"DEATH TO PEDESTRIANS AND BICYCLISTS!"
I was recently in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida and thought I was going to have a stroke. Vehicle traffic took a back seat to people on foot and bicycle. Bicycles had their own dedicated road physically separated from both the sidewalk and cars on main street. Heavily marked pedestrian crossings were up to 35 feet wide. Signs at intersections said, "Turning traffic MUST yield to Pedestrians." Wow! Not to mention there were other major east-west and north-south streets throughout the city with dedicated bicycle lanes like 1st Avenue, 3rd Street, and 31st Street. Nearby parks were bustling with walkers and bicyclers.
Then we have Mobile. Above is a Google Earth image of the busy intersection at Beauregard Street and Water Street just north of the downtown Convention Center and several public parks. There is something seriously wrong with Mobile's transportation planning and construction when there is not a single crosswalk provided for people on foot at a ridiculously busy intersection.
It should be noted that Mobile's main bus transit terminal is located 200 yards to the north of this intersection. A public housing project is located 200 yards to the northwest of this intersection. Bishop State Junior College is located less than a mile to the west. A middle school is one quarter mile to the southwest. That is a convenience store on the east side of the intersection. Lastly, the Historic GM&O building is on the northeast corner. There are sidewalks on Beauregard Street, Water Street, and Telegraph Road but no place to cross ANY of the streets at this intersection in a safe designated paint-marked crosswalk. Unbelievable. Nearest crosswalk to the Bus Station was at St. Anthony Street almost half a mile away.
There are no bike lanes on Beauregard Street yet Google Maps indicates it is a Bicycle Friendly street. Idiots! Any street that has no bike lane or paved shoulder outside of the lane of traffic and is paved only wide enough for a single car is not bicycle friendly. Six inch curb and gutter roads are not friendly to bicyclists. Speeding 2-ton steel projectiles and slow moving bicycles simply cannot safely coexist in the same narrow lane, period. If a road can't be built in a safe manner, it should not be built. It is better to have fewer safe roads than all unsafe roads.
Leaders in the South Alabama Regional Planning Commission, the Mobile Metropolitan Planning Organization, and City of Mobile Engineering need to pull their heads out of their ass and wipe the crap off their eyes so they can see. Or they can continue building and repaving all the roads in Mobile in the usual substandard way with the silent objective being, "Kill the Pedestrians and Bicyclists!" Doesn't matter if the objective of Death is on purpose or not. Death is what transportation planners are exposing pedestrians and bicyclists to by continuing to omit pedestrians and bicyclers from metropolitan transportation plans. No crosswalk? Jeesh...
Someone over in St. Petersburg must have realized a Pedestrian and Bicycle safe city is a Friendly City. People like friendly cities - especially tourists. Who wants to live in or visit a city in which you can't move around safely? Maybe that explains why the population of Mobile actually decreased during the last ten year Census.