HomeMy WebLinkAbout1/23/2024 Item PC, Schmidt
Richard Schmidt <
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Agenda correspondence public comment
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January 22, 2024
Dear Council,
With competent and caring scheduling and construction supervision, the Anholm neighborhood portion of the Anholm bike
project could have been completed – start to finish – in about 8 weeks. Instead, the neighborhood has now been in a state
of construction chaos for more than 8 months, and none of the project’s features are completed. We live in a state of
perpetual incompletion. We are told this will continue to June, which means this simple project will have been “in process”
for significantly more than a year. Given the city’s and contractor’s dilly-dallying indifference, June, it seems, may be an
optimistic and unrealistic completion date.
The result is much more than mess and inconvenience; it has presented numerous on-going life safety issues. Here
are but a few:
• Everything has been done spottily, a little here, a little there, then the contractor disappears sometimes for weeks
while unneeded no-parking signs remain in place, streets are strewn with plastic cones, broken plastic road markers, and
other construction junk, and nobody from contractor or city minds the store. The other day I witnessed a near 70-year-old
female resident picking up cones strewn in the traffic lanes of Broad Street so cars wouldn’t hit them, as those cars
whizzed around her in impatience. Foisting such safety cleanup onto resident old ladies is the height of municipal
indifference to public safety and neighborhood well-being. But it’s typical for this project.
• Last summer, for no good reason, the city removed the four very good speed humps in the 0 and 100 blocks of
Broad. I say “for no good reason” because there was nothing wrong with the humps, and to accommodate the bike track
only their westerly edge needed to be trimmed back a bit, employing the same process used for their total removal. The
humps are the only thing that keeps speed on this street civilized; prior to traffic calming we had daytime city-measured
speeds of 70 mph. For months following this unnecessary removal we lived with no humps at all, and as a result traffic
speeds at my home are higher than at any time in the past 40+ years, when the humps were first installed. (To show the
degradation of city’s caring for this neighborhood’s comfort and life safety, you should know that the humps have been
replaced before, but always on an old-ones-out and new-ones-in all in one day – precisely to protect us from freeway
speed traffic on our residential street. The city used to care about our well-being by doing things in a manner that
protected it.) The new onslaught of high vehicular speeds was unsafe for all, but especially for bicyclists and pedestrians.
After the humps had been gone for long enough to make clear a lack of intent to replace them promptly, I contacted public
works. On my first contact I was told a request would be made to the police to do speed enforcement, which never
happened. (Good humps are self-enforcing which enables the police to tend to other matters.) My second contact with
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public works was a question: when will the humps be reinstalled? I was told within the next month. When I asked why so
long? there was obfuscation. A month passed, then another, still no humps. Finally, only two of the four humps were
reinstalled, but they were clearly inferior as a 35mph vehicle can (and often does) go over them with no impediment to
exceeding the speed limit. (The purpose of a hump is to reduce speed to a street’s “design speed,” which on this street is
25 mph.) So the extraordinarily fast unsafe speeds at my home remain. That makes it really fun for geezer pedestrians to
try to cross the street. Why haven’t the other two humps long ago been reinstalled, and when will they be installed? I can’t
get an answer from public works. In the meanwhile, as a result of the city’s mean indifference to our welfare, we all
continue to live with speeding traffic, as we have for the past 5-6 months, and possibly will forever if the next two humps
are as ineffective in design as the first two. Is this how a caring welcoming city should treat its people?
Anyway, the bumps were removed allegedly so the cycle track curbs could be installed, but that didn’t start to happen for
months after hump removal, and there are still – after about a half year since hump removal -- no cycle track curbs on
most of Broad Street. Like I said before, a little here, a little there, then the contractor disappears. And we are left to live
with the safety consequences of this dilly-dallying inept scheduling and performance.
• The half-finished and poorly designed ADA improvements are a menace to all, but especially to those who are its
alleged beneficiaries. The council is aware of reports of a wheel chair user who couldn’t negotiate the complicated new
corner ramps on Chorro. I have previously pointed out to the council the dangerousness of the curbed sidewalks and
abrupt sidewalk drop-offs at Chorro-Center (where the ramps also flood and fill with debris, which are hazards to all
pedestrians but especially to the disabled). And there are already reports of a broken leg suffered by tripping on one of
these Chorro “improvements.”
But I think Broad at Murray takes the safety cake. Here, because the city’s contracted “designers” couldn’t figure out a
good solution they’ve designed an awful one that marches the disabled on the street pavement of Broad Street some 130
unprotected feet along with speeding traffic. I guess that’s the reductio ad absurdum of the fashionable notion of a “shared
path” – wheelchairs vs. speeding hunks of steel. The lengthy in-street disability route also forces users to dodge storm
inlets that accept a flood of storm water, avoid a sloping slick steel storm grate, and walk on sloping pavement leading to
the storm inlets. I watched a woman on crutches struggle with this recently, and my own use is testimony about the lack of
caring this ADA solution represents. In walking north on this “ADA accommodation” recently, I felt completely naked,
safety wise, with Broad traffic coming from behind me, but as I reached mid-point an SUV came to the often ignored stop
sign on Murray. On the far side of Murray I had to walk, in Broad, swinging outward into traffic to get away from the storm
grate and dangerously sloped pavement leading to it, then onward in the street some additional distance before reaching
the sidewalk ramp. The woman in the SUV was frustrated – probably muttering something like “why is that idiot walking in
the street?” – and kept inching up behind me then at last swung into the oncoming lane on Broad to go around me. Do
you think what I describe is in any way safe passage for the disabled, for the fall-prone balance-compromised elderly, or
for anyone? (Parents with strollers use the route.) Staff responds all will be splendid when they’re finished and a lot of
toxic thermoplastic is melted onto the street and paint smeared on the pavement and some plastic sticks are stood up (I
disagree that’s safe – putting lipstick on a porcupine doesn’t make it safe to handle), but with all the dilly-dallying plus
inept sequencing of the project’s parts we’ve already had to live with this unsafe mess that leaves users naked in the
street for many, many months. It’s my understanding the plastic and paint will be the absolute last thing to complete, so
we’ve got another 6 months to go in a dangerous state of incompletion – before we find an unsafe crossing is all we’re
ever going to get.
ADA improvements are supposed to be, well, improvements in safety and utility, not concoctions of new barriers and new
dangers. But that seems to be too much to expect these days.
• Then there are the objects of so much popular derision, the cycle track curbs that have popped up in the paving of
Broad, Chorro and Ramona. Suffice it to say, these have caused scores of accidents already -- for vehicles, pedestrians
and cyclists. In fact, a former council member did a face-plant on the pavement of our street when he struck the end of a
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particularly ill-placed curb, and suffered significant injuries; luckily he didn’t break bones or crack his head open or harm
his brain. (Before this accident I had already mentally noted this exact location as an accident waiting to happen; it was so
obvious. Why don’t the city’s professionals see safety flaws that are so obvious?)
In response to the accidents the city places plastic cones atop the narrow cycle track curbs. Of course they don’t stay put,
but are all over the street, causing yet more safety issues. I’ve already mentioned elderly residents trying – as a courtesy
to drivers -- to get them out of traffic lanes.
This kind of stuff is just nuts. It’s a shameful way to treat a neighborhood and its visitors. It’s a shameful abrogation of the
city’s presumed purpose, to protect public welfare and safety. Especially when even an invasive project like this could,
with competent and caring scheduling and management, have been completed in a fraction of the time it’s now been
underway.
But I believe it’s now typical of the city’s lack of caring for its neighborhoods. Year before last was the great sewer
replacement project, part of which was in the bikeway project area. Same contractor, same city, same sort of scheduling
and safety problems greeted with total indifference when called to city’s attention. Signs would go up on residential streets
prohibiting blocks of on-street parking for an entire month (for tasks that might have taken several days to complete), but
no work would take place during that month. This happened again and again, but certainly the wondrous piece de la
resistance of the project, the ultimate display of indifference to public safety, was the summer day the contractor managed
to break a water pipe and a sewer pipe in the same hole, which sent more than a hundred thousand of gallons of sewage
onto Broad Street and into Old Garden Creek, which runs through back yards from Murray to Lincoln, none of whose
residents were notified by the city that great microbiological horror lurked in their yards, despite an established city
procedure for so doing with pre-printed door hangers. I watched with amazement as the Broad-Murray intersection filled
with liquid crap, the city failing even then to shut the street to traffic, which meant vehicles were splashing the crap onto
the sidewalks and into yards. Doing anything at all to protect us, or even to inform us, was just too much trouble for our
fine city. Who cares about residents being exposed in their yards to hepatitis, shigella, or worse? Hepatitis be damned!
We, the wonderful city, don’t have time to be bothered with preventing such contagions.
This, dear Council, is the “caring” city you’re overseeing. It’s time for some big changes, starting with your direction of
things.
Richard Schmidt
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