Midnight Cheese

A few photos from Nashville’s biggest snow since 2003.

We’ve been fighting the speeding problem on our street for several years now. Trying to get the city of La Vergne to attempt a solution has been a major part of our effort.

Our street is about a mile long, straight as an arrow, and the gateway for the larger section of our neighborhood. Naturally, people tend to go faster than the posted 25mph speed limit while trying to get deeper into the subdivision.

Protect the Cars
Being a residential area, we’ve proposed speed bumps, but the city doesn’t like that. In addition to impeding emergency personnel vehicles, they’re afraid drivers of “souped-up Honda Civics” will damage their cars while taking the bumps at speed. (Pg.2 Paragraph 5. This is the kind of stuff you can’t make up.) In other words, speed bumps hurt cars that go over them at a high rate of speed. Let’s protect the cars by eliminating the speed bumps.

What the city is trying to say is, when driven over improperly, speed bumps can cause cars to run out of control, threatening the lives of pedestrians. But protecting pedestrians by nixing speed bumps all together leaves greater risks for kids playing outside who have to dodge speeding cars, unimpeded by speed bumps at all.

It’d be like building houses without door locks because someone might accidentally lock themselves out.

Unneeded Stop Signs
This past week, the city announced it’s finally making a move. We’re about to have two new sets of stop signs on our section of the street. One set at each end, just a few feet from the existing stop signs. (Clicking the map above will help as a visual aid.)

And this is where I need help because the reasoning for these new stop signs is completely beyond me, as well as other residents we’ve spoken with. This plan leaves a good half mile of uninterrupted pavement, straight as can be, just begging to have some rubber put down by our less than considerate neighbors who live deeper in the neighborhood.

Does this make sense to anyone? Am I missing something obvious? How do these stop signs prevent people from speeding down a half mile stretch of road? Is this a waste of tax money, resources, and time? Or am I missing the genius of it all?

With all the talk of the housing market, I decided to take a quick inventory of the homes on our block. Of the 81 homes on the south end of our street there are 8 empty homes in some form of foreclosure, abandonment or sale. That equals about 10% of the homes on our street without occupants. Most of the homes have been empty for several months or more.

La Vergne has opened a new Police sub-station in the heart of the Lake Forrest neighborhood. This places a Police presence in the heart of a neighborhood that has been on the nightly news one too many times over the last several years.

City officials and the Police department are all standing behind this effort and I’m glad to see this activism come to our neighborhood, as we certainly need it.

According to the letter (PDF) we received yesterday, this is actually a continuation of the same EPA violation from September of last year.

The La Vergne System is currently in violation of the maximum contaminant level (MCL) for total trihalomethanes (TTHMs)…

From what I’ve gathered, this means there is too much chemical by-product from the chlorine used to breakdown and treat organic matter in the water supply. THMs are considered carcinogenic.

The Daily News Journal goes into detail about past issues with the city of La Vergne and its water supply, including failing to notify citizens of problems.

The street we live on is named after a La Vergne city official (codes) who was recently suspended for using racial slurs at work.

This is what I get to think about now when addressing letters and filling out forms that require my address.

Just when you think La Vergne can’t bottom out any further, it somehow manages.

And how does a current sitting official get a street named after him?

Our street was featured on the news again this past Halloween. This time for more speeding issues. (We made national news a few weeks ago.)

Due to terrible city and neighborhood planning, our narrow little street is a main thoroughfare for the rest of our neighborhood. As a result, most drivers abuse the 25mph speed limit, cruising through at nearly double the speed.

Many small children live and play on our street so we’ve contacted the city on a number of occasions to ask for assistance in keeping the speed limit enforced. We’ve even had them come out to look for themselves. As a result, we have seen little help. From the news story:

“The city administrator sat in my kitchen and witnessed this first hand. That was about a year ago. The only thing they could do was put more speed limit signs up. Have they? Absolutely not, nothing has been done,” she said.

LaVergne City Administrator Mark Moshea refused to do an interview about the problem but said he plans to look into it.

Granted, it’s also the responsibility of the neighbors to respect others and drive through at a reasonable speed, but at the same time La Vergne is small. There isn’t a lot for the police to do in this town. They could take some time to enforce the speed limit.

But hey, our very own Taco Bell just opened!

Sad.

Update: In february we had a few days of regular speed traps on our street. I spoke with one of the officers personally. People slowed down during the presence, but I haven’t seen the police out again lately.