I walked to my appointment with the eye doctor yesterday because it seemed the safest choice given that I would have my eyes dilated. The office is about 1.5 miles from my house — an easy walk on the sidewalk along National Ave.
The large intersection at Sunshine and National has crossing lights for pedestrians. And the light is timed well enough to allow you to get across all six lanes if you’re a healthy 53-year-old man.
Standing there on a traffic island (because of the right-turn lane) waiting for the light — utterly exposed to the driving skills of random Springfieldians — one feels the awesome domination of the car culture.
Little ol’ me on foot is not the important person here. Or, rather, the important object.
It’s not really an engineering problem unless we want to generally complain about large traffic sewers (and I do). It’s a problem (including the traffic sewers) primarily caused by a certain mental construct, i.e. cars are the important objects in the road; the needs of cars are paramount and cannot be questioned. This seems like common sense because, well, sooooo many people are out there driving cars. I wonder how many we could lure out of those machines if we offered some real transportation choices?
Offering real transportation choices does not begin with spending huge sums of money on infrastructure. The first step is actually free, and it’s the most important single thing: Change your mind.
The whole school transportation thing (and other calamities) remains in the news hereabouts because of shrinking budgets (because our economy and tax structure are based on you buying stuff … so get out there and do your patriotic duty). We could make instant positive change without spending a dime if we collectively accepted this statement:
The safety of a pedestrian — especially a child walking to school — is vastly more important than the needs of anyone driving a car.
Late for work? That’s your problem. Gotta make that delivery? Should have left earlier. Don’t like waiting at long lights — all four lanes stopped waiting for kids to cross? Then find another route.
Nothing will change until all of us who use the road accept that people on foot — especially children — are the kings of the road and we in cars are the guests.