Ninety Degrees

To get to my bus stop I have to pedestrinate across my street corner:

This is an action very, very few people ever endeavor to take, and for good reason -- it's a death march. No one crosses in this direction, and as a consequence the neighborhood is gutted in two. Truthfully, there is not one neighborhood. The people living over there might as well live fifteen miles away; they aren't my neighbors. It's two neighborhoods separated by a wall of speeding cars.

I live on this suburban corner that's brutalized by traffic; not from the volume, necessarily, but from the speed. Take note of my corner's radius -- instead of it being at a pedestrian friendly right angle, the wide radius encourages cars to take the turn at high speed. Tell me -- why is it at all necessary for Elk Grove to build street corners like this? What purpose could it possibly serve other than to place all its inhabitants at risk? And I do mean all -- the driver who now feels comfortable taking the turn at 31 mph who might lose control in the turn; the bicyclist who now has to take the lane to stop the driver from attempting to cut her off while taking the turn at 31 mph; the child who's crossing to walk to school, crossing a corner now twice as long facing cars moving twice as fast; the mother walking her dog; everyone is put into harm's way...but we build these fucking things nonetheless.

Suppose for a minute that the corner concrete met at ninety degrees. Everyone would immediately become safer. The only drawback would be that cars would have to slow down to negotiate the turn. Apparently, this is too big a drawback to allow. To impede speed is treasonous in our auto dependent city.

Perhaps the Elk Grove traffic manual outlaws 90 degree curbs, outlawed because a fire truck's response time would be lengthened as the fire truck would also have to slow down to negotiate the turn. This might impose an unacceptable fire safety risk. To address that risk I offer only one incredibly obvious observation -- how many fire truck and ambulance calls are made to traffic accidents relative to fires, huh? 17:1? 60:1? More? Less? The actual number doesn't matter; what matters is that life safety is reduced as a consequence of us building residential neighborhoods resembling NASCAR ovals. Firemen spend a fair chunk of their careers responding to traffic accidents, and it would be beyond irony if the same fire department enables these accidents in the name of response times or truck maneuvering. At least their response times to traffic accidents are "satisfactory."

Every day I ride the bus home I get to stand on that adjacent corner by the fence waiting to cross the street, and the curvilinear street makes it impossible, impossible, to cross the street with any sense of safety. I risk death by anyone driving 30 mph over the posted speed, which happens all the fucking time. The only way to ensure I live to see the other side is to listen for a speeding car on Frye Creek.

And two decades from now, when I'm 60 years old, deaf from thrash metal, crossing my street for the last time on my retirement day, and all our cars, trucks, motorcycles, ice cream trucks, scooters and tractor trailers are battery powered and silent, some dumbass "neighbor" of mine driving his Oldsmobile Ohm thirty miles over the limit will run me over.