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. 

DREAM BUS
This bus is not listed in the transit app, and it drifts to the bus stop. There is a large sign and a smaller sign announcing that this is a training bus. No passengers. Okay, so I’ll wait. It’s fine. So many bus trips have been canceled the last two weeks, presumably due to Covid-related staff shortages. 

It stops.

The driver opens the door and looks at me. 
The signs says no, but he and the two other transit dudes on board tell me to hop on.

There are no other passengers. Everyone is masked. The bus is pristine. My Go CT card won’t scan, but they wave me on.

Is this kosher? What route am I even on?

Who knew a bus could smell so clean?
The seats are unfrightening. I’m not inspecting the entire bus, but nothing in sight is stained. 

 It is about ten minutes until my stop. Not another passenger boards. Did I die? I feel like this is the only explanation. This is a busy route, usually picking up passengers at every single stop at least to the city line. 

Did I fix my transit karma? 

I pull the cord that looks unsullied by any other human touch, knowing that when I leave the bus, I will never step on one so perfect again in my entire life.

72 HOURS LATER
It’s been 72 hours since the storm ended, and for this amount of snowfall, I have expectations about what the sidewalks should look like by now. 

I’m perfectly reasonable. If this were a foot of snow coming after another storm and a solid portion of residents lost electricity, I would be more understanding. That’s not what we experienced though, not in Hartford. How come on my Monday commute, I am seeing sidewalks that look like this? 

That would be the corner of Woodland and Asylum. There is a middle school across the street. There are two medical facilities — including a major hospital building — on the other corners. Who owns this trouble spot? None other than the State of Connecticut. 

They are not the only repeat offender. The dollar store at Farmington and Sigourney does not need to obey any rules, it seems. This is how its sidewalk looks three full days after a snowstorm ended.


Take a good look at this photo. There is more to say about the intersection pictured from this angle, and I’ll get to that in a minute. 

The top/cover photo shows the sparkling new roundabout. Take a look at those detour signs. Pedestrians are shunted into. . . nowhere? Snowhere?

The sidewalk and crosswalk was left uncleared. If traveling straight up Park Terrace from Park Street to Sigourney Street, you might not notice anything because that was plowed. But if you want to get to the elementary school, Pope Park North, or Park Terrace near Capitol Avenue, I hope you brought your cleats. Also, don’t slip and impale yourself on those two broken trees! 

They know people are still going to school and work, right? 

Goal: some year, get through winter without having to use 311. Maybe I’ll bake cookies with that free time. 

IT’S BEEN ONE WEEK…
Why is this?


It’s been one week — one week and two days, actually — since that snowstorm ended, but this is what Park Street and Pope Park Hwy #4 looks like because who cares about mobility for all residents.

Why yes, that is a tire atop the snow mound that people have to climb over if they want to visit Parkville Market, Pope Commons, or Pope Park. Those places I just named include a grocery store and laundromat. I’m not being bitchy about recreation and restaurants, though honestly, I could and be justified since people work at those restaurants (and I bet some use public transportation to get there) and right now, there is that Covid shack in Pope Park.  

This shows how much of the road could go away and not be missed by motorists. I hate crossing this intersection at the best of times because it is so wide and people often do not look before turning. There’s no median. They named the road a “highway” and people drive like it. The whole thing is too wide for what it is, and there is no sidewalk on one entire side, even though there is a park people might want to visit. 

But, there are not better alternatives if I am doing my grocery shopping at The Supermarket of the Damned in Parkville, so cross this road I must. What I’m saying is that we could have massive curb extensions here. And why not? If Parkville is as up and coming and happening and everything everyone says it is, shouldn’t it be more walkable?  

Over in Asylum Hill, in another area that should be more walkable than it is, I see sidewalks still uncleared. 

This is annoying, having to grip a railing so I don’t wipe out on the ice. This is not annoying for others: it’s far beyond that. When I complain about this stuff, it’s only partially out of my own personal irritation. I see who else uses the sidewalk: little kids walking to school, elderly with various types of mobility devices, regular neighborhood folks who do not own footwear with excellent grips because that takes more money than they have. 

The scary thing here is that the snow removal on the Sigourney Street bridge sidewalk has been the best in years, no doubt due to the daily presence of construction workers. Instead of having to 311 complain about there being no snow removal at all on the sidewalk, I “only” needed to report the need for salt or sand on the bridge (not pictured). 

It’s bizarre to experience the pettiness of property maintenance, which is pictured here. Later, I learn that this patch of uncleared sidewalk does belong to the State Department of Transportation. Then there’s a gap with no property owner listed, and then there’s the Sigourney Street bridge. This also has no owner identified, but any bridge that spans the highway is State of Connecticut. Going in the other direction, Aetna owns some piece of this ramp sidewalk apparently, but then the other side is also State of Connecticut — as that is where the Sigourney Street CTfastrak Station is. 

Got all that? 

GIS Property Maps are a girl’s best friend. These help you to focus your rage when you blast people for failing to maintain what they own. 

The logical solution — if one owns large pieces of property on either side of a small parcel owned by someone else — would be to work out a management solution with the other party. Like, pay us X dollars each season and we will maintain that sidewalk for you, and obviously we will sign your stupid insurance waiver or whatever while we’re at it. 

That’s using logic, though. 

Instead, we have maintenance people — and now I’m talking citywide and not about this specific location — who either do not know where the property borders are, or, who do not recognize need for people to walk across multiple properties’ sidewalks, and decide to just leave massive snow mounds at the edge — which is less of a “fuck you” to the neighbor as it is to the resident trying to get to work or school or the grocery store, who now has to find a way around or over. 

It’s not all terrible. At least two different people complained about the Woodland/Asylum sidewalk and that was resolved. The sidewalk by the dollar store was cleared better. 

Anyway,  if you were wondering where all the salt is, I found it:


This salt was several inches thick in some places on Trinity Street in Bushnell Park! 

WALK MEETING
Opting out of both Zoom and sitting inside of a coffee shop, I met up with a community member for a walking meeting. This was my preferred mode BCE (Before Covid Era), let the record show. My brain works better when I am in motion. There are studies indicating that I am not at all special in this way. 

Anyway, this took us through Pope Park, where aside from the path connecting parking lot to Park Street, it did not appear that any plowing or salting had happened  — nearly one week after the storm ended. If I had a beach pail and shovel, I may have relocated salt from Bushnell Park to Pope Park. I don’t, so I didn’t. 

This also confirmed that the City of Hartford still had not cleared the roundabout sidewalks or crosswalks. I know there are families who walk from Asylum Hill to the elementary school. I hope none of them fell. The pic below shows sidewalk leading from Pope Park North to the Burns School. 

RIGHT FROM LEFT ON HARD RED
I said I was going to talk about the Farmington and Sigourney intersection and I don’t tell lies. To give an even more clear look at the situation, I’m providing a Google Maps screenshot: 


If you are a motorist driving in the left lane south on Sigourney and the light is red, do you: 

(1) Stop. That is your option. Red means stop. 

(2) Ignore the red light.
Ignore the “NO TURN ON RED” sign.
Ignore all social norms.
Decide that you are special and can pass several cars in front of you to make a right turn on red from the left lane while all legs of this intersection have the red light because it is now the exclusive pedestrian phase and there are two middle school-aged boys and one middle-aged woman in the crosswalk that you are driving through. 

DEBRIS OF THE WEEK

This photo was actually taken a few months ago. I see drug baggies/envelopes and other accessories constantly, and I would never get to my destination if I stopped to photograph each one, but this struck me as extra.

La Cura. A stamp made during a pandemic.

There is so much here that makes the skin crawl, including that this was one block from an elementary school on the property of someone who would never touch this shit. Litter. Dropped by someone passing by, or blown onto the driveway by the wind. Sitting there at the edge of driveway and sidewalk, where anyone walking by could pick it up. 

What was most astounding about hearing of a 13-year old boy’s fatal overdose at the Sport and Medical Sciences Academy was not that it happened, but that — according to the superintendent — they do not keep Naloxone at Hartford schools. 

With absolutely no respect: are you fucking kidding me?! 

All a person needs to do is walk a few blocks outside of any area not cleaned by the HBID and she will encounter at least several of these empty drug bags. Less prevalent than cigarette butts, more common than mattresses. 

Having seen many of these, along with syringes, on various Hartford school grounds, I have to wonder what administrators have been telling themselves all these years. Did they think the problem would never enter the building? Do they not consume the same news that report overdoses all over the place, including many who were not using what they thought they were — even marijuana being laced with fentanyl? Do they drive everywhere and never walk around the school perimeter where such litter can be spotted? 

The Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance — with two locations in Hartford — have been providing free overdose kits for years, and training people how to use these tools. How is there not at least one overdose kit in every school nurse’s office in the district? Would having medicine at the Sport and Medical Sciences Academy have prevented this heartbreaking loss? That’s uncertain. But Naloxone saves many lives, and it’s wild that a place with so many people in one building would not have this on hand. Even if you can’t imagine a child that young messing around with fentanyl, that’s besides the point. Children are not the only people inside of school buildings. This isn’t Lord of the Flies. 

This is yet another thing for the file of Hartford Schools Should Thank Me For Not Being A Parent Because If I Am This Furious While Being Child-Free, Oh, Just You Imagine. 

WHAT NEXT? 

1. Know of properties with routinely neglected sidewalks, whether broken, covered in trash, or not cleared of snow/ice in reasonable time? Use GIS to pinpoint owner, then report to 311 with that information. It seems to be helpful if multiple people report same issue and explain why it’s a problem. For instance, is the hazard near a school or hospital? Is it near an elderly housing complex? Spell it out. 

2. The Vision Zero Council is meeting at 10 AM on 19 January 2022. Meeting details are here. The purpose of these meetings: “to develop a state-wide policy and interagency approach to eliminate all transportation-related fatalities and severe injuries to pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users, motorists and passengers.” Previous meeting materials and minutes can be found here.