If only …
A major feature of the project will be a developer-funded public road that will link Fifth Street and Avon Street Extended, a connection that the County is eager to see—especially now that the massive Biscuit Run development has County drivers fretting about increased traffic in the area.
It seems that the only time a new road has a chance of being built, it comes from private money. Hopefully the County will ensure that this is a functional road, with bike paths, etc.
This seems to be the type of development that we want – anything to help alleviate the congestion on the 29 North Corridor. More information on this and other transportation projects can be found at cvilletomorrow’s excellent Transportation Matrix.
Note that this story is from the C-Ville’s new website. Quite nifty. Now they appear to have permalinks, which will make linking to their stories that much better; it’s a shame that their links are so complex. Maybe one of the more technologically-inclined will help me understand why theirs are so different.
See the difference between theirs
http://c-ville.com/index.php?cat=141404064435450&ShowArticle_ID=1332404062435079
and mine?
Technorati Tags: charlalbemarle, growth, transportation
Why do I have a hard time believing that many of these projects will actually make it to the construction phase? Could it be the history the county has on road projects? or maybe its the current budget crisis in Richmond?
Where is your optimism? 🙂
Seriously, if they take UVA’s path and remove the government from the equation, then the road will be built. Gov’t gives the direction and guidance, but the private developers actually do it.
I think if they end up linking fifth st and Avon Street I think it will be via Rt 20 south (Where Avon St extended dumps out) Which will make it useless for most people that would like to see a link up because right now they can just as easily use 64 to 20 and backtrack a bit.
I think it might be more reasonable connecting those two areas to give Avon St Extended it’s own off ramp from I-64. All you’d have to do would be to widen the road/bridge a little bit and put in traffic lights.
On a side note: In looking at a map in relation to this post I saw that The street the jail is on is called “Peregory Ln”. What do you want to bet whomever named the street just mis-spelled “purgatory?”
I’m confident the roads will be built too, it’s just a matter of time.
The need for more capacity of the road network is very clear but I’m wondering if non-polluting and more innovative alternatives like carpools, bike paths and even Segway Human Transporters have been seriously considered to partly alleviate the congestion.
Also consider that over time, the more people who choose to work from home, the better!
If private developers build roads with private money, how long before they figure out that they are THEIR roads and start charging tolls as if they were a real private enterprise?
The permalink question relates back to how C-Ville.com is implementing PHP. C-Ville.com is running PHP 4.3.4 on an Apache web server, while your blog is running PHP-CGI 0.1b on a differnt version of Apache. While differnt versions of the various web servers allow for different degrees of PHP functionality, the disparity in permalink structure may simply reflect how C-Ville.com has chosen to implement PHP.
In any event, your permalinks are cool . . .
My biggest issues with the county and city are the relentless studies and meetings to conclude what an average driver in Charlottesville could tell you. I mean I understand the point of a few studies to make sure money is being spent right, but for god sakes at some point you need to start laying pavement. It has taken 17 years for the county to figure out it doesn’t want a Western Bypass. This diverted tons of resources from other projects and cities that were ready to act. It has taken 30+ years for construction on the parkway to start*(pending). Now the county is spending tons of money on studies to figure out if 29 needs to be widened to Greene and if 250 needs to be widened to Fluvanna. Now ask yourself, what would the average driver say about the projects? Now ask, what will the studies conclude? See if there is any correlation.
UV08:
I love it. That is really funny.
The permalink difference stems from there being no actual standard for “permanent” links. Any unique attribute can be used. Viable permalinks for individual elements on a website (articles, comments, photographs, applicants…whatever) could include the exact date and time that it was posted, a randomly-generated alphanumeric string, the first few words of the content in question, an integer advanced by 1, or just about anything else you can think of. All of these are in use on different sites, and all work well for different reasons.
That said, it’s not the technical viability of permalinks that’s particularly interesting, it’s the human-usefulness. In the past few years it has become clear to website developers that permalinks must be human-readable. The standard that developed among blog software is fast emerging as the overall standard:
example.com/yyyy/mm/dd/content-slug/
Better still if that URL can be hacked — removing the slug should yield a page that lists all content for that day. Removing the day, too, should yield all content for the month. And so on.
C-Ville Weekly’s URL structure has been created to be convenient for the site developers, by using an integer so long that there is no chance that they’ll run out of numbers. (That assumes that C-Ville will never publish more than ten quadrillion articles. I would have gone with a smaller number of digits, myself.) The website categories, perhaps demonstrating some restraint, are limited to one quadrillion. The combination of the two, however, is where things get powerful: by cleverly distributing their articles within all categories, they can have a hair under one decillion articles.
If they write one article each second, they’ll run out of numbers in 10^25 years, or way the hell longer than the universe has existed thus far. Now that’s planning ahead.
I’m home sick. I have nothing else to do. What can I say?
Waldo – Thank you for all I ever wanted to know about permalinks but was afraid to ask.
–Jim
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