Amazon: The Thread | 5,000 Jobs | 1M SQFT in Nashville Yards

[DDIG]

28 minutes ago, wreynol4 said:

Any idea when Amazon will start some of their hiring?

They've started. I've seen some Nashville-based business development jobs pop up on LinkedIn Jobs.

[PruneTracy]

On ‎2019‎-‎01‎-‎14 at 2:01 PM, AronG said:

Won't argue that there aren't tradoffs, but your idea that we need to design bike lanes explicitly so people can swerve in and out of the vehicle lanes to avoid debris is typical of the way they've been conceived in Nashville to date. My point is that we have the demand and are ready for a few key bike/scooter routes that are designed for actual, comfortable, mainstream use, not as afterthoughts for the 1% of spandex-wearing enthusiasts who are interested in risking their a** shooting in and out of car traffic to dodge storm drains.

If you're looking for a design that accommodates all skill levels and purposes of cycling then the answer more likely than not is going to be a bicycle boulevard or other shared street. The point of these is to reduce the number of cars and their speed rather than attempt to segregate traffic. There are enough roadways in the CBD and other urban areas to suggest this could be implemented on some without inducing congestion on others.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space

In any case it is worth asking if the Church Street viaduct is the place to accommodate both roadway traffic and beginner or recreational cycling. It is a viaduct, after all. I'm not trying to say that these users should not be considered but rather that some roadways are better fits, and have varying demands, for different modes and purposes of transportation than others. Not every roadway has to be a "complete street" that does everything while doing nothing.

On ‎2019‎-‎01‎-‎14 at 2:01 PM, AronG said:

The on-sidewalk/non-grade-separated bike lanes on 11th, 28/31 (and 1st) are an interesting typology, and in my experience a failed one. You called them "shared-use paths", which sounds right, because they just turn into a few bikers/scooters weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic. They seem like another example of us doing 99% of our engineering around car traffic, then letting pedestrians and anything else fight over the crumbs.

I'm also not sure the 11th Avenue redesign counts as engineering around car traffic. It was at one time four lanes with zero bike/ped infrastructure. It's now two lanes and the majority of the right-of-way width is dedicated to the shared-use paths and street furniture.

As for the paths themselves, they are a good solution to get bicycle (and now scooter, etc.) traffic away from cars in areas that don't have a critical mass of cycle or pedestrian traffic. 11th Avenue is a good example, as would be the Church Street viaduct. You could take your family riding up 11th and count on one hand the number of pedestrians you see, simply because of the nature and location of the roadway. Same for the Church Street viaduct. Lower Broadway on the other hand would be a poor application. Again, not every road has to have the same treatment and not all roads require all treatments.

[Guest]

Brillant post.

3 hours ago, PruneTracy said:

In any case it is worth asking if the Church Street viaduct is the place to accommodate both roadway traffic and beginner or recreational cycling. It is a viaduct, after all. I'm not trying to say that these users should not be considered but rather that some roadways are better fits, and have varying demands, for different modes and purposes of transportation than others. Not every roadway has to be a "complete street" that does everything while doing nothing.

[MidTenn1]

The Metro Council voted 31 to 3 on second reading to approve $15 million for site improvements in Nashville Yards for the two Amazon Towers. Per the TENNESSEAN..

Quote

The Metro Council voted Tuesday to give preliminary approval to $15.2 million for road, sewer and other work around Nashville Yards, the future downtown mega-development that's the planned home of the city's new Amazon hub and several other uses.……..

The work includes environmental clean-up in the public right-of-way, traffic signalization, street and sidewalk work at Church and Commerce streets as well as 8th, 9th and 10th avenues, the separation of water and sewer utilities and other utility infrastructure and upgrades.

The local contribution is to be voted on later...

Quote

But the local contribution has faced criticism, inspiring separate resolutions that were deferred Tuesday and will be taken up in the coming weeks.

The 31 to 3 vote was encouraging, nevertheless.

The Nashville Yards web site has a video with an updated rendering...

[PaulChinetti]

"The agreements include the city reimbursing the developers $15.2 million out of $79.5 million they intend to spend on infrastructure work."

I think all the headlines keep leaving the second number out. Doesn't sound too bad when you see them together. 

[MLBrumby]

That first AMZN tower looks like it's grown a floor or two from the previous iteration. I'm not so good at counting floors (my eyes go wonky ) but it looks a tad taller (leaner) than the recently 'cut down' version. 

Also, I seem to remember the second tower was the same height as the first one, but the exterior "wings" rose up toward the north. In that picture, it looks considerably taller.... by another 50' or so. 

If this rendering is drawn in proportion to the other buildings in NY, then the office towers should be quite prominent. I base this on the shorter one being about 30% taller than the Grand Hyatt which I'd expect to top out somewhere around 300'.  So add another 30% height to that and you'll get a very tall office tower in the high 300s. So a really good chance the second one will rise taller than 400'.

Edited January 16, 2019 by MLBrumby

[markhollin]

As best I can count the floors on this latest rendering, it would appear that the tower closest to Church Street is 21 stories with a 30' crown.   The 2nd tower, set further back from Church St., looks to be 25 stories with a 30' crown.  

Bear  in mind that these renderings seem to change weekly...so I wouldn't put a whole lot of stock in them just yet. 

[Bos2Nash]

16 hours ago, PruneTracy said:

In any case it is worth asking if the Church Street viaduct is the place to accommodate both roadway traffic and beginner or recreational cycling. It is a viaduct, after all. I'm not trying to say that these users should not be considered but rather that some roadways are better fits, and have varying demands, for different modes and purposes of transportation than others. Not every roadway has to be a "complete street" that does everything while doing nothing.

I agree that not every street needs to be a complete street, but due to the fact that CSX is not going anywhere anytime soon, we need to have at least two of these viaducts be more complete. Demonbruen is quite honestly a sad attempt at it, so that leaves Broadway and Church as the viable candidates for a redesign and integrating these strategies. There was no metrics to say that we needed to design all roadways around cars and continually expand our roads to the point that people need to run across four to five lanes of traffic when they are walking in a downtown area, but we built them nonetheless. Society is shifting from a design standpoint and we need to work to implement the best strategies for a successful city and that is the improvement of bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

Drop the lane count on both Broadway and Church, or make the lanes the absolute minimum to reduce speeding and increase comfort for ALL users. Cars are no longer all the users on these streets.

[AronG]

18 hours ago, PruneTracy said:

I'm also not sure the 11th Avenue redesign counts as engineering around car traffic. It was at one time four lanes with zero bike/ped infrastructure. It's now two lanes and the majority of the right-of-way width is dedicated to the shared-use paths and street furniture.

As for the paths themselves, they are a good solution to get bicycle (and now scooter, etc.) traffic away from cars in areas that don't have a critical mass of cycle or pedestrian traffic. 11th Avenue is a good example, as would be the Church Street viaduct. You could take your family riding up 11th and count on one hand the number of pedestrians you see, simply because of the nature and location of the roadway. Same for the Church Street viaduct. Lower Broadway on the other hand would be a poor application. Again, not every road has to have the same treatment and not all roads require all treatments.

Sure 11th is sparse on pedestrians right now, but that's because it doesn't connect anything. It was a down payment towards future capacity, and one that could pay off now. It's easy to imagine a 2021 where Metro and/or the Nashville Yards developers spent some money building out real dedicated bike infrastructure on Church from 11th to Rosa Parks. With a good connection to the 11th St bike lanes/greenway, we would have a traffic-separated route connecting two densified areas (the gulch & the new Nashville Yards neighborhood) with a significant amount of potential residential/office/tourist cross-traffic. And a bonus of at least some connectivity into downtown, since Church below 8th is a pretty traffic-calmed environment. It would be a great test case to see how much traffic we could move if we actually provided safe, dedicated bike/scooter facilities that allow you to get somewhere useful. Tack on dedicated/reworked facilities along the riverfront and some eye-catching wayfinding and we'd have the start of a real network.

"Bicycle boulevards" are great in the right environment, but in downtown Nashville it just leads to bikers/scooters sitting with cars in traffic gridlock. Lots of people want to drive their car into downtown, and that's fine, but as the downtown population mushrooms let's give everybody making trips of less than a mile or two an alternative way to get around without sitting in the traffic. It should be a win-win: nobody's happy with the scooters in the roads and sidewalks, but the truth is they're off-loading a bunch of traffic that would otherwise clog up the car lanes.

Anyway, appreciate your thoughts as they seem like a window into the prevalent thinking. Did I see in some other thread that you work in this field? I realize that I'm probably delusional in these hopes. I know it will be much easier for them to stick with the existing form factors. Here's hoping we at least get some kind of improvements.

[markhollin]

Area engineers talk about the challenges that Amazon's HQ will bring in this slide show article at NBJ:

https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2019/01/16/nashville-engineers-highlight-the-challenges.html?iana=hpmvp_nsh_news_headline

[dReAmWiELdEr]

That first AMZN tower looks like it's grown a floor or two from the previous iteration. I'm not so good at counting floors (my eyes go wonky ) but it looks a tad taller (leaner) than the recently 'cut down' version. 

Also, I seem to remember the second tower was the same height as the first one, but the exterior "wings" rose up toward the north. In that picture, it looks considerably taller.... by another 50' or so. 

If this rendering is drawn in proportion to the other buildings in NY, then the office towers should be quite prominent. I base this on the shorter one being about 30% taller than the Grand Hyatt which I'd expect to top out somewhere around 300'.  So add another 30% height to that and you'll get a very tall office tower in the high 300s. So a really good chance the second one will rise taller than 400'.

I was seeing the same thing. I would bet at least 300+ feet for both towers. They look more equal in height in the renderings shown in the sister article about the $15 million Nashville has committed to.

[PruneTracy]

On ‎2019‎-‎01‎-‎16 at 9:35 AM, Bos2Nash said:

Drop the lane count on both Broadway and Church, or make the lanes the absolute minimum to reduce speeding and increase comfort for ALL users. Cars are no longer all the users on these streets.

On ‎2019‎-‎01‎-‎16 at 11:02 AM, AronG said:

Anyway, appreciate your thoughts as they seem like a window into the prevalent thinking. Did I see in some other thread that you work in this field? I realize that I'm probably delusional in these hopes. I know it will be much easier for them to stick with the existing form factors. Here's hoping we at least get some kind of improvements.

Yes, I work in planning and design of everything from freeways to sidewalks to greenways as well as studies and consulting for transit, traffic management, etc. The default attitude in the field is not to resist change or to give undue priority to vehicular traffic; in any event, all of the various bike/ped improvements that you see on the ground were suggested by a planner and designed by an engineer. Whatever the reasons for delay in rolling out improvements, narrow-minded thinking on the part of the planner and designer isn't one of them.

Ultimately, however, the fundamental goal is to make the most efficient use of the prescribed right-of-way, existing assets, and available budget. I just got back from a meeting with a municipal client elsewhere in Tennessee regarding a design project that involves a series of improvements to a downtown street network currently featuring nothing but wide traffic lanes and narrow sidewalks. While it was understood that the client wanted the best possible experience for cyclists and pedestrians in the downtown core, the meeting consisted of looking at the typical sections for roadways in the project area and reaching a consensus on what features to include on each street based on its use, the available width, and improvements on nearby streets. This means that some got bike lanes and some didn't, some got wider sidewalks and some didn't, etc.

I'm sure that some of the residents of the town would look at the finished product and say that all of the streets should have been improved to be less car-centric but the reality of the situation is that a) the town government couldn't afford it; b) the increased width would have meant right-of-way takes, stormwater changes, or other impractical or counterproductive results; c) some of the improvements didn't make sense for the roadway (e.g., bike lanes / sidewalks on a limited-access highway); and to be perfectly honest, d) the vast majority of the town's residents currently travel by car and will more likely than not continue to do so in the foreseeable future regardless of what the streets' cross-sections are.

The bottom line is that if/when the project goes in the ground a pedestrian or cyclist will be able to use the facilities to get to most downtown locations. Will they have to ride in the GP lane, or in a bike lane next to traffic, or walk on a narrow sidewalk at one time or another? Probably. It's not perfect or ideal but it's the best the town can do with their available resources and in any case it's better than it was.

[markhollin]

KCI Technologies has a study on traffic patterns downtown with the new Amazon HQ.

More at NBJ here:

https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2019/01/23/study-what-amazons-new-nashville-hub-means-for.html?iana=hpmvp_nsh_news_headline

[markhollin]

Some equipment on site.

Looking SW from intersection of 10th Ave. North and Union St:

Looking north from Church St. Viaduct crossing CSX tracks:

Looking east from Church St. Viaduct crossing CSX tracks:

[DDIG]

Gah that Y is already busy as humanly possible. Just thinking what it will be like when the YARDS is up and running.

Also can we somehow skin that power grid thing across the street?

[CenterHill]

2 hours ago, DDIG said:

Also can we somehow skin that power grid thing across the street?

NES is relocating it.     Or at least I think that is still the plan.   

[wmaddbb2018]

2 hours ago, DDIG said:

Gah that Y is already busy as humanly possible. Just thinking what it will be like when the YARDS is up and running.

Also can we somehow skin that power grid thing across the street?

I have to think the Y will buy the parking lot on north side and incorporate it into their long term plans. It’s already too busy most of the time, with little to no parking. 

[markhollin]

Amazon to host a public "Amazon: Live at the Ryman" event to introduce themselves to the community on Feb. 6th.  Amazon Senior Vice President for Worldwide Operations Dave Clark and other company officials will speak, and it is designed for “students and community members who are interested in learning more about Amazon’s new Nashville Operations Center of Excellence.”

More at NBJ here:

https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2019/01/31/amazon-to-introduce-itself-to-nashville-with-ryman.html?iana=hpmvp_nsh_news_headline

[nashvylle]

I’m sure PATHE will either disrupt this meeting or protest outside Ryman. 

[Bos2Nash]

Wouldn't it be nice if they came inside to have an ordered conversation about their wishes for the city and see if amazon was willing to work towards some of them. 

[PaulChinetti]

I was reading about "Density Bonusing" yesterday. Seems pretty interesting, and has had some solid monetary advantages for Vancouver, I haven't yet looked up anything more recent though to see how it's going now. 

https://council.vancouver.ca/20150624/documents/ptec4.pdf    Link in tweet.

https://twitter.com/BrentToderian/status/613860770879700992/photo/1

[WebberThomas4]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/nyregion/amazon-hq2-board-veto.html

This should be interesting to watch. 

[PaulChinetti]

"At the same time, Amazon executives have privately voiced frustration at the criticism in New York, comparing it with the welcome they have received in Virginia, where a similarly sized campus was announced on the same day in November. "

I am constantly surprised by journalists, who don't use links throughout a piece to provide more information. I mean why in an article like this should I have to google that deal in Virginia. So here ya go (below). Really seems like NYC did a incredibly poor job of negotiating . 

$3billion for for 25,000/40,000 = $125,000/$75,000

$573 (+$223) million for 25,000 = $22,920 (#31,840)

$102 million for 5,000 jobs = $20,400

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-news/waiting-for-scrutiny-of-amazons-h2q-plans-it-could-happen-in-2019/2018/12/26/9a71d160-02e8-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html?utm_term=.27671cf48b56

"The basics: The state and county agreed to give Amazon direct subsidies totaling $573 million, based on the company creating 25,000 jobs with an average salary of $150,000 over the next 12 years. If the number of jobs rises to 37,500, more incentives will kick in. The state and county also will invest a total of $223 million for transportation improvements that will benefit Amazon as well as the rest of the community."

[Hey_Hey]

You know, they already got plans underway in Nashville for 5000 jobs. How about they go ahead and sign onto Station District and fill up another five buildings with another 20,000 employees? After all, it’s only a short walk from their other two buildings. 

[Buildtall]

I have a feeling amazon is just testing the water here in Nashville to see how things go and how Nashville handles them coming here. I think they have much bigger plans for Nashville once they see we can handle it. That’s just what I think they are up to.