The Alliance for Green Hills Park Festival --- canceled : (

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

The Alliance for Green Hills Park Festival TODAY!!!

***

We are very sorry to announce that this event will be cancelled. With the ongoing rain and with the rain likely returning during the evening movie, we are looking at very soggy conditions, even if the skies clear a little during the afternoon. 

We will look for a new date and will keep you posted! Thank you for your support for this event!

***

As everyone knows, Green Hills has a traffic issue.  The Alliance for Green Hills is working hard to make Green Hills a walkable community.  

They are also having a BIG PARTY TODAY!

***

There is a chance of rain so check their FB page or this blog for rain info (rain date, next Saturday).

Join the Alliance for Green Hills and the Friends of Green Hills Park for a FREE festival celebrating local food and vendors. From YMCA bounce houses to one-of-a-kind treasures from local Green Hills shops, this festival has something for everyone. 

PARKING: See all4greenhills.com/resources/events for parking information. Thank you to Lipscomb for offering the elementary school lot close to the park -- as well as a shuttle. 

Yes, we will have a beer garden! A fire truck will be onsite for kids to explore, too. Face painting awaits along with a Parnassus / Green Hills Library book nook! As the festival nears sunset, settle onto a picnic blanket to enjoy a movie - Inside Out! 

Beer Garden
Parnassus 
Green Hills Library
Ten Thousand Villages
Ex Voto Vintage
Green Hills Grille
Let's Face It - face painting
YMCA - bounce houses
King of Pops
Nashville Fire Department & Police Department (vehicle onsite!)
Two Thompsons
Horrell Company
Freebirds World Burrito
Brilliant Sky
Mall at Green Hills
McDougals Chicken
First Tennessee Bank
Wishing Chair Productions
Lipscomb University
Boy Scouts Troop 17
Hillsboro High School Players

Want to learn more about our organizations? Visit the Alliance for Green Hills at all4greenhills.com and the Friends of Green Hills Park at www.friendsofgreenhillspark.org.

Have strong feelings about Green Hills traffic?  Take just a few minutes and share your thoughts here:

http://all4greenhills.com/resources/alliance-for-green-hills-community-surveys


There is a chance of rain so check the Facebook page (or this blog), link below, before heading over.  Rain date would be next Saturday.


LINK:

https://www.facebook.com/events/255529468158391/

With Citizens' Help...Wishing there was a faster way to try new projects in Nashville...

With Citizens' Help, Cities Can Build A Better Bike Lane — And More

3:25

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September 15, 20164:47 AM ET

Heard on  Morning Edition

LAUREL WAMSLEY

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Peggy O'Neill stands outside Edmunds Elementary and Middle Schools in Burlington, Vt. She was one of the strongest advocates for the bike lane in her city but met a lot of resistance.

Laurel Wamsley/NPR

There's a new term that has become popular in city planning circles: tactical urbanism. The idea is that small experiments, done cheaply and quickly, can make cities better, and more nimble.

Some of the tactics are guerrilla methods: citizens might paint a crosswalk where they believe one should exist, or post their own road signs where they find the official ones confusing.

Across the country, DIY urbanists have been leaving their mark on cities — and now city governments are trying to bring them into the fold to harness their ideas.

'How can they say no to kids?'

At first glance, the battle for a bike lane in Burlington, Vt., seems like the sort of thing that plays out in town meetings everywhere. A group of concerned citizens wanted a protected bike lane by the elementary school downtown, to make it safer for kids to get to school.

But there are a few things that make this case different. For starters, the bike lane was really a symbol of something bigger: showing that streets could be made better for everyone, and that citizens could lead the way through experimentation.

This is Church Street, a pedestrian-only thoroughfare in downtown Burlington.

Laurel Wamsley/NPR

Peggy O'Neill was one of the strongest advocates for the bike lane. She and her family had just come back from a semester in Bogota, Colombia, the city that invented Ciclovia — closing streets to cars, and opening them to everything else.

"It's the entire city," she explains. "Avenues, huge avenues! Open to bicycles. Dogs. Skateboard riders. Rollerbladers. Everything! Not cars. So you have this privilege and priority in the streets."

She was fired up to bring some of Bogota's ideas to Burlington. Along with many others, O'Neill tried to get the city to approve the protected bike lane for a week, a day, or just an hour.

"Every meeting I would go in feeling optimistic," she says. "How can they say no to kids?"

But that's exactly what happened.

"It was incredibly discouraging," O'Neill says.

Empowering citizens

"We really wanted to say yes to it," says Miro Weinberger, Burlington's mayor.

He says he wants Burlington to be the sort of place where citizens' energy can flourish — noting that city governments can be the instigators of tactical interventions, too. He points to New York City, and the success that city had in remaking Times Square from a traffic-choked bottleneck into an incredibly popular pedestrian plaza. And New York started by just trying it out, one Memorial Day weekend, with some orange plastic barrels to reroute cars and lawn chairs to sit on.

(Left) Mayor Miro Weinberger wants Burlington to be best biking city on the East Coast. (Right) Jason Van Driesche stands in Local Motion's trailer full of tactical urbanism supplies. Van Driesche believes DIY methods can spur permanent change.

Laurel Wamsley/NPR

Part of Mayor Weinberger's vision is to make Burlington the best biking city on the East Coast.

"But we've got a long way to go to get there," he says, "and we think it will be accelerated if citizens are empowered to help us do some of the work that's going to be necessary."

So the city created a tactical urbanism policy, making it easier to greenlight projects like O'Neill's. And it published a 50-page tactical urbanism guide, offering ideas for projects citizens might propose, from curb extensions that shorten pedestrian crossings, to wayfinding signs that make it easier to explore the city.

'I need to be strategic'

Brendan Hogan is another bike lane advocate. At Open Streets, Burlington's now-annual, much smaller version of Ciclovia, people of all ages biked past, on a mile and a half of streets closed to cars. O'Neill and her family were there, making pedal-powered smoothies on the back of a bike.

O'Neill and fellow bike lane advocate Brendan Hogan stand with Hogan's son George on a blocked off street during Open Streets in Burlington.

Laurel Wamsley/NPR

Hogan said the city's new efforts felt like a victory, even though he didn't get everything he wanted.

"The city was not ready for a bunch of citizens proposing changes to their streets, us laypeople without civil engineering degrees," he said.

But Hogan says their efforts laid the groundwork – for both the city and the citizens – to do this kind of thing in the future. And for advocates like Jason Van Driesche, deputy director of the Vermont walking and biking nonprofit Local Motion, the unsanctioned methods still have an appeal.

"I'd be lying if I didn't say that at times I have been sorely tempted to go out with a can of spray paint and paint a damn white line on the street. But my better self remembers that if I want something permanent, I need to be strategic."

As Burlington and other cities adopt the scrappy tactics of their citizens, they'll need to show that they can make good on tactical urbanism's original principles — to move faster, try new things, and not be afraid to fail.

LINK:

http://www.npr.org/2016/09/15/493970623/with-citizens-help-cities-can-build-a-better-bike-lane-and-more

Take a Minute & VOTE for where you want to see a sidewalk in Nashville!!!

When you come upon a particularly difficult place to walk in Nashville, take a moment to open http://thesidewalkfoundation.org and drop a pin.  We need all your thoughts and comments on this!
Share this link with your neighborhood groups.  Show this administration that you want sidewalks and you getting frustrated waiting!

The Alliance for Green Hills Park Festival THIS SATURDAY!!!

The Alliance for Green Hills is working hard to make Green Hills a walkable community.  They are also having a BIG PARTY this Saturday!

***

So excited for The Alliance for Green Hills Park Festival 

THIS SATURDAY!!!

Join the Alliance for Green Hills and the Friends of Green Hills Park for a FREE festival celebrating local food and vendors. From YMCA bounce houses to one-of-a-kind treasures from local Green Hills shops, this festival has something for everyone. 

PARKING: See all4greenhills.com/resources/events for parking information. Thank you to Lipscomb for offering the elementary school lot close to the park -- as well as a shuttle. 

Yes, we will have a beer garden! A fire truck will be onsite for kids to explore, too. Face painting awaits along with a Parnassus / Green Hills Library book nook! As the festival nears sunset, settle onto a picnic blanket to enjoy a movie - Inside Out! 

Beer Garden
Parnassus 
Green Hills Library
Ten Thousand Villages
Ex Voto Vintage
Green Hills Grille
Let's Face It - face painting
YMCA - bounce houses
King of Pops
Nashville Fire Department & Police Department (vehicle onsite!)
Two Thompsons
Horrell Company
Freebirds World Burrito
Brilliant Sky
Mall at Green Hills
McDougals Chicken
First Tennessee Bank
Wishing Chair Productions
Lipscomb University
Boy Scouts Troop 17
Hillsboro High School Players

Want to learn more about our organizations? Visit the Alliance for Green Hills at all4greenhills.com and the Friends of Green Hills Park at www.friendsofgreenhillspark.org.

Have strong feelings about Green Hills traffic?  Take just a few minutes and share your thoughts here:
http://all4greenhills.com/resources/alliance-for-green-hills-community-surveys


There is a slight chance of rain so check the Facebook page, link below, before heading over.


LINK:

https://www.facebook.com/events/255529468158391/

Green Hills Traffic Survey - Help to fix it!

Have issue with Green Hills?  You can HELP!!!

Link to Survey on Transportation in Green Hills:

http://all4greenhills.com/resources/alliance-for-green-hills-community-surveys

Green Hills traffic? The worst. This group needs your help fixing it.

LINK:

http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2016/09/07/green-hills-traffic-the-worst-this-group-needs.html

Sep 7, 2016, 11:12am 

•  

Adam SichkoSenior ReporterNashville Business Journal

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Among Nashville's notoriously horrendous hotbeds of snarled traffic, affluent Green Hills ranks at the top of the list. Especially Hillsboro Pike, which is a key commute route that also runs by a high school, The Mall at Green Hills and several prominent developments, including a $125 million project featuring 310 apartments.

Now, an advocacy group that arose partly out of development-induced tension is planning a traffic summit that will involve Metro and state transportation officials. Almost 30,000 vehicles travel this part of Hillsboro Pike in the average day, according to state data. While that number has remained about the same over the years, other roads are getting worse. Traffic on Lone Oak Road, a half-mile from Hillsboro Pike, is at its highest level in a decade, and traffic on Abbott Martin Road — bordering the mall — is higher than ever recorded.

Enlarge

Southern Land Co. is under construction on this 18-story, $125 million mixed-use… more

PROVIDED BY SOUTHERN LAND CO.

To frame that summit, planned for January, the Alliance for Green Hills first wants the public's input. The group is asking the public to take a 10-minute survey on that topic.

“We know people are frustrated with neighborhood traffic congestion and that they want to see a plan to improve traffic flow. Understanding area residents’ traffic use, their roadway experiences and the specific problems they encounter is an essential step in planning long-term solutions,” said Ed Cole, president of The Alliance for Green Hills. This is a topic in Cole's wheelhouse: He is a former executive with the state Department of Transportation, and the former chief of the nonprofit Transit Alliance of Middle Tennessee.

Click here to take the survey.