Monday, June 25, 2012

A Problem Street ?

There's a problem on my street. People keep crashing their cars. As we all know this is anybody's problem except the drivers' I mean it's straight - how ac anybody navigate that?
It's not flat - it slopes down to the east.
The issue is that halfway down the street the road narrows and, while parking on the north side of the narrower section is eliminated, there is parking on the south and people routinely drive east & proceed to smash into the parked cars. Straight street? Stationary objects? Talk about a recipe for disaster…..
From my perch on the southside of the street it's clear that most people driving east drive down left of the double yellow center lines to deal with the crazy roadway.
The upper western half of the road was developed in the 20s while the eastern section was largely developed in the 40s. A deep ravine appears to have been the divider. Why the development to thee east has a narrower road? beats me.
Nobody living in these homes really needs to park on the street. All the homes have driveways & garages. Of course in the 20s & 40s people didn't have fleets of cars……
One of the issues at this bottleneck - a guy in the house just past the bottleneck on the north side is a car hoarder. He uses the city street to store his fleet. He leaves them up the street in the wider stretch (the long term storage) but mainly has them clustered right at the bottleneck. Does it bother me that his are the cars most often smashed? ~not really~ The idea that he has no insurance makes it even more palatable. Most of the crashes are hit & run. Probably because the drivers don't have insurance either.
While it's usually just a sideswipe or bump (and invariably a hit & run) the last one had a car bounce off a parked car & into the path of an oncoming car. Everyone was speeding. No injuries, thankfully but the crashes are becoming more frequent.
One neighbor wants speed bumps. As a cyclist I am way opposed to that idea. The city also recommends this street to cyclists (which is also dumb since it's a residential street). Another alternative would be to widen the street to the south. That'd be BIG bucks with all the emminent domain. It makes some sense, tho since the far eastern end of the street doesn't align with the rest of the steet anyway. It jogs south at the bottom of the hill with a little bridge crossing a small stream. A lot of people drive into the stream on winter days.
My suggestion is - put some kids out there in the street. No, not real kids, just project holographic images of kids playing in the streets to slow the drivers down.
My other idea is pretty wacky, tho - make drivers education more rigorous.

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