Wayfinding sign headed East on Commercial Street

The first of the city’s wayfinding signs is scheduled to be installed this morning.

Nixa-based Modern Neon will install the first sign near Springfield-Branson National Airport, on the west side of Airport Boulevard south of the traffic roundabout. The sign aims to guide travelers to the three city districts represented in the program: the Battlefield/Glenstone retail corridor, the Bass Pro retail area and downtown.

The sign program is supposed to increase awareness of the city’s major retail destinations, and identify parking options in those areas, according to a city news release. It is mostly funded by the quarter-cent capital improvements sales tax and is expected to cost more than $604,000 for design, fabrication and installation. The sales tax covered just less than $500,000 of the total cost.

Wayfinding sign, Commercial Street headed West

Pretty cool huh. Oh, and before you leave, check out this recent discussion of urban parking by Professor Andy Cline, Missouri State University – OUR URBAN CHALLENGE: FREE PARKING that included a visit to the parking spaces associated with the signs:

Dr. Donald Shoup wrote a book called The High Cost of Free Parking in which he argued that too many American cities just give away their most valuable real estate in the form of free parking spaces. The usual cry from business owners in response is: “But we’ll drive away customers if we charge for parking.”

Thanks for stopping by!

… Seth nails it. Especially when it comes to the Olympic Swimming Committee.

So we already have one strike against us, to say nothing of the lost revenue since the Park District can’t sell adult beverages, but look at this story:

Nowhere in Brazil’s more than three million mostly tropical square miles is there a facility devoted to curling, the stone-and-broom sport played on ice that joined the Winter Olympics program in 1998.

The World Curling Federation allots two berths in the 12-team world championship to countries from the Americas, and in the 50 years of the event the lone representatives have been the United States and Canada. Only two other countries in the Americas belong to the federation: Brazil, which joined in 1998, and the United States Virgin Islands.

I say if Brazil can compete, so can Springfield. And there has to be available ice time at Mediacom Ice Park. I know of at least one downtown Barber Shop that’s prepared to field a team. Who’s with me?

Call 417-866-7444 and give them your opinion!

Update – the Wall Street Journal picked up on the article on February 3rd. They like the idea and added to it:

If you’ve forgotten your winter Olympics lingo, curling is the winter sport that’s sometimes called shuffleboard on ice or chess on ice, and thought to have started in Scotland in 1541. Last weekend Brazil, which doesn’t even have an ice rink, had its international curling debut in Bismarck, N.D. The four Brazilians only recently took up curling while studying at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. “According to their first coach, Judy Cassidy of the Lennoxville Curling Club in Sherbrooke, none of the four realized the heft of a granite curling stone (40 pounds) until they showed up to ask about lessons in the summer of 2007,” Pat Borzi writes in the New York Times.

The Brazilian four still have a ways to go. “They didn’t last long, losing all three matches in emphatic fashion, but kudos on their debut appearance nonetheless,” the Curling News reports on its blog.

A blog? What a great idea!

Now it’s the Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau who’s reaching out to the community, suggesting an effort to get Casper’s recognized by the Food Channel TV program, Diners Drive Ins and Dives

The most remarkable aspect to their effort? The CVB is using Twitter and their blog (inexplicably they are using Blogger rather then driving the traffic to their primary site, a lesson KY3 recently took to heart with the Political blog David Catanese has developed for them). Get out the vote folks!