The past couple of days, as you might have sussed due to a dearth of posts, I've had errands to run. Now, since we here in the Cake Eater household are automobile-less for the time being, this means, on occasion, riding the bus to get places we cannot walk to. On Monday, I had to hop the bus to the library. Yesterday, I had to go down to the area around Southdale. I have to tell ya, I've had it with the sidewalks, or rather the lack thereof, in either place.
I'm sure you know what I'm talking about if you've ever ridden the bus to the suburbs of your fair city: sidewalks made for drivers, not walkers. Any sidewalks that might be around are added strictly as an afterhtought so drivers do not have to risk life and limb walking through an unwieldy parking lot, rather than for walkers/mass transport riders who don't have cars. After being dropped off at the central hub that is the mall, these mass transport users/walkers find themselves walking across great swathes of parking lot to get where they need to go, because the fastest way from Point A to Point B is, indeed, a straight line. At other times, they find themselves having to walk through and then practically halfway around a mall because some landscape designer/urban planner/mall designer dude thought the parking lot would look better from the air if they designed the parking lot in a circle. They find themselves having to dodge traffic because there are no crosswalks and when there are crosswalks, well, the drivers are so surprised to see someone actually walking they forget how to brake. They find themselves, as in my case, hopping off the bus at the library and having to walk from the bus stop and all the way around this huge wrought iron fence and into the parking lot, where the cars enter, because no one thought that it would be necessary to include a break in the fence, let alone lay down seven feet of sidewalk, for someone who had----GASP---taken the bus to the library.
And I'm not even going to get into how the few sidewalks that are meant for pedestrians disappear when it snows because that's where the plows put the snow they clear from the roads.
I am sick and tired of hearing from the Met Council how fabulous the Twin Cities' public transportation system is. I am sick of having to pay increased taxes for the mucho fabulouso 11.5 mile long light rail line that doesn't serve anyone other than the Mall of Gomorrah, the airport and the east side of Minneapolis. I am sick and tired of listening to the bus drivers whine about their pay and benefits. I am sick of service cutbacks and schedule rearrangements. But mostly, I am sick and fucking tired of being told what a great alternative mass transit is compared to driving a car and then having to walk extra because of modern transportation logistics and sidewalks that are designed for drivers rather than walkers! If I have to go downtown or to uptown, I have no issues with riding the bus. Why? Not only is it quicker than driving, but also mainly because there are plenty of sidewalks to accomodate pedestrian traffic. In the suburbs, however, I have yet to see that they even think of pedestrians when they design sidewalks. This is why no one in their right mind wants to ride the bus out in the hinterlands. And this is what the Met Council fails to appreciate. This is what everyone fails to appreciate.
Honestly. Designers don't even think about the fact that people will take the bus places in the suburbs. It does not cross their minds. Case in point: the Edina Branch of the Hennepin County Library. This building is less than two-years old, its former location having been appropriated for the new City Hall/Cop Shop. They put in a bus stop right across the street from the library. Did they perhaps think that someone would take the bus to the library? No, hence no sidewalk through the massive wrought iron fence. This is bureaucratic blindness at its finest. Oh, we have to make sure people have acccess to the library, so we'll make sure the bus stops there, but most people drive and the biggest complaint we had at the old location was that there wasn't enough parking, so we'll must make sure to add more parking! And honestly, that's as far as their thought processes go.
While this is a pain and a half for me, what about other people who ride the bus? The elderly shouldn't have to walk for ages through a non-crosswalked street or climb a snowbank to get to the safety of the sidewalk. And then you have the handicapped. Because no one ever looked at the situation outside of a driver's perspective someone who takes the bus and who is in a wheelchair would have to dodge traffic to get to either end of this library parking lot where they could enter. They wouldn't even have the option of getting onto the sidewalk because cars park on the street, and that's only if there isn't a snowbank the size of Pike's Peak blocking the sidewalk. While there are special buses for the handicapped that do drop them at the door, the regular street buses are enabled for handicapped riders, too. How is someone who is handicapped to handle this? They'd better have a motorized wheelchair, because the library is at the top of a hill, too, and if they had to manually push their way to safety it would take some time. The City of Edina, in an inspired act of idiocy, has just make wheelchair riders more vulnerable to being hit by a car because they didn't think!
Posted by Kathy at February 9, 2005 02:28 PM