I remember playing Frogger in the arcade next door to the laundromat when I was a kid. I was never really any good at it – I don’t remember ever making it past the third level, but I do remember one of the underlying themes of the game – crossing the road was no joke.
There has been quite a bit of news, both online and in more traditional media about Raquel Nelson the Georgia mother who was arrested and put on trial for the death of her son in a hit and run accident where she and her children were trying to cross the street from the bus stop and her 4-year-old son was hit and killed by a driver. There is a lot of discussion about the lack of a cross walk, and more about the location of the bus stop – why put a stop where there is no nearby safe way to cross the street? It is a design failure of tragic proportions. And our streets are littered with them.
Today, thanks to a moment of bone-headedness on my part, I had an opportunity to walk the streets of the City where I work. I don’t know about other suburban city employees, but I almost never actually walk in the City where I work. My office is in an office park that has been expressly designed not just to the scale of the automobile, but to the scale of lots of automobiles. I get to work from the freeway in the morning – unless it is one of those days where I actually get my act together early enough to ride my bike in – in which case I avoid the City component all together and stick to the periphery trails. When I run errands in the City, I do it from my car. I’ve thought about walking to the post office or the bank, but, even though they are less than 1/2 mile away as the crow flies, I end up in my car. That is because I cannot get there as the crow flies. I can’t even get there as the crow meanders.
And because I have to cross the freeway.
There is an overpass with sidewalks which makes crossing the freeway possible. Yet it is still a harrowing experience. The on ramps are particularly alarming. There is nothing that checks the motorists getting onto the freeway from the street – no light, no stop sign, nothing – and many of those motorists are anticipating the freeway experience – which is to say that they are speeding. Crossing those on ramps is just like playing Frogger. Only there are no extra lives.
I’ve crossed freeways on dedicated pedestrian bridges and on bridges that have lights that regulate the access to the on ramp before and while the roar of the traffic below can be a little intense, there is no immediate feeling of death looming up on you in the shape of a minivan piloted by a harried soccer mom or an ancient Buick helmed by a little old blue-haired lady – or a vehicle being driven by someone who’d had a beer with his breakfast.
That would make that aspect of road safety an accessibility issue. If pedestrians are going to have access to a road, then the road needs to be designed at the safety level of the pedestrian. That safety level is based on critters that move slower, are a whole lot smaller, and have way less body armor than your usual Ford or Honda. One of the ironies I noticed in crossing the freeway today was that there were curb cuts with wheelchair accessible ramps. Yet anyone in a wheelchair would be at an even greater disadvantage in crossing the on ramps because they overpass design would render them out of sight until the vehicles were right on top of them – which is much too late to effectively stop. All of this might actually be an issue – if there was any sort of pedestrian usage. There isn’t. Maybe a couple dozen people cross the freeway at that overpass every day. Maybe.
Why? Scale. Not only does the area feel exposed and unsafe, but even though it is only about 1/2 mile from the light rail stop it feels like it might as well be 15 miles away as everything is paved and huge and far too open. And depending on where you are trying to go, you might end up in a similar situation as Ms. Nelson – where your destination is right across the street, but the cross walk to get there is at the absolute far end of a very long block. The temptation to jaywalk is strong – so strong that today I gave in and sprinted across four lanes during a lull in the traffic instead of taking another 10 minutes to walk down to the cross walk, cross the street, and then walk back up the block to my office.
There is an increasing amount of emphasis being put on creating places that are “walkable” and “accessible”. But a lot of those efforts end up as tokens of walkability (sidewalks that do not provide access to anything but the street face) and accessibility (curb-cuts that spill wheelchairs and strollers into unregulated traffic). They sound good in the planning meeting and at the city council session and in the CDBG reports and General Plans for the community, but in reality they fall seriously short of the goals they are intended to meet.
The question is, how do we fix it? I’m not sure about the exact method, but I think a great place to start would be for more city planners and public works engineers and city council members and developers and others who are responsible for the design of our urban spaces to go and walk those spaces – to see what it feels like to be on the street – and not just on a Saturday or Sunday morning – but at peak traffic, at midday, and at night. That experience could do a lot in transforming the definition of the problem from the abstract maps and plans to the reality of our built environment.
Because Frogger is only fun when it’s on the screen.
urbanhistori 