Instead of screaming into the void of Twitter, I bring you a weekly highlight reel of what it’s like going places in Greater Hartford when one is gloriously car-free. These posts are on a slight time delay because nobody needs to know exactly where I am when I am there.

1. Make Eye Contact: Of the bad advice that “shared responsibility” “experts” fling at pedestrians and cyclists,  “make eye contact with the driver” is among the worst. It may seem well-intentioned, but have you even tried to get a cashier to make eye contact with you? They’re a few feet away, not within an isolation tank of plastic, metal, and glass. Well, some are behind plexiglass these days, but they’re stationary. My point is, how you going to get a driver to make eye contact with you, lowly pedestrian, when they’re video chatting with someone on the morning drive?

All the proof of driver distraction is around me as I try to get a few errands done.

First, I encounter yet another knocked over sign. This one has tell-tale tire tracks in the grass strip beside it. When struck, the sign was in the sign zone, but the car had left its designated area. Perhaps its driver steered it stupidly. Perhaps the car that hit the sign had been hit by another vehicle, and the sign was the victim of a domino effect.

Then there’s the debris left all over the sidewalk in Pope Park beside Park Street.

For witless reasons (that we won’t describe here because how many times in a week can I rant about the King of Parkville?) this section of Park Street was not sufficiently narrowed, and instead of adding protected bike lanes, there is on-street parking, most of which is never used, which means that there is more space for cars to speed down this straightaway. When I have complained about this, instead of seeing street improvements, they send out cops. Police presence may slow some people down, but how this plays out is that a gaggle of cops park their copmobiles on the sidewalk below the highway, making it awkward for pedestrians to use the tiny piece of real estate afforded us. Those in wheelchairs cannot get through. Really, this only creates other problems for pedestrians and cyclists, and at best, the safety improvement is very, very temporary.

Because nobody is serious about improving street safety, this stretch of Park Street often sees damage. Take a look at the median next time you cross. Today, there’s soil and broken glass all over the sidewalk. A young street tree, which was growing where it was meant to be, was killed.

Obviously a sign and a tree have no eyes, but if they are where they are supposed to be and if motorists remain where they are supposed to be, then all should be fine. Right?

Okay, but then there’s this:

Sorry that it’s so blurry. Can anyone explain how I am supposed to make eye contact with someone who has covered over a broken window with something they have no shot in hell of seeing anything out of? And is this better or worse than the dark tints, that also do not afford vulnerable road users a glimpse at the driver? As this person drove by — slowly, because school traffic — I tried to look through the (tarp? saran wrap?) non-standard window to see who was behind the wheel, and I could not tell you the first thing about the motorist. Not to worry, we’ll be seeing the winter edition of this in no time, I’m sure.

2. In My Bag: Occasionally, I forget to look at the weather. This was one of those days. I was not thrilled about what was going to be a rainy walk home from work, but I was most concerned about the paperback in my bag. (Could I have left it at work? Yes. Did I want to bring it home to finish reading that night? Also, yes.)  Tucking it inside my shirt was not a desirable option — papercuts. As luck would have it, a coworker had gifted me cheesy poofs and I figured that if angled correctly, these would protect my book. I was right. This might work less well in a monsoon situation though.

3. Misaligned: This photo shows a path through Elizabeth Park being divided by Prospect Avenue.

Commonsense would say “this is exactly where a marked crosswalk and centerline yield sign should go” because, umm, hello?! Who is going to leave the path, walk all the way to the corner, then come walking back to return to the path? I mapped this out, and park users are being asked to take a seven minute detour instead of being able to legally cross there. Did I take the seven minute detour? Hell no! I waited to cross, something that was less difficult than usual because nobody had parked on Prospect Avenue, making it easier to see approaching traffic.

This is hardly the only place that the road does not feel designed for those outside of vehicles.

Look at the misaligned intersection of Capitol and Laurel, where there are inexplicably two lanes on Laurel Street north. Motorists gun it through this intersection, unnerving when they are aiming their vehicles directly at you, and you can only hope they are paying attention and willing to put themselves where they belong. The turn from Capitol WB onto Laurel NB is rounded — not a corner — and that encourages drivers to not even stop before making right turns. Motorists take their buses up on the sidewalk rather than figure out how to safely negotiate the turn. It’s pretty awesome wondering if it’s going to be a bus on the sidewalk or oncoming traffic that doesn’t move itself into the lane that ultimately does you in.

4. West End Obstacle Course: It truly does not matter what day of the week I walk down Whitney Street, its residents (or property managers?) are completely unwilling to remove recycling and trash barrels from the tiny sidewalks. This makes me feel not-so-bad about how their bins went floating away last summer during that flash flood. I don’t like having this sort of street-specific animosity, but I cannot recall a single time in the last decade that I could walk down either side of the street without having at least one occasion to walk in the street or a lawn (but usually the street because look at the yard design). Get your shit together, Whitney Street!

This does take me back to a thread on the West End’s FB group in which some people were F-U-R-I-O-U-S that randos were depositing dog poop in their precious trash barrels. First of all, better to toss it in a can than leave the canine droppings in a yard or the middle of a sidewalk, but secondly, if you moved your cans back up the driveway, people would not be so quick to defile your virginal refuse containers.

5. fdfsgfdgsfgdfgfdgsdfgsdfgsfdgsdfgfsdgfdgdfgdfgdfgsdfgdfgdgsdgdsfgd

That was my placeholder text, but should I leave it there? Because that’s basically the sound I make as I approach this particular feature on the days I’ve just given up, and fine, I’ll go to my not at all favorite grocery store because I’m not sure how I feel about being on a bus at the moment with the Covid positivity rate being what it is, and knowing that most bus drivers do nothing to enforce mask wearing. As it turns out, my not at all favorite grocery store is like a ground zero shitshow of unmasked nonsense. Literally half the shoppers were walking around like the positivity rate isn’t at 9%. So, I might’ve been better off on the bus. I don’t know.

What I know is that this walk to get groceries has a few irritations on the way, in particular, the details surrounding the at-grade crossing (fancy words used for “street where a train can definitely hit you”) on Hamilton Street. I like being able to cross here, don’t get me wrong. It’s still rude that they closed Flower Street because it was deemed too dangerous with the addition of the busway.

But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about this, the way that the sidewalk ends but there is no striping or anything telling motorists to stay in their dfjsdfjsdkfljsd lane.

See, I’m not worried about the train itself. I can look both ways twice or thrice, look for lights, listen for the train, and be confident that the train is not what will do me in here. (Trust, I do not rely on only the cross arms to give me information. I always look.)

I’m not so worried about crossing the busway. It’s riskier than the train tracks in that there are more frequent vehicles on it, including those for whom the busway was not intended. At least this crossing has a marked crosswalk, though the ped heads (the pedestrian go light box things) are aligned strangely and challenging to see when traveling east.

But look at the photo below. It sort of opens up to pavement, and is it that hard to imagine the distracted driver who is doomscrolling Twitter behind the wheel glancing at the road and veering over? Every single time I cross here, that is my worry. Not Amtrak.

Nearly every time someone does get hit by a train, Amtrak callously publishes information about a “trespasser” incident. I hate this language and I’ve called them out on it. Yes, technically, the person who has just been killed was trespassing, but way to demonize the dead. Still, I think we could learn something here. Hold your horses…I’m getting to it.

6. Jay Drivers: Waiting at the bus stop, I turn to see if the bus is coming yet, and while that’s nowhere in sight, I see instead someone who has decided to drive his car down the sidewalk. As in, he’s heading directly toward me. He turns onto another leg of sidewalk and parks outside a storefront. He unlocks the door, goes in, comes back out, and then gets back into this illegally parked vehicle, does some more sketchy sidewalk driving, and then exits onto the roadway. That’s the red vehicle you see pictured below. 

This isn’t Brooklyn. He could’ve driven around the corner and easily parked on a side street. Instead, he chose to be dangerous to people using the sidewalk, and there are always people out on this block. 

This is near a police substation, so let’s lose the pretense that cop presence effectively deters crime. Instead, we have regular instances of drivers trespassing on the sidewalk on Farmington Avenue in the area around the substation.

I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but here’s someone trespassing on the Farmington Avenue sidewalk. This is outside the dollar store at Farmington and Sigourney, and it’s not an uncommon sight.

Some jokers might think this is evidence that we need more parking in the area, looking at the cluster that forms everything evening during rush hour as people fight over the spaces in front of the strip mall.


But if there is anything I stand for, it’s erasing bad information. There is an entire surface parking lot behind this plaza, which rarely has more than two or three vehicles in it. Why people don’t park here and save themselves the hassle, I truly do not understand. It fits into the whole car culture though, the people who scream their heads off about how there is “no parking” when all they need to do is open their eyes, but I suppose if you’re driving around with a tarp window, it can be hard to notice things.