Our Street

Ugh. First, a tangent: I was so excited to get things done during my first weekend at home in a while, and instead, I’ve been sick. It might be the lettuce thing. You don’t want details. Well, maybe you want one detail, which is: where did you get it and how can I avoid it? Sadly, I don’t know. With anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks before the onset of symptoms, it could have happened at home, in Tucson, or in Minneapolis. I’ve done a lot of restaurant eating lately. Although I did throw away some stuff in my fridge that I am now afraid to eat. Anyway.

Perhaps you heard about the recent tempest in a tea cup on our street? We were out of town when I got a text from a neighbor who’s an attorney asking if Cute W would join her in trying to file an injunction or something about our street. She wasn’t home, either, but had seen plenty of pictures on Facebook. The county highway department had painted parts of our street. It was really very ugly. But not, like, illegally ugly. And that’s the official opinion from my favorite attorney! Anyway, looking at it (you can see pictures via that link to Facebook), Cute W and I immediately figured that there was no way that the red paint would stay. It was just aesthetically unacceptable. And the people in my neighborhood really like our neighborhood and its aesthetics.

A while back, some workers were lurking suspiciously around an extremely huge, old, gorgeous tree on our block that has buckled both the sidewalk and the asphalt of the street with its roots. Neighbors immediately showed up to plead its case and threatened legal action and protests. The fabulous tree continues to grow, happily and undaunted.

This spring, workers showed up to take measurements and plant flags, and I was one of several neighbors who came outside to investigate. Earlier, there had been a survey and a public meeting seeking input on an upcoming Grand Boulevard construction project to decrease car speeds and make it safer for bikers and pedestrians, I was full-on alarmed when I learned that one of the options they were considering (or perhaps wanted us to consider) was to pave walking and biking baths on the grassy median. Absolutely no, we said. There was plenty of space on the wide lanes to create physical barriers that could calm speeds and protect cyclists–no need for more pavement, we said. Or, Cute W and I said. But only in the survey because we were out of town for the one public meeting about it. And then, earlier this spring, the long-talked-about project seemed to be beginning, without too much fanfare. There was some information on the town’s website, but at least one member of the town staff was confused and spreading the confusion to callers.

We were told it was a county project. To their credit, someone from the county called me – hooray! He assured me that they were not paving the grassy median, which was my main concern. I asked about the sidewalks, because our sidewalks are terrible, and there seemed to be some movement toward making the curb areas ADA compliant. Why yes, they were putting in accessible curb areas, he confirmed, but fixing the rest of the sidewalks would be up to the town. “So there will potentially be little starts of sidewalk that don’t lead anywhere?” I asked. And basically: yes. Hopefully someone else would do that part later. Hopefully. Cool, cool. I decided that I could be hopeful, too. “Will there be any sort of physical barrier between cars and bikes?” No, was the answer. Painted sharrows. Three-quarters of the time when I mention the sharrows, people say, “What are sharrows?” Here is a sharrow that has since been painted on Grand Boulevard:

I don’t know why anyone ever thought that these were a good idea, but apparently they did. As someone who rides my bike on Grand Boulevard all the time, I can tell you that anyone who is driving on the street and happens to notice the new pictures of bikes on the pavement at all, much less changes their behavior to be more accommodating to bikers, was likely never a concern in the first place. The problem is the massive speeders and the people who are actively hostile toward bikers, like the driver who laid on their horn when I had the audacity to go around the parked car on Grand in front of them when they hadn’t even caught up with me to pass me, anyway.

Just for “funsies,” as a daughter would say, here are a couple of quotes from people who are not me: “Studies have shown that sharrows don’t actually provide any real safety benefits for cyclists. In fact, they may even make things worse by encouraging drivers to pass cyclists too closely.” Streetsblog USA says “Sharrows are the dregs of bike infrastructure — the scraps cities hand out when they can’t muster the will to implement exclusive space for bicycling.”

So, the whole thing was pretty stupid from the start, but we basically shrugged. We had done what we could, and there are plenty of more serious things to protest right now. The county was gonna do what the county was gonna do. Even when the project dragged on interminably and things looked like this for weeks on end,

Cute W and I just sighed. Yes, the asphalt smelled bad. Yes, the rough road contributed to my worst bike accident in decades. But such is life. And we tried our best to ignore it, except for that one day when it was super hot and they were laying asphalt and I brought out ice water. People thanked me but did not partake. Maybe I should have made lemonade. Anyway, next thing we heard was the Red Scare.

And honestly I think we both were thinking that this is where there would be an uprising. I told my daughters it reminded me of the Great Battle To Defeat New Coke. And sure enough, within a day of the first lawyer neighbor’s text, I had another update from a different neighbor who had contacted the county and received a swift response that the county was scrapping the red paint and that they’d be doing something else. And in fact, even though I was only away for a few days, the red paint had been hastily covered before I even got home. They didn’t just repaint it: they paved over it, and the result is corners like this gorgeous thing, demonstrating both the hasty cover-up and a piece of sidewalk-to-nowhere:

Oh, fantastic. Yes, that’s terrific.

What’s particularly annoying about all this is, have you seen Franklin Street in Schenectady lately?

Do you see how there is a dedicated bike lane (lanes, really) physically separated from the cars? And not just physically separated, but with big, substantial barriers that provide extra protection and–be still my heart–some lovely native plants? See how that green paint says “caution” in a gentler way than the red turned our entire neighborhood bullish? The fact that this was happening basically at the same time with results that are so much more effective and pleasing proves that it is possible. This was a City of Schenectady project, though, so I guess different people are planning it? It’s just a colossal bummer.

But the thing that is absolutely the most rage-inducing is that, in the interim, while they’re trying to figure out what to do next, the newly-paved street with a clear center line is making many motorists treat each side of the boulevard as if it is two lanes, and they’re passing each other! At one point, a man was driving along slowly and waving at me to pass him. I finally pulled up alongside him and rolled down my windows to yell that Grand Blvd. isn’t a two-lane street and I’m not doing to treat it like one. Meanwhile the lady driving behind me was laughing at both of us! I whined on a Facebook post that even putting out some traffic cones could help prevent drivers from using the boulevard like a four-lane highway.

Weeks after that happened, there has been no progress on the boulevard and no one has made any attempt to discourage motorists from passing each other. Which is especially surprising, considering how easy it could be. Here’s a picture from this morning:

There are orange cones just sitting around, doing nothing! I’ve had half a mind to redistribute them. But lately I’ve been… indisposed.