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The Crosswalk to Hell
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5/01/2007
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Atlanta, in her unending efforts to make the city something it is not, has recently begun wasting a bunch of our money making the streets more pedestrian friendly. As a guy who walks a 6 mile round trip to work 2-3 times a week, I certainly appreciate the hazards of crossing busy streets. I also understand that this is not New York City and I am in the minority as a pedestrian. Furthermore, I realize that cars are much bigger than I am, and all of the warning signs and government attempts to save my life will not put my guts back in my abdomen if I step in front of a minivan.
Atlanta seems to think that making our inner city surface streets look like a goddamn video game will make drivers more aware of those who walk. WRONG. If you have driven in the Virginia Highlands/Little Five Points areas lately, you will see all manner of curbing, signs, and other construction designed to slow drivers down. As you approach a pedestrian crossing zone you will see the curbing swell out to narrow the lane, a blinky yellow light overhead, two huge green ped-xing signs on the sides of the road, and a new thing they call a "delineator", which is a sign that is actually sitting in the middle of the road getting bashed to hell on a daily basis. While walking to work I have been known to move these signs to the sidewalk to get them out of the way. I would move them to the nearest dumpster, but I think that's illegal.
You definitely don't want to be reincarnated as one of these.
At night, the plutonium coated warning signs reflect your headlights with the intensity of a thousand suns, making it difficult to see anything that might lie beyond them (like people). Now you have to consider the physics of putting your car up on two wheels so you can fit through the tiny space they left between the curb and the delineator, and not much of your brain is left to worry about whether someone is crossing the street. I have personally seen four instances this year where a driver was trying to thread the needle between a sign, some unnecessary curbing, and a cyclist (in the city's infinite wisdom, they almost completely left out bicycle lanes) and almost pegged a ped.
Here is the way I think it would work better - if there was nothing in my way except a human being, that makes a total of one thing I have to avoid, thus reducing my cockpit workload and increasing the chances that said person is going to live to see the other side of the street. Or how about this one - when the pedestrian gets to the edge of the curb, have a motion sensor activate a flashing light. That way we know that if the light is flashing, there is someone there.
If you want folks to slow down, try actually enforcing the speed limits you have posted everywhere. Use those stupid intersection cameras to give us chicken shit tickets while we are on our way to pay more taxes if that's really what it has come to. People who can't read speed limit signs deserve to pay fines, and paying those fines will definitely get their attention for longer than it takes to cross an intersection.
While we are at it, let's not forget to levy similar fines for those pedestrians who cross against the light or don't use crosswalks at all. If pedestrians only had the right of way within designated crosswalks, maybe everyone would pay more attention.
 Dusty
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posted by Dusty at 10:09 AM |
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6 Comments:
I find it funny that people don't get the simple shit, such as this. Why block my road with BS like this?
Can't we stop forcing every driver to go apeshit over ANOTHER obstacle in the road to drive around? I agree wholeheartedly, it's frustrating as hell. What we need are cops to start enforcing the laws that they are supposed to be upholding. IF they did that, then maybe, just maybe, we'd get some sanity back into this world.
TLee007
P.S. Almost an afterthought, but I'm FIRST?!?!?!!? WOOHOOOOO!!!!!!
The other thing we have to deal with: cross walks coming out of all stores WITH stop signs for cars. It's very annoying because the pedestrians pay even less attention to the traffic, and boy does it clog up traffic.
Not to mention that it's placed right near the giant tree trunk that juts out into the road on the other side, so you have to play Human Frogger with an ancient oak, a reflective day-ruiner and whatever crackhead is shuffling into oncoming traffic.
- Derek
CHICAGO—Residents of the Carney Gardens neighborhood on Chicago's South Side are opposing an effort by asshole real-estate developer Royce Messner to build a godawful $45 million strip mall and condominium complex in the crime-ridden shithole they call home.
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Residents march to protect their beloved, execrable squalor.
The Save Carney Neighborhood Foundation, the most organized non-criminal group in this part of town, has filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the scheduled April 2008 groundbreaking. While halting the project would surely prevent a tragic urban-planning nightmare, it would also mean keeping the run-down, economically depressed community exactly as it is.
"Carney is where I was born and raised, and it remains a tight-knit community," said Foundation chairman Althea Hynes at a fundraising block party held Monday on a broken bottle- and condom-strewn stretch of Carney Avenue where the money-grubbing Messner wants to put a soulless indoor food court. "Lots of young kids still play in the empty lots around here."
Messner, 54, a three-time Chicagoland "Builder of the Year" and all-time unbelievable scumbag who made his fortune in the 1990s converting public parks and cheap, blighted properties into high-rise luxury residences, is seeking to "revitalize" Carney Gardens by razing it and replacing it with a damned cookie-cutter mixed commercial-residential development that would benefit no one who lives there now.
Unrepentant prick Messner.
"What people like this can never get through their heads is the fact that progress isn't always painless," the rapacious bastard said, as if he were not talking about driving thousands of poor benighted fucks out of the place that, pestilential hellhole or not, is the only home they've ever been able to afford. "They complained about the expressway over their heads too, but its easy-on, easy-off access makes Carney Gardens a prime area for development. Once we get a few more chain restaurants in that area, the whole economy will turn around."
A hellish 16-block stretch of burned-out buildings and howling poverty, Carney Gardens has never recovered from its economic slide in the late 1960s. However, many of those who live in the human sewer say they can't just allow Messner to squat his bloated fat-cat ass over their neighborhood and dump a big concrete-and-glass yuppie turd onto everything they've ever known.
"There's no way this city can allow some developer to just come in here and ruin our community," said liquor store owner Carlos Jimenez, demonstrating willful ignorance of Chicago history, the conditions immediately outside his door, and even his role in Carney Gardens' downfall.
"Where are all these people supposed to go if they put up that mall here—Gary, Indiana?" said Hynes, as if living in a filthy, dangerous joke of an ass wipe city was some kind of affront to her standards.
Urban planning experts say that any opposition to the colossal asshole faces an uphill battle, as Carney Gardens has been a wart on the ass of Chicago for too long. Despite this, it seems that the determined Save Carney group will not abandon its hope of rejecting the only development proposal their hopeless pit will see in the next two decades.
"Poor communities are at a disadvantage against this type of developer, who speaks the language of City Hall," said Jackson Eisenberg, an architecture professor at Loyola University who has studied the effects of short-sighted, profit-oriented renewal and gentrification on dozens of crap areas. "It's the same dilemma faced by the working-class [losers] in [rotten-ass] urban neighborhoods across America. As a [shrivel-dicked] businessman looking for a lucrative investment, [evil] Messner sees a ripe opportunity here."
Mayor Richard M. Daley has yet to speak publicly about whether he will oppose Messner's human hamster cage, or allow the vile prick to wipe the bleeding hemorrhoid that is Carney Gardens from existence.
Try doin' a naked caricature of yourself, then perhaps you'll realize no one woman would lay next to your eunicless pasty skin wrap....as far as the streets stand in the middle dressed in black and do us all a favor you suck your writing sux and your fans are all Darwin apostles just waiting to do something utterly fuckin' stupid and go to HELL!
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