A Walking City
Boston is a walking city… or so they say. And sometimes I try to walk places. But when you’re on foot, Boston is more of a waiting city…
We don’t want car traffic to get backed up do we?
25 comments
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I have been reading missives from the UK that are saying that the attitude of “Smoothing the traffic flow” has caused more than half of the pedestrian and cyclist deaths in London. I’m sorry to see it in this country as well.
Amen! The absolute worst is the light at Ruggles Street on the Southwest Corridor. I’ve waited 5 minutes for the light to turn there on a regular basis. Even in Boston, which has done so much to improve conditions for cyclists, the mentality remains to keep everything convenient for cars.
My girlfriend just moved here from NYC and is totally confused by the pedestrian signalling in Boston. I hadn’t really ever thought about it before, but she’s totally right to be confused.
I bike most places, but when I actually walk or run somewhere I don’t usually, I find it is far more difficult to walk than any other mode! My neighborhood and the surrounding area lacks sidewalks on about half the blocks, and that is in the old part of the city, where the grid was laid out specifically for pedestrians and wagons.
The bridges and viaducts connecting the chopped-up urban core sometimes have narrow, rusted “sidewalks” that are extremely dangerous and the suburbs have insane arterials that are a 200-foot walk curb-to-curb (if you can even get there in the first place). If I go to some shopping development, I find myself walking twenty minutes from store to store, cutting through parking lots and landscaping that are clearly meant to funnel cars from place to place. It’s amazing to me how little thought is given to the idea that someone might actually walk from place to place.