Small Change

At our block party last month I had a trifold board (taped to a table top, since it was breezy that evening), markers, and Post-it notes, and used Neighborland's fill-in-the-blank sentence as the assignment:  "I want ____ in my neighborhood."  I wrote "A crosswalk across Cumberland" on an orange Post-it note and then paid no attention to who was writing what for most of the evening.  There weren't many suggestions made -- just seven altogether, including mine -- but two of them were about sidewalks.  "A sidewalk," one person wrote, and below it another note, "Me too!!  We need sidewalks!"

There has been a lot in the news recently about pedestrian safety and sidewalks.  There's been the constant succession of pedestrian deaths in the Atlanta area, discussion about what the July 31 T-SPLOST referendum will and will not fund (reportedly some of the funding for Atlanta for local projects will go to sidewalks and other improvements to enhance pedestrian safety), and PEDS has continued to advocate for the City of Atlanta to properly support sidewalk maintenance rather than expecting property owners to do it themselves.  At the Streets Alive event in May, PEDS was collecting footprints on paper as a petition which they subsequently delivered to the City Council meeting, asking the city to fund sidewalk maintenance.

There are families with young children on our street, and there are no sidewalks, other than at the North Highland end of the street by the apartments and a narrow fragment mid-block, in front of a couple of the new houses.  I'd be all for sidewalks on our street if the street wasn't already so wide and the yards so small; carving out a big enough swath for a proper sidewalk to could a quarter or more of our yards, while we have a street that is wide enough for cars to park on both sides of the street without obstructing two-way traffic.  On Wessyngton Road, the cars already have a disproportionate amount of space, and if there's going to be a sidewalk, I'd prefer it to come at the expense of the street than our already very small yards.  I find it hard to visualize that happening, but if it did I'd be all for sidewalks on on our street.

There's a tactical urbanism approach to narrowing streets and reducing speed of cars by re-striping the street to create a bicycle lane next to the curb, moving the cars over, narrowing the street.  This as been done as part of the Build a Better Block projects in commercial areas, but I don't see why it couldn't be done in a residential area.  Re-striping doesn't cost much; if the cars parked 6 feet away from the curb, there would be room for pedestrians next to the curb, and they would be separated from the traffic by parked cars.  It would not be as good as a sidewalk, but it might be a feasible interim measure, and it wouldn't cost much.

But we do need a crosswalk on Cumberland, and that wouldn't cost much either.  Whether there are sidewalks on Wessyngton or not, we still have to cross Cumberland to get to the sidewalk on the other side of that street.  Cars come down the hill too fast sometimes on Cumberland, and every child who walks down Wessyngton Road to Morningside Elementary School has to cross Cumberland Road with no crosswalk there.

I doubt that T-SPLOST, even if it passes, will do anything for sidewalks in Morningside, but a big chunk of what makes our neighborhood so desirable is that it's walkable.  Absolutely, the city needs to come up with a long-term plan to fix the sidewalks.  In the meantime, though, there are things that could be done that wouldn't require a bond issue; they could be done with a couple of gallons of paint.