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Of wires, street closings, no sidewalks and late bands

by Glenn H. Reynolds

Some people thought my column about Knoxville last time was a bit on the, er, sunny side. So I want to demonstrate that I can, in fact, be critical. Following is a collection of Andy Rooney-esque rants about Knoxville. Bear in mind that—as I mentioned in the last column—I love this place and think that it's a great place to live. But that's not the same as perfect.

1) Overhead Wires: East Tennessee is a beautiful place. So is Knoxville. And when I work to sell the place to people from out of town—as, for example, I'm doing this year in chairing the UT Law School's hiring committee—I always stress its beauty.

The only trouble is, it's a beautiful place that's sometimes made ugly. And one of the things that I've noticed making it ugly is the mass of telephone and power poles festooned with cables hanging everywhere. It doesn't help that the poles always seem to be leaning drunkenly as you look down the road, or that the cables always seem to be especially thick when I'm trying to take in a scenic view.

Well, big deal. People need to have power, and phones and cable TV, right?

Yeah. But they don't necessarily need to have them via overhead wires. In fact, some communities have adopted "no overhead wires" policies, and more are adopting them all the time. It's expensive to move wires underground—about 10 times as much, per mile, for underground cables as for pole-mounted ones—but it does have advantages in terms of reliability. Falling trees don't take down underground cables, and underground cables don't require tree-trimming (or tree-topping) to keep them safe.

I don't see anything like that happening in Knoxville anytime soon, but I wish they'd at least consider it along some of the more scenic, or prominent, stretches of road. Once you start noticing how ugly those power lines and poles are, you notice them everywhere.

2) Deane Hill: The closing off of Deane Hill Drive from Golf Club Road and Cheshire Drive has tied up traffic all around the West Town Mall area. It seems to me that there have been even more wrecks at the Westland/Morrell Drive intersection (where there really needs to be a left-turn arrow northbound) and at the Morrell /Deane Hill intersection. If the people in the Deane Hill neighborhood want to live in a gated community, fine—though it's not clear that they really do. But why should they get one at the taxpayers' expense? If there's a problem with people going too fast, as opposed to simply an attitude problem on the part of a few Deane Hill residents, then there are all sorts of "traffic calming" measures that can slow traffic without closing off the roads. Personally, I'm betting on the attitude problem, as I was once confronted by a crazed homeowner who ran in front of my car and screamed "slow down!" as I tooled along Cheshire doing all of 35 mph. If you don't want people driving by your house at 35 miles per hour, you should get an apartment. Open up the roads. (And this isn't exactly a complaint, but while I'm on the subject of traffic, and overhead wires, how about battery backups on the key traffic lights that always seem to go out during thunderstorms? Other towns have those, and they help prevent traffic tie-ups during blackouts.)

3) Bands that start the next day: A lot of Knoxville bands start their shows after midnight, meaning that the Saturday night show actually starts on Sunday morning. As someone with a family and a job, that's often too late for me. It didn't used to be that way—back when Todd Steed and I were in a band together some years ago, bands often started at 9:30. Now, of course, nobody shows up at 9:30—but that's because they're used to bands starting after midnight. Even the musicians are complaining about the late starts, and I don't think it's good for business. With the drinking age over 21, the class of people who can stay out at bars until 3 or 4 a.m., especially on weeknights, is actually a lot smaller than it was years ago, when the drinking age was 18, and the bands started earlier. Go figure. (And we ought to lower the drinking age back to 18, too, but that's another column.)

4) Lack of sidewalks: I live in West Knoxville, where there are no sidewalks to speak of. We live too close to my daughter's elementary school for bus service, but too far for her to walk along busy streets with no sidewalks. (The school even discourages kids from walking, no matter how close they live. So why no bus?) It's hard to make a town as spread-out as Knoxville pedestrian-friendly (though we do a bad job even around downtown), but surely we could do better. It perhaps says something that the biggest concentration of sidewalks in West Knoxville leads to West Town Mall. I'd like to see sidewalks surrounding, say, elementary schools to the same distance.

OK, those are my complaints. I imagine I could come up with a few more if I had to, but this should be enough to prove that I can find things to complain about when I want to. In the meantime, I've at least tried to offer some constructive suggestions along with the complaints. Tune in next time for something completely different!

Glenn Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee, and writes for InstaPundit.com, MSNBC.com, and TechCentralStation.com.