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. 

In the three days I am in Providence, I can count on one hand the number of drivers I see commit a moving violation: slightly speeding, slowly rolling through a crosswalk, not stopping for person (moi) trying to cross. In the first ten minutes I am back in Hartford, I see two people blow left through a red light. One is at Broad and Capitol; that was a cop. The other at Babcock and Capitol, where the new flex posts were installed. There is also the creeping toward me while I’m in crosswalk instead of coming to a complete stop and waiting. 

Going elsewhere means putting into sharp focus the things you are already aware of at home. Outside of Hartford, there is so much less litter around. Not none, but substantially less. Walking through other places – from the wealthy neighborhoods to the weird industrial stretches to the so-called rough areas – it becomes clear that in Hartford, we leave our depression messes out for the world to see. I think that’s fair and I challenge you to provide a better explanation. We look like we’ve given up on ourselves, like we don’t think we deserve to live in anything but squalor. What I did not see in Providence was a crew of people with brooms in downtown or anywhere else. There were not, as far as I could tell, more municipal trash cans. Yet, the garbage was minimal. Two empty liquor bottles at a neighborhood park. A couple cigarette butts. One loose napkin blowing down a street. A few plastic bottles in the canal. I can’t count our litter. It’s everywhere. Where they may be installing a cycletrack on Sigourney Street in Hartford? There’s a syringe that’s been sitting by a pedestrian beg button for over a year; on the bridge, another one appeared last week. Both have been reported, but the City of Hartford shrugs at medical waste on our sidewalks, and that’s to say nothing of the car crash debris — smashed glass, shattered lights, and more — that cover this area.

Not to get too sidetracked, but I needed to throw a couple Hartford pics in here so those reading this in Providence know what I mean when I say there’s litter all over the place. The pic directly below is on the grounds of the Burns School, an elementary school in Hartford’s Frog Hollow neighborhood. This mess has been reported to the City of Hartford via 311 numerous times, but the DPW won’t be bothered, and neither will any school staff.

And this pic below is of debris in the Park River where the Asylum Hill and West End neighborhoods of Hartford meet.

Litter is so much more noticeable when you’re moving at slower speeds. If, during my trip, there had been trash around, I would’ve seen it, right? I didn’t go everywhere in Providence. Maybe I missed something? So after returning, I sat down with Google street view and looked at a few roads in areas that I’d heard Providence locals complaining about. . . and even then, hardly nothing. Maybe it doesn’t show up on Google maps? So, I looked up blocks in Hartford that are always a shitshow, and sure enough, the litter was visible. I’m not saying Providence is pristine, but I am saying that in three days I did not step over any needles or dog poop on the sidewalk or drug baggies casually tossed on a school lawn, so. . .

For this post, I am not doing all the research to answer this question, though I will be later. What I want to know: what systems are in place that allow for a city to be so much more functional, from its aesthetics (trash) to its safety (streets)? 

I arrived by train. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t horrible. The mask policy was sporadically enforced on train. The Hartford to New Haven stretch felt like anything goes, and there were four separate people in my car coughing away. Could it have been allergies? No. By now everyone knows the policy: you cough in public, you need to reassure those around you, usually by yelling something like “NOT CONTAGIOUS! JUST CHOKING ON MY OWN SPIT! SORRY!” Anyway, despite the in-writing mask policy, visual reminders, announcement. . . despite commonsense. . . despite having to check a box saying you have no symptoms. . . the reality is that people have gone “back to normal,” normal meaning that many do not give a fuck about the health and safety of others. Disgusting and dangerous! On other recent trips between Hartford and New Haven, I’ve experienced the same on Amtrak: lots of unmasked riders, quite a bit of coughing, staff saying nothing to passengers. One rider had her mask off, like no mask even in sight, the whole way while she sang and had a loud phone conversation. This was a packed train! There are the policies on paper, and then there are the policies in action.

The New Haven to Providence train was more civilized, in part because train personnel told offenders to fix their masks and were more direct: if you have to be told twice, you’re getting off the train at the next stop. On my return trip, someone dicknosed his mask the whole time, because waaah, it’s sooo hard to breathe through a surgical mask waaaah. Anyway, people are gross, but if we took the selfish idiots of the train, the ride itself would’ve been great and fewer people would’ve needed to sit right next to strangers. Alas.

Not that I will ever have the luxury of retirement, but if I did, I’m pretty sure I’d just ride Shore Line East all day long.

Anyway, off the train and I’m looking around to see what kind of trouble I can get into. I’m in Providence to research the setting for the book I’m writing. There were a few specific landmarks and streets I wanted to see, and then it was a matter of familiarizing myself with various neighborhoods. Fiction means making things up, but what I invent should be believable. You don’t plunk down a comic book store on an affluent, entirely residential street and expect people to buy that. I needed to know what areas smelled like. I had to know what they sounded like, and this was the most difficult because at home, I have taken to popping in my earbuds most days. This started because the street noise in Hartford was rubbing my nerves raw. What I learned was how quiet, in comparison, Providence is. Aside from sirens, and the occasional revving on a Saturday night, there was minimal horn blasting, minimal stereos cranking. Vehicles were mostly being driven more slowly and less aggressively. I know there are places I did not get to go where this would not be the case, but I made it to through sizable portions of ten different neighborhoods. Reckless driving was the exception, not the norm.

Again, why? 

A lot of this is obvious: street design. Most streets were appropriately narrow and required drivers to make sharper turns. Signs reminded turning drivers they had to yield to people using crosswalk. And people were using the crosswalk. I saw maybe two other people (besides myself) using road space that wasn’t the crosswalk. Even on the narrow, super quiet residential streets that might see one car an hour, I watched people cross at the crosswalk. . . which makes sense when there is a local culture of drivers actually stopping for pedestrians. By and large, everyone was following the rules, and there was some semblance of safety.

Which is good, because that means my characters won’t have to yell at drivers every time they leave their houses to go on adventures. All weekend, I only thunked one car with my umbrella. One! This isn’t on another continent or coast. This is 87 miles away. We speak the same language, have the same weather.

Walking around, I noticed in my body how I was not in a constant state of high alert. There were a few intersections where that changed. Exception, not the rule.

But why does Providence seem eager to get a handle on its disaster areas, while Hartford can’t/won’t do the same? You can’t say it’s because Rhode Island has wealthy residents. Connecticut’s got those too. Is it political will? Is it that people in Providence feel they deserve better? Any time I say “hey, how about we do something about XYZ,” I get talked down to like I’m being an insolent child for daring to want more for myself, for my neighbors.

Am I imagining safety? The Rhode Island DOT website says, “The top community for pedestrian fatalities from 2014 to 2018 was Warwick with 2.” Hartford has had 4 (or 5, if you count the guy who ran himself over) since the beginning of this year.

Since the last time I visited, there have been many improvements. The photo above shows the barrier-protected bike lanes that go by the Providence Public Library.

A pedestrian/cyclist bridge resembling the High Line gives people a pleasant way to cross the Providence River, and as I saw, serves as a spot for wedding photo shoots, as well as actual weddings. 

Another new thing since last I was there: e-bike and e-scooter rentals.

The one time that I wanted a bike or scooter — I was close to thumbing a ride — was in a place where none were anywhere to be found. Looking on the app days later, I see that some do make it to that general neighborhood, so we’ll call this my bad luck and nothing more. They weren’t rare sights. If I wanted a leisurely, scenic ride, I could’ve had that anytime. But the time I needed to see several locations spread out in a much less scenic part of the city, *sad trombone*.

There are more marked bus and bike lanes.

It’s not perfect. I could see where people ignored the marked bike and bus lanes, mainly around one hotel. A different hotel somehow was allowed to remove (or not have in the first place) sidewalk so the whole front area was valet parking or something, and there was like a foot of mulch through which people could walk. Not accessible to those in wheelchairs, obviously.

Valley Street – a long, slightly curving road through an industrial area – felt dicey. This is where I had reduced confidence in drivers stopping for me at crosswalks. Gano Street got annoying the closer one got to the highway, and was the only place where a few drivers ignored me waiting at an unsignalized crosswalk; the third car through stopped and let me go. Had this been at the raceway in my neighborhood, I’d still be waiting to cross.

If you don’t add barricades, then a very busy, very important automobilist will jaydrive into the bike and bus only lanes. The only surprise is that the car wasn’t wearing fake temp RI plates, but maybe that scam doesn’t work in actual Rhode Island.

I’m sure nothing happens there without a degree of resistance. The difference: they’re still making it happen.

I will likely return a few times in upcoming months for more observation, and I know there are issues with snow clearance, though for what I’m writing that is irrelevant given the dystopian aspect of the novel that renders winter more-or-less a mere memory. I did not have a chance to ride around on the buses; the app is on my phone and ready to go.

One more thing: whenever there’s the suggestion made that people might ditch their cars and try walking or biking, one of the excuses given for why they can’t/won’t is because an area is hilly. Well, Providence has one fricken steep hill, and plenty of people walked up and down that. Some were pushing, instead of riding, their bikes. . . but they were still out there, in numbers. My ankles did not love this; after a few days of it, I got used to the incline.


SOMETHING LOCAL AND SURPRISINGLY NOT TERRIBLE
Can we get free public transit always? Hartford’s two Working Families Party City Council members have a resolution to call on the Governor and Connecticut legislature to make the temporary free bus rides a permanent feature. This is sensible and long overdue. And maybe the first thing City Council has done in years that I’ve felt any excitement at all over.

THE TWEETS THAT SAVE

https://twitter.com/carlosfgarciac/status/1515668376496050184


The original video would’ve been enough, but Carlos’s comment adds something.

Twitter has become the place where people document their response to the dumb ‘gotcha’ questions tossed at cyclists, like “how’re you gonna transport landscaping tools on a bike.”

The tweet above also doubles as the #ImprovisedWeaponOfTheWeek. Maybe people would drive more carefully around cyclists if they knew we were toting chainsaws and pruning shears.

WHAT NEXT
The City of Hartford has yet to show any urgency surrounding recent pedestrians deaths. Maybe they’re too busy getting lawyered up after the Trinity student’s preventable death on New Britain Avenue. Another tool to try: 311 every last problem spot for cyclists and pedestrians, and keep at it. There will be no momentum if it’s only two people demanding accountability and street improvements.