On foot today? Be nimble: It's scary out there
| Saturday, Nov 21 2009 10:45 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Nov 21 2009 10:45 PM
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I probably visit San Luis Obispo, that charming central-coast city 120 miles west of Bakersfield, a couple of times a year. I like to shuffle along the tree-lined main drag, Higuera Street, and stop for lunch at the Big Sky Cafe or SLO Brewery. Invariably I am taken aback by a strange and vaguely unsettling local custom.
I'll simply glance toward a crosswalk -- not having even remotely committed myself to the act of stepping off the curb -- and a moving row of cars will ease to a stop, their occupants looking at me expectantly. Some will even smile.
What manner of madness is this? Any sane person who has spent more than a month in Bakersfield recognizes this as a setup, a cruel game inflicted on the naive.
But apparently not in San Luis Obispo. In SLO, drivers seem to admire pedestrians. Perhaps some of them have actually been pedestrians. On purpose.
In Bakersfield, people are not pedestrians on purpose. We walk from the front door to the garage to the parking lot to the office and then back again. We walk on treadmills or the bike path -- or, if we are unusually trusting, down the manicured little streets of our neighborhoods. But not for the purpose of actually going anywhere. That would be hazardous.
Given my experience as a pedestrian in both Bakersfield and SLO, I was not surprised to see where the two cities lined up in terms of safety in a new report, "Dangerous by Design," by the nonprofit organization Transportation for America. The most dangerous city in California to walk, according to the study: Bakersfield, and by a substantial margin over the second-worst city, Stockton. The safest: San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles.
The report connects pedestrian safety, or lack thereof, to things like engineered traffic-calming features, scaled-back speed limits, wide sidewalks, frequent crosswalks and pedestrian signals, pedestrian refuge medians, curb cuts for wheelchair users, bicycle lanes, and pedestrian education programs for children.
But does the answer lie in safety features alone? Or is it something in the culture? Stack Bakersfield against the 10 most dangerous large cities in the U.S. and it sticks out like a geographic oddity: Orlando, Tampa, Miami, Jacksonville, Memphis, Raleigh, Louisville, Houston, Birmingham and Atlanta are all Southern cities.
Does that little detail suggest that Bakersfield, with its historical and cultural ties to Texas and Oklahoma, shares some sort of societal insensitivity to pedestrians? We have no such evidence, although it's curious to note that Bakersfield (which, if it were 20 percent larger in size, would be No. 7 on the national most-dangerous big city list) has a pedestrian safety score that's virtually identical to Tulsa's.
The study's authors stick with what they know, attributing the Southern cities' problems with pedestrian safety to growth-and-planning considerations.
"These (most dangerous) areas are dominated by lower (population) density and automobile-oriented development patterns, which include high-speed urban arterials that are particularly hazardous for walking," the report reads.
That certainly describes Bakersfield. But do those factors, in addition to whatever logistical circumstances they create, also convey some sort of subtle message about the hierarchy of the streets?
Put another way, have we allowed this city to grow and develop in a way that essentially declares open season on pedestrians? We hear plenty about the health benefits of walking, about clean-air impacts of building communities that promote walking, but how much weight does pedestrian safety get in the process of long-range community planning? Not enough, because, like many U.S. cities, it's all about our cars.
As a result, some of us have become very attentive pedestrians -- even in other cities where drivers aren't subconsciously tabulating the point value of the people in the crosswalk.
E-mail Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com.
