Pedestrian safety / Roving Reads

Fall break - time to take a breath and write some things. I realized lately that I'm a kind of grumpy blogger and kind of get on a soapbox about things. Although I'm really a quite happy person, I find it hard to write cheery slice-of-life stuff when madness is always going on in this region. So, today I'm going to write about one thing that gets my goat and one super cool idea that I read about.


Walkable Ann Arbor?

 

The pedestrian and the car

Two weeks ago Ann Arbor saw two vehicle-pedestrian accidents, one of which was fatal and incredibly tragic. In the second, the Ann Arbor police chief exculpated the car involved because the runners in question were not using the crosswalk. This was at Beakes and Fifth, where I've run many a time, and anybody who's been a ped knows that whole area is a death trap, with cars whizzing over the bridge and taking sudden turns. The week before, a fellow urban planning student was clipped on her bicycle - and luckily not harmed - by a reckless right-turner at Glen and Fuller/Depot. In August, someone was hospitalized crossing W. Stadium. And of course, last year saw another tragedy of University of Michigan student killed at a crosswalk on Plymouth Rd.