Year: 2011

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Jarman’s Gap Construction Begins

Sidewalk, and bike lanes and car lanes.

From the VDOT site:

The improvements will include wider travel lanes, the addition of bike lanes, and construction of curb and gutter and sidewalk. The proposed design calls for 12-foot wide travel lanes, a four-foot wide bicycle lane on each side of the road, curb and gutter on both sides of the roadway and sidewalk on the northern side of Route 691.

h/t newsplex.

I’ll chalk this up as a pending improvement.

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Bike Month 2011 – How Is Crozet Going to Participate?

It’s Bike Month; the folks at Bike Charlottesville have coordinated an outstanding set of events which I encourage you to participate in any way that you can.

Here in Crozet, walking or biking to school or coffee shops or the library is an eminently doable thing and something that everyone should consider.

How are you going to participate in Bike Week?

I tried to revitalize the Walk To School program at Crozet Elementary, but ran into so many bureaucratic and “worried about liability” impediments that I conceded to those concerns.

Managing that process is a feat and skill unto itself. Rather than try to work within the defined systems, I’ll simply keep riding my bike with my daughter to school, wear my helmet inside the school to encourage conversations with kids who will hopefully pester their parents and continue trying to both set and example and “walk the walk”, if you will.

Bureaucracy has its place, as do safety concerns, but both seem more concerned with preventing progress and CYA than actually accomplishing anything.

I’m still wondering where the pedestrian improvements for Crozet Elementary are.

Please take the time to read Seth Godin’s “Times a Million” post from 2007; it made a real impact on how I think and the decisions I make.

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Will Crozet’s Next Library Be … (courtesy of Seth Godin)

If the new Crozet ever gets built (PDF) …

When will the new library be built?

The schematic plan for the library was presented to the Planning Commission in February of 2009, and will be presented to the BOS in March of 2009 after presentation to the Crozet community. Once the schematic plan is approved, formal design will proceed. Based on revised Capital Improvements Plan recommendations under consideration by the BOS, construction funding will shift from July 2009 to July 2011, allowing for completion by Fall 2012.

… Will Crozet’s next Library be this?

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.

Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.