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 case anyone is making a list of reasons for why public transportation should be free, add these:

  • it reduces the awkwardness of juggling things to pay upon boarding when you are returning from a grocery trip and have your hands full
  • there isn’t the congestion at the front of the bus because nobody needs transfer tickets or to feed nickels into the machine
  • no stress about where you put your fare card
  • you aren’t getting hit up for spare change for the bus, nor is anyone trying to sell you a bus pass
  • so much less litter without transfer tickets and expired bus passes

WHAT YOU MISS INSIDE THE TIN CAN ON WHEELS

My favorite thing that people say to justify their insecurity truck ownership (and really, most unnecessary car ownership) is how they can tow things and I can’t.

First of all, hold my beer.

But secondly, I would rather walk through the scent of roses and lilacs drifting through the air in late May, would rather be able to see kids’ sidewalk art, than tow anything.

In the last week, I’ve spontaneously crossed paths with eight people I know.

Plus, I have a coworker who now works at a different site; because we both walk all or part of the way to work, we see each other almost every morning.

HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES 

I do not think we should be converting farmland or forests into housing. All you have to do is looking at an aerial map to see how much space has been wasted on surface lots that are (1) actually harmful to the environment, and (2) could be put into better use.

Here are a few contenders:

Why are we allowing prime space next to a beautiful park and a short walk from the train station to be used for car storage?

On Asylum Avenue, a few minutes walk from Union Station. This could be housing.

An adjacent parking lot, middle of the weekday, stagnant. This also could be housing.

This barely scratches the surface.

“PAIN” AT THE PUMP

While the media keeps feeding into this myth that gas is too expensive, I continue to be confronted with evidence to the contrary:

This is the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru line, spilling out over the sidewalk. Until nobody is wasting money and resources by idling in drive-thru lanes, gas is not anywhere near costing what it should.

PESKY PEDESTRIANS, COMING OUT OF NOWHERE 

Who would like to explain why this vehicle is parked partially blocking the crosswalk, and in such a way that someone in a wheelchair cannot access the curb ramp? I counted, and there were ten legal, open parking spots available on Lawrence Street between Capitol and Russ. Again, how does someone in a wheelchair or pushing a stroller access the sidewalk?

Who would like to explain to me why I’m walking down Farmington Avenue and hear what sounds like a vehicle behind me, and then I turn around and see two pickup trucks — larger than what anyone actually needs — being driven up on the sidewalk? It’s not enough that they have the street and parking lots. . . now they have to come into the scraps leftover for people on foot? Classy.

CONSTRUCTION CRITICISM 

But don’t worry, Farmington Avenue isn’t the only place where automobilists display their bullshit.

Over on Asylum Avenue near a work site, someone chose to use the scraps for pedestrians. The sidewalk is not the work zone. There’s no excuse.

When there is a full extra lane that could be used, but we don’t dare inconvenience the automobilists, so instead we block the entire sidewalk, on more than one day. . . that’s what we call privilege.

On my third day walking by the Sigourney and Asylum road work, there was no truck blocking the sidewalk, but signs were partially impeding access, even though there are two travel lanes in both directions and ample room for interfering with those to whom the alert was most relevant.

And in a construction area in Frog Hollow:

Those are people walking in the street because there is no sidewalk taking them to the detour, unless they were to walk two blocks extra. . . which always seems like such a reasonable thing to ask of pedestrians, but not of automobilists who complain about losing on-street parking. Hmm…. Anyway, a few seconds before I took this bad photo with my phone, a bus passed by them

WHEN YOUR WORLD REVOLVES AROUND PARKING 

There’s this thing municipalities do to pretend they are making progress. They throw down a sharrow here and there. They roll out paint and call it a bike lane, even though it’s connected to nothing and/or is not barrier-protected.

In my ongoing “WTF WeHA” file. . . Farmington Avenue could be, or could have been, the gold standard. Engineers could have decided to create one excellent barrier-protected east-west bike route. It could’ve started on Asylum Street at Main in Hartford, and then continued on Farmington Avenue, up all the way to the Reservoir in West Hartford.

Instead, we have a few blocks here and there of paint-only bike lanes. Paint-only bike lanes in a place with no enforcement means drivers will drive and/or park in those lanes, often.

West Hartford announced that it would be adding a paint-only bike lane to Farmington Avenue between Cadwell Street and Wardwell. Because someone complained about where their landscaper would park — JFC, WeHa, way to be a caricature — there would no longer be a 1.5 foot paint buffer between the bicycle lane and traffic. The bike lane gains half a foot, but loses a foot of space overall. And still, there’s no barriers. And because we know how landscapers, delivery drivers, etc. seem to ignore paint, I can say confidently that this bike lane is going to be yet another joke unless the town cops aggressively ticket and tow. And why would they?

This is also so unimpressive because the distance in question is 0.2 miles.

Could someone have the guts to tell residents that (1) your landscaper’s inability to park in your driveway is not the responsibility of the town, (2) it is not the responsibility of the town to provide you with parking anymore than it is the town’s responsibility to provide you with a bookcase for your books or a rack for your shoes?

FLEEING VEHICLES? NOT EXACTLY 

News coverage of the two pedestrian fatalities in the last week included language referring to “the fleeing vehicle” and whether or not the “vehicle” stopped. There is no reason to believe either involve autonomous vehicles.

FOX61 (and others) very obviously parrot cop talk in their reports. Why do I say that? I’ll read three articles side-by-side and see that they are nearly identical. There’s a formula they follow and the language is coming from police.

Here’s part of how Fox61 covered the fatal pedestrian collision on I-91 in North Haven on May 21:

Many reporters are quick to excuse poor reporting, blaming the shrinking newsrooms, but for routine news items — and sadly, that’s what crashes are — they are working from formulas. Read enough, and it is obvious. All this means is that the media need to update their templates.

Where to start? The Vision Zero Reporting tool provides examples and let’s people evaluate existing stories. I used the tool to analyze the FOX61 item in question, and it offered two critiques:

Working with less experienced staff on the weekend? Give them that basic formula to use.
But then, when the story is updated, be sure to frame the issue appropriately. Too often pedestrian deaths are presented as what happens when someone is unfortunately not alert enough, not in hi-vis enough. . . that nonsense. The Vision Zero Reporting tool had this to say for the FOX61 piece:

And then it offered ways to fix it:

In this case, I went straight to Google Streets and took a look at the highway. When a pedestrian is struck on an interstate, there are several scenarios there that are less likely to turn up on city streets: (1) pedestrian was intending to be struck and killed (does not apply with North Haven tow truck driver situation), (2) pedestrian was a stranded motorist who was not thinking clearly while extremely stressed, and attempting to cross travel lanes to exit highway (not this situation), (3) pedestrian was a stranded motorist or someone assisting who did not have adequate space away from vehicles passing at literal highway speeds (ding ding ding), (4) the previous scenario, but with snow or ice involved (not the North Haven situation in May).

If you identify as a driver, you should be concerned about what happens if your car breaks down in one of these places where there is either no breakdown lane, or something very narrow. How safe will you feel or be sitting inside that vehicle waiting for a tow while vehicles are zooming by at 75 MPH? Is there space to exit the vehicle? How is the tow truck driver going to manage? A tow truck is large. Drivers often wear reflective vests. But if someone is texting while operating a motor vehicle, are they going to notice either?

When the tow truck driver exited his vehicle, he became a pedestrian. He didn’t just “come out of nowhere.”

A few nights ago, a driver crashed into a police substation a few blocks away from my house. That building, painted a light gray, has the words “HARTFORD AFFLECK ST POLICE SUBSTATION” in large white letters. Somebody shot the driver and passenger about a mile away on Zion Street near Flatbush Avenue. One can assume that they were trying to drive themselves to the Hartford Hospital Emergency Room. Driving legal speeds, that should have been a six minute trip. Instead, the victim was speeding, hit a parked car, and then crashed into the police substation’s awning. Of the buildings on this corner, that was the best for someone to crash into: it’s not a residential building, it’s not historical. I mention this at all because of the ongoing “I didn’t see them” bullshit that many drivers use when referring to why they hit or almost hit a person. If so many drivers strike light colored buildings, why would we expect them to somehow not strike people?

Meanwhile, we have Carly Rose Diascro, 19, who struck and killed 84-year old Valda Dienavs in 2020 when the elderly woman was checking her mail. The teen was distracting herself while attempting to operate a motor vehicle. She hit the woman, knew she hit someone, and drove away. She was just now sentenced. Three months in prison. That’s it. There’s no mention of her losing driving privileges. That never seems to come up. Felons can’t have guns, but people who kill with cars can pretty much keep on keepin’ on. Because  Diascro wasn’t driving a stolen car when this happened, the “law and order” crew don’t have a damn thing to say about this. They only get themselves in a twist when the culprit looks a certain way and also stole a vehicle.

Recently, in an engineering working group for street safety, some dude piped up about driver responsibility and how we need to hold drivers accountable and stop blaming design. Besides not seeming to know what room he was in, there’s a few problems with this.

We have tried pinning personal responsibility on drivers for the last century, and that hasn’t worked well. [It also does not work well with plague control or mitigating climate change]

The way we’ve attempted that has been half-assed. . . so it’s not surprising. How many years will I do if I kill someone with a gun? How many years if I kill with a car? As we can see, the young woman from Glastonbury is getting a three month slap on the wrist. That’s a blip. It’s not even an amount of time future employers would be likely to ask her about in an interview. It can be folded into a gap year, FFS. Three months for killing someone and running away. I don’t think she should spend decades behind bars, but three months is hardly a deterrent.

There’s the justice angle, of course, knowing that people in my neighborhood go away for far longer for doing far less harm.

I don’t believe in absolving people of responsibility. It’s why I take the time to call someone a coward on the pedestrian murder map, rather than use language like “the vehicle fled the scene.” Bullshit. The coward operating the murder weapon fled the scene of the crime. I don’t care if that coward was a perky cheerleader or some dude nodding off. The result was the same: someone died before their time.

What else made that crime possible?

How is it that we can’t disable phones in vehicles except for GPS and 911 functions?
In the Glastonbury case, we couldn’t have installed mailboxes so residents did not have to cross and stand in the street? This was truly the only option?

We don’t have the technology to physically stop vehicles when they strike something or someone? If people knew their vehicle would become disabled after hitting anything larger than a squirrel, you think people might slow down and pay more attention, knowing they can’t get very far fleeing a crime scene on foot?

Design informs behavior.

Language informs empathy.

Having any understanding of how others live helps inform design.

THE TWEETS THAT GIVE ME LIFE 

There’s this:

https://twitter.com/AmericanFietser/status/1529158880063807489

I will steal that phrase as often as necessary.

And then there’s this whole thread, which you should pour yourself a cold one and go read. You don’t need to be a dirtbag about the make and model of vehicle. That’s hardly the point:

READER-SUBMITTED ITEM

I virtually “collect” photos of people moving things on foot or by bicycle that people have definitely told them was impossible without a car. Most of these are by bike, like people towing kegs of beer or giant pipes.

And then, I open my email to find this delight:

 Photo by R. Nelson.

Photographed T. E. Denman.

They say: “Old Timers who never had a car and never wanted one know how to get things done.”

That’s a collapsible cart being used to transport plywood for a home improvement project, and it’s happening in a Hartford suburb.

WHAT NEXT?
West Hartford readers: please contact your guy ( greg.sommer@westhartfordct.gov or 860-561-7543 ) and let him know that it’s time to stop pandering to people who don’t know how to use their own driveways. Anything short of a barrier-protected bike lane on Farmington Avenue is, as they say, bike lane cosplay.