Car-Free Diaries: Week 29

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. 

For those just tuning in, let me catch you up to speed real quick. I’ve been car-free for longer than 29 weeks. It’s been a few years, and you can read about that here. This year-long series emerged after hearing one misconception after another (“What about when it’s winter?” and other “gotcha” nonsense that was thrown my way as if I hadn’t been doing this for awhile, or hadn’t been living in Connecticut for my entire life) and feeling like this, combined with my status as a totally non-special human, might shed light on this part of my life that, honestly, feels like the least weird thing about me but consistently gets me those “what kind of alien are you, anyway?” looks.

Something I think about is the difference between those who say “I can’t do that” versus “I’m not doing this. . . yet.” The first group lacks imagination. I’m not wasting my time on the “you’ll have to pry the keys to my gas guzzling land yacht from my cold, dead hands” crew because our philosophical differences go far, far beyond what they might view as a single choice they’ve made. This is not for them. This is for those who know they can do better, but have trouble envisioning how it might look to live without relying entirely (or at all) on a private vehicle.

So, I started with the idea that I would give a kind of highlight reel of my week, even if it feels boring to me, because it’s just moving from one place to the next, right? Who wants to read about getting groceries or going to work? Except this conflicts with that pithy “life is about the journey, not the destination” saying that gets plastered on everything from mugs to bumperstickers.

I’m not particularly athletic. I don’t have a towering presence, as much as I might like to pretend I do whenever Mark Lanegan comes blasting through my headphones and into my ears. I’m not a young influencer. I’m not an influential Baby Boomer. I’m a Gen Xer who’d much rather be painting garden gnomes and watching Stranger Things than going after engineers who’ve allowed our roads to be too unsafe, even for once a latchkey kid, always a latchkey kid standards.

So, this series is holding up a mirror. It’s not painting watercolor scenes or being the mouthpiece for elected officials or raging against those who don’t have the power to change something.

The other thing to know, which has perhaps gotten distorted by those who haven’t done their research lately before talking smack, is that I’ve spent years immersed in transportation safety and equity action, either professionally or as a volunteer. Work. Meetings. Conferences. I don’t list all my credentials constantly because along with my Gen X roots, I’m from a blue collar background where doing so looks pretentious, though I understand that as a woman, there are those who are going to assume I know nothing about anything anyway, except nail polish and skirt trends.

Okay? Okay.

Last weekend, I was able to get out and enjoy being out because it was cool, dry, and windy — very few mosquitoes. One day, I took the 62 bus (free) to Bishops Corner in West Hartford, walked up a residential street for about ten minutes, and wandered into Bugbee Reservoir. It doesn’t have the magnificence of Acadia or the Grand Canyon, but it’s a good amount of green for very little fuss.

The paths at the reservoir connect to the trails in Westmoor Park. I think a lot of people in the area are familiar with the farm section, but might not have ventured much beyond that. There’s a wooded area with vernal pools and then two ponds and a large meadow. Maybe it’s two meadows, technically. Either way, if your timing is lucky and you’ve missed when its suburban neighbors have hauled out their lawn mowers and leaf blowers, it’s a nice way to spend a few hours.

I try to go once or twice each season, which isn’t difficult, and then after I’ve stomped around in the mud for a bit, I make my way back to the noisy hellscape of parking lots and strip malls, pick up groceries or socks or whatever boring middle-aged lady errands I have to do, and then hop back on the bus and go home.

The other day, I walked down along the Connecticut River in Hartford, which you can do on a path and trails from Charter Oak Landing all the way to the Windsor town line. I didn’t go quite that far north last weekend, but made it to where the “island” connects to land. There is a path hacked through the vegetation and the water is low right now, if you were looking for a time to go. I had a few inches of exposed skin that I didn’t want brushing up against the poison ivy. That was poor planning on my part, but I’ve been out to the island a few other times.

I meandered around, and then up on the dike, always hopeful that I’ll see a coyote again, just because I saw one here twice before.

If you walk on the flood control dike, you get a view of a bunch of sleeping buses.

As I looked on, it all came flooding back, the filibustering that went on before SB4, the Connecticut Clean Air Act, was voted on this year. Here I am, trying to enjoy the dragonflies and butterflies, but reliving some of the most bizarre “reasons” for why a minority of legislators refused to consider the bill. One of them, fighting against the move toward electric buses, said he didn’t know where buses went to get fueled up.

I understand how the average person might not know, but a politician tasked with voting on this issue?!?!
Bro, it’s your job to know.

It’s not like the garage is in a hidden, undisclosed location. The address comes up immediately in Google. It’s visible from I-91. It’s visible from a park.

It gets better. In that debate, there was a bit of faux concern over where the electricity would come from. I don’t know where CTtransit currently and will get it from, however, check out this photo below of the garage with the capped, former landfill in the background. You know what covers a large swath of the ex-landfill? Solar panels. There’s a lot of space in this area where more solar panels could be installed, if needed. It doesn’t even take that much imagination — just the willingness to see what is out there in the world.

The deer and the cedar waxwing were the obvious highlights of this outing, but the walk on the dike did allow for this “War On Cars” photo to happen with no effort on my part.

My whole week, though, was not taking leisurely walks in underappreciated parks. It also involved errands and commuting.

A neighborhood friend tipped me off that walking on the Sigourney Street bridge might be doable on off-peak times, so on the weekend, when there was no construction happening, I tried it.

Verdict: better than expected, but not something I’d go for during rush hour or when there’s active construction.

I mean, look at this view:

That’s what it looks like while waiting to cross a highway exit ramp. I wasn’t convinced for awhile that the temporary beg button worked, but it turned out that it did. I question why the exit ramp is this wide.

Here is another view from the same spot. Just me, being probably obstructed by a sign. I have no idea what it says on the other side.

Why even try the bridge?

I was tired. If I take Sigourney Street, it’s a ten minute walk home from the bus stop. If I avoid Sigourney Street, it’s going to be a 20 minute walk. I don’t love a long walk when I’m carrying groceries, especially after I’d already taken a long walk.

On my outbound trip, I took the stairs from Capitol Avenue to Sigourney Street, and this is what pedestrian access looks like at the moment: dust and pieces of concrete everywhere. It doesn’t feel especially safe to use during construction unless you’re wearing a hard hat.

On the way back, I decided to continue straight off the bridge, avoiding the stairs. No signs said I couldn’t. Then, I had the entire road to myself. That was nice. Since access to/from I-84 has been blocked here during construction, the roundabout has been safer to cross, in my experience. The drivers, raging over the idea of pausing for three seconds to let a person cross the road, seemed to vanish the second those barriers went up. It’s been a pleasant month or so not seeing the worst in people emerge when someone dares ask they stop at a crosswalk directly next to an elementary school.

What else?
One day, I found sidewalk litter countering the narrative that the kids-these-days aren’t being taught cursive.

I noticed that several flex posts have been destroyed or simply removed from Babcock and Capitol. They were installed without an explanation, really, of what purpose they serve, and the stop lines were not repainted. If nothing else, could we at least require people, in order to renew their drivers’ licenses, to correctly describe the purpose of the perpendicular white lines striped by intersections? Because it seems people think if they drive over them, something magical will trigger a light, when in reality, a stop line is telling people not to drive their vehicle beyond the line.

Walking down Park Street from the CTfastrak Parkville station, I noticed what I think is the third tree on this block that’s been destroyed in the last few months. I reported the uprooted street tree to 311, hoping something could be done to salvage it.

I took a quick lunch break trip to walk on the busway’s multi-use path. Just to be clear, I didn’t walk the whole thing during my lunch break, nor have I done that all in one go. This was a simple ten minutes out, ten minutes back walk because I did have work to do, but I also had a really spectacular weather day that I didn’t want to feel I missed out on entirely.

Even though the pond by the Cedar Street Station was even more dried up than a few weeks ago, there were red-winged blackbirds making a lot of music.

And, I saw the path people have been using to go from the bus station to the supermarket strip mall that should but does not have a legit, direct path:

The crosswalk to the Fenn Road Starbucks is also worn away. Not surprising, since despite the “pain at the pump” wails, the drive-thru line was seven cars deep mid-day on a weekday. It’s always a joy to pop in and pop out while the line has only moved one car.

Oh, and waiting for a bus, I saw this sticker, which I felt much more comfortable with than the fascist stickers that have been pasted around Asylum Hill.

I don’t have much to say about the pic below, except that of course a tractor trailer was parked illegally over the sidewalk across the street from the police substation. Of course it was.

CHANGES

WOODLAND STREET BIKE LANE?

For real for real, I thought this was a joke.
I still think it’s a joke.
Walking down Woodland Street I first noticed the crosswalk at Niles Street was repainted.
Hooray.
Then, I spied it: sharrows.

My understanding, based on this little thing called NACTO, is that sharrows are supposed to be for low-speed roads, where, in NACTO language, “the speed differential between bicyclist and motorist travel speeds is very low.” Like 25 MPH. The posted speed limit on Woodland Street is 30, and most people drive faster than that when the road design enables it — especially around the hospital. (I’ve biked Woodland to Keney Park, and I’d honestly be in that park much more often if this short distance weren’t so dangerous for cycling.)

But then, there’s a narrow bike lane from Niles Street to Farmington Avenue, which has exactly one marking and doesn’t really look or feel like a bike lane.

Could they have committed to removing a travel lane and turning that into a protected bike lane, rather than using sharrows, and then when the road becomes one lane from Niles to Farmington, plunking down the sharrows there?

I was baffled, so I asked a friend who knows these things because this is his line of work, and to paraphrase him in a way that won’t get him in a hot water, he basically said, “yeah, that’s weird.”

It feels like someone wasn’t really supposed to do anything, but they tried to sneak something resembling bicycle infrastructure in because if you have something painted, it kinda creates a precedent.

Anyway, I beg Hartford to do the same thing I beg of West Hartford: create one solid east-west and one solid north-south route for cyclists. It needs to go where people have reason to be — not just recreation — and it needs to offer actual barrier-protection. Nobody’s interested in having one spectacular block that connects to nothing else. We actually want to go places. If we didn’t, we’d be at home on our Pelotons or whatever.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE! LOOK ANYWHERE ELSE! IT’S ALL FINE!

What’s that a picture of? That’s someone illegally parked in the bus stop in West Hartford Center. This is a common sight for that location. It seems that the bus stop locations are not the problem so much as people deciding their convenience is more important than the safety of those boarding buses (who are then let out in the street or closer to the corner, or both). Yes, there are those who are questioning the bus stops in West Hartford’s town center. I don’t believe these concerns are coming from anyone who rides the bus.

So, if you don’t ride the bus, what would indicate that this is not where to park? There’s the blue and white sign with the bus on it that says “BUS STOP.” Below it is the easy-to-read no parking sign that indicates no parking from that sign to the intersection. And if you somehow miss that, there’s the vibrantly-painted bus shelter, and since buses are not those tiny clown cars, anyone should know that you need to leave enough room to accommodate a bus. There’s literally no reason to park here. The lot behind the building offers free short-term parking.

But don’t worry. It was just for a minute, I’m sure.

Was that scathing? I’m hearing through the grapevine that some West Hartford residents did not like the tone in my open letter and to that I’d say tough shit. I don’t like pedestrians and cyclists being needlessly hurt and killed. I don’t like how many near misses I experience while doing all of the correct and legal things, knowing that none of these actions — waiting for the walk signal, staying on the sidewalk, staying in the marked crosswalk — protect me, but at least in the crash report it’ll say that I took no improper action. I especially don’t like it when I get texts from friends saying how their kids were almost hit in these known problem locations, while the kids were in the marked crosswalks when the walk sign was on.

Perhaps instead of tone policing, y’all could get out there and put your energy toward making your town actually safe for your own kids.

And that’s who is getting hurt: kids. Lots of ’em.

Out of the 237 pedestrian and cyclist crashes (involving motor vehicles) with injuries from January 2015 through the beginning of May 2022 in West Hartford, 43 of those injured were people age 18 and younger. One of those children was a two-year old who was inside a building; that incident was one of three times in that period when a person was injured as the result of a motorist driving through a building. Another of those children injured was a three-year old who was using the marked crosswalk while the crossing guard held up a stop sign.

Let’s see who has the guts to claim that the problem is my use of language and not that the roads are designed poorly, that the speed limits are too high, that vehicles do not have speed governors like low-speed scooters do, that ignition locks are not standard, that we aren’t using automated enforcement. Pushing all the blame onto the driver or the pedestrian/cyclist absolves those in power (mayors, other politicians, engineers, the automotive industry) from taking responsibility and making meaningful changes.

West Hartford frantically pushed out its decision to make its timid modifications on North Main Street permanent. I am not going to play along and call what they’ve done there or are planning to install a road diet. If you’re not lowering the speed limit significantly or designing to significantly drop driver speeds, you’re not really doing anything in the spirit of a road diet. You’re moving the food around on your plate while pretending to eat. I’m not surprised about the defeatist plan to adopt a higher speed limit next to the new paint-only bike lane; it’s the Town of West Hartford where they will send you only the best Thoughts & Prayers.

In the meantime, keep clutching your pearls every time you see the word “fuck” and not when you hear sirens headed toward yet another crash.

WHAT NEXT?

1. How do I know these numbers?

I pull them from the UConn Crash Data Repository, not out of my ass.

You, too, can access this database. Find numbers overwhelming? There’s a free, online tutorial offered on Wednesday, June 22, so you can see what the trends are statewide or for your own corner of Connecticut.

Register here.

2. What else is next? There are features coming to Real Hartford this summer that will focus on car-free travel: #BeyondHartfordBeyondCars. This is all train-willing, of course. If they shut down Union Station, all bets are off. Let’s hope the train gods and the weather gods cooperate.