Friday, June 17, 2011
Any Areas You Avoid Walking Through?
I just received a tweet complaining about a large pile of what appears to be human feces at Main and Post, which reminded me of my short-lived campaign to get the folks at the Ridpath to clean up their sidewalks after the weekend. I actually changed my route from the STA Plaza to my office because I was tired of walking past vomit, feces, blood and other unidentified fluids and materials every Monday morning. Are there any areas you avoid due to unsavory sights? Try to keep your language clean please ;)
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7 comments:
Sad how much the area around the Ridpath has gone downhill, lets hope the group that wants to buy it and remodel it are successful. I guess I am lucky as I don't normally go near that area when I am walking, so I really do not avoid any areas when I am walking.
That's why my campaign was so short-lived. The group is obviously dedicated to improving things there so I felt like I would be picking on them when they already have their hands full if I kept bugging them about it. Obviously they already know there's a problem.
This might be a lot to read, but I hope you find some useful insight in it. There are other factors besides human waste (although that's a pretty big factor) that make a stretch of sidewalk undesirable. You can have the cleanest street ever, but if the engineered and architecturally designed surroundings aren't supportive of the pedestrian experience, it has great impacts too.
That being said, I do not like to walk along South-bound Division Street where it bends around the corner to Spokane Falls Blvd adjacent to the Group Health Exhibit Hall. I blame that tall "decorative" metal wall that they used to shield off the exhibit hall's loading docks from Division. The wall is impermeable, made of a very cold-feeling industrial palette of materials, is built way out of a human scale, and is immediately adjacent to a narrow and standard 6-foot wide sidewalk. The result is that a pedestrian feels PINNED between the dominating wall and 4, VERY LOUD lanes of Division Street that zoom right by them, 2 feet away. The material of the wall doesn't help - it echos traffic noise right back at the pedestrian, making that space even louder.
That stretch of sidewalk is loud, harsh, and FEELS insecure and uncomfortable. The architects (or maybe it was engineers who decided to place a metal wall) definitely did not think about how their wall would permanently (sans major modifications to the wall) erode and destroy that stretch of sidewalk permanently. I mean, the whole experience lasts 700+ feet (which is at least a couple minutes of walking). Keep in mind, that city blocks (like right next to the Ridpath) are less than half that distance.
So when thinking about Complete Streets, it's also important to think about the pedestrian experience that is created by what's around the street, not just the fact that a hypothetical street would have a bike lane and sidewalk.
I get the same feeling on the South side of the STA Plaza. I feel a lot more insecure on the south side versus the north side because again, the pedestrian is pinned on a relatively "narrow" sidewalk between the impermeable, hard brick walls of the STA Plaza (with no street level windows) and the BLANK concrete-walled parking garage of the Washington Trust Building across the street. The North side of the STA Plaza has wider sidewalks (or at least it feels that way) and has street level windows. A permeable facade of the Sterling Savings headquarters across the street helps out too!
The entire grounds of the intermodal center ;-)
Thanks for the comments Jason and Ryan. The Intermodal Center also bugs me because it doesn't feel so 'intermodal.' People dropping off travelers aren't very aware of pedestrians, the taxis block the driveways half the time and someone is always trying to panhandle you. I think my very least favorite place to walk though is from the north end of the Monroe Street Bridge up to about REI. The sidewalks are narrow and often have poles, etc. in the middle of them, the traffic is rushing by at high speeds and there are long stretches with no safe place to cross the street.
It is better now than a few years ago, I was volunteering a lot at the courthouse and also at the library and so about once a week I walked from the courthouse to the library, and I remember the Monroe Street bridge swaying when a bus or heavy truck crossed the bridge when I was walking on the bridge sidewalk. Much better now the bridge is very solid.
The Maple Street bridge does that now! I avoid it like crazy because it freaks me out. I know it's been there for years and isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but that swaying is very unnerving when you're trapped in a cage with traffic rushing by at high speeds and its a long way to the end of the bridge.
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