Juxtaposition du Jour

After class today I added my four wheels to the traffic out in west LR and drove to the Arkansas Department of Highways AND Transportation's first public meeting regarding their Highway 10 / Cantrell Road study at the new Don Roberts Elementary School. Then I headed back downtown to Preservation Libations, co-hosted by the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas and the Quapaw Quarter Association, where I met a couple of really interesting folks from Community Revitalization Strategies out of Dallas. Needless to say the assembled groups in the two locations were not discussing the same topics, or at least had very different views regarding how to solve some pressing problems.

My own school duties beckon me tonight, but watch for posts in the near future with some heretical remarks about the folly trying to solve traffic problems by expanding roads and also about problems with the new trends in school design and placement. A preview: (1) why in the world does an elementary school require 16+ acres of land?; (2) why in the world would we build such a school immediately beside a neighborhood of 60 houses with absolutely no way to walk between the two?; and (3) why would we put a little commercial development on the same "block" with no connections to either the school or the residents?

Anyone want to challenge my prediction that there's a For Lease sign on some of those commercial buildings in the NW corner of the block?