Why is it so goddamn hard to walk in this city? And I'm not even talking about the city's outskirts or some of the notorious clusterfucks like Aurora and Rainier Ave. It's not even easy to cross the street in the city's densest neighborhoods.
Take Olive Way between Broadway and Denny on Capitol Hill. You've got two choices to crossâat Summit, where you can wait what feels like a fucking eternity because of course we can't inconvenience cars for the 10 seconds it takes to cross the street; or you can cross at Boylston and flip a coin whether cars will stop for you. If you want some more exercise and a little adrenaline rush, you can try to scurry across at any of the "unmarked crosswalks"âlegal but not remotely safe.
And let me go on a tangent for a second to say FUCK whichever asshole decided to be lazy as fuck and rather than painting crosswalks (or installing any sort of traffic-calming measuresâfuck that, right?) instead said fuck it, let's just say that every intersection in that area is a crosswalk. I mean just brilliant reasoning there. Let's just call things what they're not so that we don't have to think about them anymore. Just give this asshole the Fields Medal for the Third Incompleteness Theorem. But Jesus H Fucking Christ this city still considers "jaywalking" a crimeâfucking jaywalking. As if this progressive city doesn't understand the history of jaywalking and has such little decency for human beings that it tells them to get the fuck off the roadway instead of building walkable infrastructure and inviting public spaces.
But if you're lucky enough to walk across Olive Way and make it to Denny alive, good for you because you get to witness one of the truly most fucked up traffic designs in the city: There is a green arrow for turning right from Olive Way onto Denny that briefly changes color to yellow and then just a solid greenâjust in time for the walk sign to turn onâso we have cars accelerating into an intersection and then turning across a pedestrian right-of-wayâwhat could go wrong? It's like the traffic engineers know that leading pedestrian intervals save lives and they just said, you know what fuck them I-5 is just around the corner. Unless this problem is fixed, a pedestrian is going to fucking die at this intersectionâand the state Senate's transportation chair Marko Liias will throw his hands up and blame distracted driving.
But it's cool to know that as our world is burning you can always get to I-5 just a little faster thanks to the city's traffic planners.
And P.S. to drivers: If you hit a pedestrian, just keep driving. SDOT and SPD don't seem to give a fuck.
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