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.

I started this series after some guy on the Internet was ‘splainin’ to me how it’s not realistic to be car-free in Connecticut, because dontcha know, it gets cold here in the winter. What was adorable about him schooling me on something I’d been doing for several years already was that he got it really wrong.

There are a few — maybe 3-5 — brutally cold days every year. But what really tests my patience is not the cold weather or the rain. It’s this heat.

It spells out for us, with the very hot temperatures coming earlier every year, the realness of climate change. It only gets hotter from here.

The challenge of blazing heat is made even more pronounced by our street tree deficit. Our parks got them, sure, but our streets? Wait for the bus on Farmington Avenue just east of Sigourney Street. Walk up Broad Street from Capitol Avenue to Farmington Avenue. [Feel free to add in the comments stops that are barren, or the opposite– bus stops that aren’t hostile] It’s made hotter by the asphalt. Hotter still by vehicles idling. Just like horns should be as loud inside a vehicle as outside, the heat vehicles produce should also be the same inside. I know that sounds cruel, but how else do you get people to do things like turn their engines off and only use the horn for emergencies?

I think my favorite (not really) aspect of gross heat is when there are warnings for people to wear loose clothing that breathes and in light colors. Go outside on a hot as hell day and tell me what you see people in the city wearing as they walk around. You can tell that the people who select work uniforms and the people who have to wear them are not the same. Black pants. Dark top. Watch them walk those blocks with no street trees to wait at bus stops with no shade next to a line of cars stopped at the light.

This last week has been sweaty, but it’s been more than that.

WALKED

With all my traveling around the state lately, I haven’t been doing as many recreational walks in Hartford lately — just getting myself to work or the train station or the bus stop. Over the weekend I made it a priority, and saw that Bloom Bake Shop, which I’d already known was moving to Pratt Street, has its sign up. It’s not open yet. Looks like they’re still repainting the interior. But, soon.

There are closer bakeries to where I live, but I will always applaud when business owners choose locations that are walkable, and Pratt Street, by virtue of being closed to cars, meets that criteria. It’s close to major bus stops. Both ends of the street have marked crosswalks and pedestrian lights; if you hit the beg button on the Trumbull Street side, the pedestrian light comes on it like five seconds.

Over the last year I feel like more and more new bakeries have excitedly told me how they’re moving to some different location out in the middle of nowhere, which is absolutely what I would consider a place that has no bus service. It’s always awkward. They’re like “come visit us at ___,” and I’m over here, “well, it’s been nice knowing you” and thinking “you couldn’t have found something within a five-minute, shoot, a ten-minute walk of public transportation? You had to go with something twenty minutes from the nearest bus stop, in an area with no sidewalks and no marked crosswalks? Why?”

So, yeah, lots of applause for the places that don’t do that.

The next day, I found myself back on Pratt Street.

That’s funny sentence construction. Look at me, surprised to be somewhere! No, that’s not how it happened. I literally marked my calendar because of the Bark & Vine pop up. Remember when Angelina and Brad adopted a whole bunch of kids? I think I understand now. One houseplant opened up the door and now I have a full situation and am annoying a neighbor friend with daily requests to help me install hooks and brackets so that my plant family is not restricted to windowsills. (“Help me install” means I have hardware that I will be handing to him and showing vaguely where I want it, and then throwing some cash. The alternative is that I pile books on a chair and stand on those so I can reach.)

In my defense, I grew up in a place with lots of trees. Far more trees than asphalt and concrete.

I think I arrived to this pop-up shop before it technically opened, but there were already a dozen shoppers ahead of me, and there was a steady stream arriving. We should have nice things in Hartford.

After I walked my latest plant home and ate lunch, I decided to treat myself to ice cream. Friends had been talking about my favorite ice cream shop, and though I didn’t have time to make that trip, I could walk the five whole minutes to one in my neighborhood.

My timing was perfect because just as I took my last bite, I watched as the fire department, not responding to a call, illegally parked in a handicapped spot out front.

BLOCKED

When the fire department, in one of those SUVs, pulled into the handicapped spot, I could only roll my eyes. It was just one more moment of cluelessness among many over the past few days.

I wrote about the jazz festival last year.
It stinks.
It’s the kind of event I want to tell everyone to come out for, but over the years I’ve become disillusioned by it for more than one reason. I’d noticed how vendors did not seem particularly local and wondered what impact this event was having on our local economy, aside from hotels. Not that I think every event needs to do anything to the economy, but it’s a huge opportunity, or could be, considering the crowd size.
And then, I noticed how more and more space used in Bushnell Park was being used for parking vehicles — as if the park isn’t surrounded by on-street and surface parking lots, not to mention the parking garages.

When I talk to people about this, their windshield bias comes into sharp focus. They don’t understand why blocking off part of a park is that big of a deal. (And I don’t actually think this is the most important issue of the day, but in the spirit of ‘we deserve to have nice things,’ I know there’s a way they can make the festival happen without disrupting residents, so why don’t they do that)

So, I try to explain the many ways this practice is a problem.

I know some readers have not appreciated my “beautiful efficient English language words that get the point across in a hurry.” However, I can’t imagine going into someone else’s town and taping off a portion of a public park for my own use. To me, that’s obscenity.

This year, I did not return with scissors to cut the zip ties, but my detouring meant extra walking and extra time in the hot weather that I was already not feeling. It’s okay for me to tack on an extra half mile, depending on which direction I’m coming from and if I’m aware that I’ll need to turn around and take a detour, but it’s not okay for event organizers to park their vehicles in a lot across the street from the park? Got it.

On some occasions, this meant taking the portion of Broad Street by the unkempt former Courant building, where there is about two seconds worth of shade. It meant crossing the 84 ramp on Asylum Avenue by the train station where the wait for the pedestrian signal is long. That intersection is part of the reason I prefer going behind the Legislative Office Building and through Bushnell Park.

On one occasion, I tried to detour via Capitol Avenue. Again, not a preferred route because the intersection with Washington/Lafayette is a death trap, and it means later either crossing highway ramps (☠️) or having to cross Capitol Avenue by the State Capitol. The pedestrian beg button is very responsive there, though it seems one out of every four drivers are unaware this light exists and they blow through at high speeds.

What happened was, a giant pickup truck was parked across the sidewalk on Capitol Avenue, totally blocking it and any view beyond it. Assuming this was the beginning and end of this particular inconvenience, I waited until traffic cleared and then walked around it in the street since there was no room to do so behind it on sidewalk, where some sort of construction project was happening at The Bushnell. After walking a little more, I came to see sidewalk blocked by fencing, no warning that this was the case. Was this for two feet or the rest of the block? Now, not near a marked crosswalk, I wasn’t in the position to cross the street, so I walked in it, hopping up onto the tiny ledge of sidewalk when a car approached. Not ideal, and something I would’ve avoided entirely had jazz festival event organizers been less greedy about the space they took up. Seriously. They could’ve left the path along the railroad wall completely open and still had their ridiculous and unnecessary lawn parking.

And in the spirit of stupid blockages, here’s one of the storm sewers on Russ Street:

HARTFORD LINES
This whole Hartford Line situation really is a case study in communication failure. On the first day of The Change I continued to see local news post misleading headlines and vague, not especially helpful pieces, which you know means that the average schmuck glanced at and comes away from thinking that there is no train service for months.

Unless they see CRCOG’s tweet, in which case they’ll come away thinking they feel confused:


I woke up ready to play nice all day, but that went right out the window when I saw this on the first day of The Change. The universe is testing me.
1. This is not breaking news. Just because the regional organization seemingly became aware of it for the first time on Monday does not make it breaking news. We should have all received earlier notice than we did, but it’s been in the news for a few weeks now.
2. It’s the Hartford Line train, not buses, that are suspended, and
3. It’s not even all train routes. I explained this a few times. I’m expecting to be a broken record through September.

But here is what I saw coming up the tracks from the Laurel Street bridge in Hartford on the first day of The Change, so that was exciting:

I’d only ever seen these stationary, but here they are, moving north.

You expect hiccups on a first day. First day of school. First day of work. First day of disrupting train service.

Currently, the most reliable way to find out about delays is by getting alerts on Twitter (fantastic when you’re traveling and watching your phone losing charge) so these three tweets are a whole transitional mood. The third was the last one from when service was regular: the annoying, but fairly standard, 5-10 minute train delay. Then, the announcement that the Hartford Line has officially begun its construction schedule. And on top? The first bus delay: 60-70 minutes.

The flooding in New York impacted Metro North, but this bus was going south and we didn’t have much going on beyond standard rush hour delays — at least, no highway closures were reported.

And then things kept being bonkers from there:

What fun for riders on a rainy day!

A question I have: because buses have more flexibility than trains (i.e. you’re not waiting on the tracks for a southbound train to pass so you can continue north) why not run extra buses between those schedule times? Add in two or three more runs during the day? It seems like this would reduce a 70 minute delay by half.

But we don’t know why that bus was delayed. Was there a mechanical problem? Traffic delay? Did they not arrange to have enough buses? Did a driver call out sick? Something else?

I hear griping about how Uber/Lyft drivers are “suffering” because of gas prices, and maybe this is their moment to switch paths, get CDLs, and drive buses.

Looking at the alerts on day two of The Change, I see more delays 25-30 and 30-35 minutes. Buses are not all Peter Pan. There’s also Dattco and King Gray. Hmm.

VICTORY OF THE WEEK
I didn’t want to go into a heatwave without ice cream in the freezer, so by a miracle I remembered to bring my insulated bag with me on a shopping trip. It was in the 80s and felt hotter. Not a fan. Looking at the forecast, this would be the coolest day for awhile.

Before the Sigourney Street bridge construction, I could get off the bus and be home within ten minutes. My self-imposed detour doubles that time. My other option: take Farmington Avenue bus all the way downtown, walk a few blocks, and catch the Capitol Avenue or Hillside Avenue bus, and then only walk one or two blocks depending on which bus. The issue with this: timing. Those buses each run twice an hour, with arrival time five minutes apart. I could be showing up to the stop in the 25-minute gap though, and with ice cream that would not do.

So, I sucked it up and took the construction route. By luck, I did not have to wait at any of the lights including those to cross highway ramps (the major reason I’ve been going another way) and either workers were on lunch break or they weren’t in the middle of any super loud or dirty tasks at the moment.

The ice cream was not any softer than whenever I transported groceries in my car when it lacked a/c during the last few years of its life. This is a win.

WHAT NEXT?
For Connecticut residents interested in the e-bike voucher, please take a few minutes to read the Electric Bicycle Program RFI and provide DEEP with  your suggestions.

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