Watch your step
Walking in Spokane can be like stepping into a sci-fi story. Spend enough time as a pedestrian in the Lilac City and you eventually conclude that you have perfected a cloaking technology that makes you invisible to many motorists. Or so it seems.
I’ve been walking to and from work for several years. That’s about 40 miles a week. And I long ago lost count of the number of times drivers failed to notice my rather hulking presence and came close to making me a statistic.
According to the Spokane Police Department, there have been more than 100 injury-causing “pedestrian involved” collisions each year since 2003 – and the numbers are climbing.
What’s going on here?
“I think drivers in Spokane are not used to seeing people out walking and don’t respond to them appropriately,” said Amy Lutz, a Spokane Public Schools employee who has worked on making it safer for children to walk to school.
She might be right. If it’s not Bloomsday or you’re not on the Centennial Trail or in a park, the idea of walking seems to strike some here as odd. Hey, I see those looks.
“Is he homeless?”
“Must have had heart surgery or a DUI.”
“Running away from home?”
I encounter lots of friendly, courteous drivers who recognize my right of way. I routinely exchange waves and mouth the words “Thank you.”
But then there are those motorists who seem utterly oblivious. They pull right in front of me as I legally cross a street. Or, as they prepare to whip onto a one-way street, they fail to even glance in the direction from which I’m coming. Or they zoom by while I’m in the middle of a crosswalk.
In the words of Ratso Rizzo from the movie “Midnight Cowboy” – “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”
OK, like most of America, Spokane is a car culture. We all know that. But couldn’t we do a better job of acknowledging that there are other forms of transportation?
Spokane Police Sgt. Rick Dobrow thinks we could. He said we don’t have to look any farther than Seattle to see a more enlightened attitude about sharing streets. “There is a different mind-set over on the other side of the state,” he said. “People are much more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly over there.”
Earlier this year, Prevention magazine ranked 100 U.S. cities for their walkability. Seattle finished fifth. Spokane came in at No. 54.
“I think that, on average, Spokane drivers tend to be much less friendly toward pedestrians and/or cyclists than other cities in my experience, including Kansas City, Tallahassee, Dublin and Chicago,” said Amy Jude Keaton, a graduate student living in the West Central neighborhood.
All right, no one is suggesting that absolutely all Spokane drivers are either rude or clueless when it comes to accommodating pedestrians. Still, I’ve learned that if I haven’t made eye contact with the people behind the steering wheels, I can’t trust them.
The law says pedestrians have “preferential right of way” at most intersections. Often it feels more like trying to steal second base.
It’s not just me, of course.
Down in his windowless office in the bowels of the Police Department, Dobrow played a video of a local “targeted crosswalk enforcement” experience.
A police officer in plain clothes was trying to cross a street. There was a lull in the traffic and he started on his way. Then cars and trucks started barreling past him on both sides like bats outta Spokane, seemingly inches from hitting him.
The officer looked like some suicidal sad sack who had staggered onto a NASCAR track in the middle of a race.
If there had been enough cops on hand, the police could have written a dozen tickets based on maybe 30 seconds of action.
“There is plenty of work cut out for us here in Spokane,” said Dobrow.
To be sure, boneheaded and pointedly in-your-face pedestrians create some of the problems. Still, that’s a narrow slice of the pie compared to the role of drivers who are not paying attention or are simply proudly ignorant of pedestrians’ rights.
Why are we satisfied to tolerate such lunkheaded behavior? Why is it OK to all but invite visitors to regard Spokane as Jerkwater, U.S.A.?
It’s hard to resist the thought that this is a function of a lack of both urban sophistication and see-the-future imagination.
Chris Kelly, a writer who lives on the North Side, doesn’t really think it’s motorists who cause problems. He actually finds them fairly congenial here.
He places blame elsewhere. “The city traffic planners seem to be less pedestrian-friendly, apparently because people on foot impede the smooth flow of traffic,” he said.
Aha! I knew I had it in me to be a troublemaker. I’m impeding flow.
By the way, I’m not suggesting everyone should walk to work. For most of us, that’s simply not practical.
According to the most recent statistics gathered for the Spokane County Commute Trip Reduction program, about 2 percent of those surveyed had walked to work at least once during a specified week. That’s not exactly a thundering herd.
Surely a lot more Spokane residents occasionally want to leave the car in the driveway and simply hoof it from Point A to Point B. Sometimes, though, even that can be a challenge.
“A lack of sidewalks, even along arterials, in so many places in Spokane is a major barrier to pedestrian travel,” said Lorna Ream, a retiree living on the lower South Hill.
Don’t get me started on the subject of sidewalks. Instead, let’s hear from transportation-sanity activist Gail Prosser.
“Many sidewalks in Spokane are broken, parked on, or, inaccessible due to overgrown trees or plants,” she said in an e-mail. “Large areas of our city don’t have sidewalks at all. Currently, most of Spokane’s streets are designed specifically for cars. Frequent speeding and cut-through traffic in our neighborhoods makes it unsafe for people on foot or bike, and unpleasant for everyone.”
Does that sound like Near Nature/Near Perfect to you?
Landscape architect Bob Scarfo wished he had a camera one winter day when he saw a scene that, to him, summarized where pedestrians fit in the Spokane transportation food chain.
Snow plows had buried the roadside along a busy thoroughfare. So here was this elderly woman struggling forward with her groceries, literally walking in the street as traffic rocketed by.
“It said it all,” said Scarfo, who teaches at WSU Spokane’s Interdisciplinary Design Institute.
And if you are in a wheelchair? Forget about it.
Sidewalks are not the only issue, though. People who are open to the idea of walking prefer to have clean, leafy, well-lighted areas comfortably removed from the whoosh of traffic. Easier said than done.
It’s one thing to include a crushed-gravel path in some cul-de-sac infested housing development. It’s another matter to retrofit what planners call “the built environment,” aka a city.
OK, so Spokane is not a traipsing-through-the-flowers alt-tran wonderland. We know all about pollution, gas prices and obesity, and yet automobiles are how the vast majority of us get around the vast majority of the time.
This is a city that genuflects before internal combustion. That is not going to change overnight.
But Melissa Eadie isn’t throwing in the towel. A city planner in the Development Incentives Department, she is a coordinator for the multiagency Active Living Task Force.
She said some might be surprised to learn how many different groups and coalitions are actively working on making walkability more of a reality in Spokane. Whether those efforts will coalesce into genuine political clout remains to be seen. She said she is optimistic.
“I feel there’s an awful lot of promise,” said Eadie. “But people need to realize we’re not going to get one $3 million grant that will take care of everything. It’s going to take 10 grants. It’s going to take a grant for sidewalks. It’s going to take a grant for urban forestry. …”
Marketing executive and sidewalks advocate David Camp said local leaders could take a big step in the direction of improving Spokane’s walkability by simply agreeing to take the existing comprehensive plan seriously.
We’ll see.
Me? I’m going to keep hoping that my community will catch on to the idea that there’s a tremendous economic-development upside to being a pedestrian-friendly city.
And I’m going to look around for a new shoes grant. You wouldn’t believe how fast I wear mine out.