and is now covered with 6 foot high weeds. I was just cracking up going through there... this is such a "Louisville" concept of nature: weeds, an interstate in the distance, and the smell of burnt rubber.
It got even weirder, as the trail goes right by an aluminum processing center. And by right by, I mean there are 20 foot high heaps of aluminum just 2 feet from the bikepath. As a bonus, two guys wearing gas masks were doing something to a some pieces of metal just 5 feet from the path... hope I didn't inhale anything too lethal. As anyone who has watched "The Wire" knows, aluminum is like... the entire means of financial support for every homeless man in America. So naturally, there would be a big problem with bums stealing the aluminum they just sold to sell it again. The aluminum palace has thought of this, and has not just a barbed wire fence but an *electric fence* inside the barbed wire fence, with prominent labels in English and Spanish that anyone touching the fence will get a 7,000 volt jolt. And this is what Louisville's visionary greenway goes right past! I was cracking up.
At any rate, past that, it's not quite as hilarious, just lame. It goes past all of those gigantic chemical plants that make up Rubbertown, for about 5 miles really, then finally you get off the road again and it's almost to the levee trail and it's somewhat tolerable.
Well... the whole thing was better for comedic value than anything else. Nice work, Louisville.
A lot cyclists work downtown or in Hurstbourne, and a lot of them live in the Highlands, the East End, and the South End. So naturally, a useless place to put a bike route would be along the river from the west end through Rubbertown out to the depopulated trailer park country of southwest Louisville. Yeah... because people who work with harsh chemicals 40 hours a week and who live in flood plains are exactly the demographic that would be absolutely least likely to ever get from point A to point B in anything other than an American pickup, much less in a bicycle. Seriously, the city has identified the demographic most likely to throw bottles at random bicyclists and put a bike lane right in their front yard.
At any rate, that's where the city has put their multimillion dollar bike path, so this weekend I decided to go see what an inept Democratic city government hath wrought.
Now, the riverwalk trail has run from Waterfront Park to Shawnee Park since time immemorial (aka the early 90s). It's okay... it is a glaring reminder that we demolished our riverfront in the 1960s to put in an expressway (I-64), but for what it is, the Riverwalk is somewhat well designed and especially when it goes into Shawnee Park, pretty nice.
Past Shawnee is what is apparently called the "Mill Creek Trail", which basically connects the Riverwalk to the Levee Trail. It opened recently, so there is a lot of confusion about it, bikers I'd asked had said they'd gotten lost trying to find it from the Riverwalk, and indeed I got lost too my first time and just went home.
But Saturday I found it. This new trail is just... bizarre. Millions of dollars went into this, and it's supposed to be part of this flagship "city of parks" initiative to create a 100 mile greenway around Louisville. The "greenways" it goes through aren't landscaped or even wilderness forest, they're land that's been stripped and is now covered with 6 foot high weeds. I was just cracking up going through there... this is such a "Louisville" concept of nature: weeds, an interstate in the distance, and the smell of burnt rubber.
It got even weirder, as the trail goes right by an aluminum processing center. And by right by, I mean there are 20 foot high heaps of aluminum just 2 feet from the bikepath. As a bonus, two guys wearing gas masks were doing something to a some pieces of metal just 5 feet from the path... hope I didn't inhale anything too lethal. As anyone who has watched "The Wire" knows, aluminum is like... the entire means of financial support for every homeless man in America. So naturally, there would be a big problem with bums stealing the aluminum they just sold to sell it again. The aluminum palace has thought of this, and has not just a barbed wire fence but an *electric fence* inside the barbed wire fence, with prominent labels in English and Spanish that anyone touching the fence will get a 7,000 volt jolt. And this is what Louisville's visionary greenway goes right past! I was cracking up.
At any rate, past that, it's not quite as hilarious, just lame. It goes past all of those gigantic chemical plants that make up Rubbertown, for about 5 miles really, then finally you get off the road again and it's almost to the levee trail and it's somewhat tolerable.
Well... the whole thing was better for comedic value than anything else. Nice work, Louisville.