Since there will likely be a long string of posts on construction zones done wrong, I want to point out that they can be done right. This is one from yesterday. Though the crosswalk closure here was less than one day, it was signed properly, and the detour was very short, about 30 feet west to the next crosswalk.
Construction projects all over the city of Sacramento continue to bias motor vehicle travel over walkers and bicyclists. This has been going on for a long time, and it has not gotten any better. A few construction projects handle it appropriately, most do not.
One issue that I ran into yesterday is particularly galling because of the long detour it takes to bypass the construction site at the corner of J Street and 4th Street, at the California Fruit Building (not sure if it will have the same name after reconstruction). From the southeast corner of J Street & 3rd Street to the southeast corner of J Street & 4th Street is 380 feet, along a sidewalk which has been closed by construction. The detour is 785 feet, but the important issue is not the distance but the time. The detour requires pressing five beg buttons and using five crosswalks, a walk of 7.25 minutes, most of that time waiting for the pedestrian signal to change. A direct route would be just over a minute.
This map (Google) shows the detour.
What are the alternatives? One is that a travel lane could be removed from J Street. Both a pedestrian walkway and a bicycle lane could be temporarily installed in this section past the construction. Another is to install a crosswalk on the east leg of the J Street & 3rd Street intersection. Pedestrian crossing is currently prohibited (by signing and guard rail) at this location, but the prohibition is solely for the flow of motor vehicle traffic and the convenience of drivers, it has nothing to do with pedestrian safety. The crosswalk need not be temporary, it could be a permanent installation. Of course this crosswalk would require two crossings, but two is better than five.
Short of these two real fixes, the signing could be better. In the photo below, there is an unobvious sign indicating a detour to the west, but it doesn’t say which sidewalk. I did not understand what it meant until I had walked down to the construction fence. On the sidewalk that is closed, there is no indication until reaching the construction fence that the sidewalk is closed. There should be some indication of how long, or how many crossings, for the detour. A person might decide to turn around and head south to L Street, or to the access points to K Street, if they had more information. This photo also shows the pedestrian prohibition established for traffic flow rather than pedestrians safety.
In the westbound direction, there is even less information. The sign says sidewalk closed, and there is a vandalised construction arrow, which might or might not indicate the detour route.
I don’t blame most of this type of issue on the construction companies. The construction company has to get a permit from the city, which includes a traffic plan. The city is accepting, and in some cases encouraging, traffic plans with no, or insufficient, accommodation for pedestrians and bicyclists, and insufficient signing. Of course the construction company wishes to minimize the work and the signing, but it should be the city’s responsibility to ensure good traffic plans. It rarely does. I will remind readers again that the city employee who supervises this permitting process said that pedestrians and bicyclists would be accommodated if it did not interfere with traffic flow.
Since I have time on my hands, I’ve been walking a lot more in downtown/midtown, with social distancing of course, so I hope to add additional posts on this topic.
Here in the city of Sacramento, most signalized intersections have beg buttons, the button you press to get the pedestrian crossing. Some of these are on auto-recall, which is what it is called when the pedestrian crossing (the white walker symbol) comes on every cycle. Most of them are not; the pedestrian crossing will never change unless you press the button. A few of them won’t ever change because the beg button is broken. You would think that the city would label the buttons with their function: is it required, is it not required, does it only affect the disability audible signal? Who knows. The city can’t be bothered to tell people walking how it works.
This is a huge frustration for walkers ALL the time, but now it is more, it is a public health hazard. Is there corona virus on that button? Probably yes. Is the city cleaning the buttons? Certainly no. So the city is allowing and encouraging a public health hazard by requiring walkers to use the buttons in order to cross the street. This must stop now! The city must set all pedestrian crossings to auto-recall, at least until the end of the pandemic, and hopefully forever.
I have been going on two long walks a day, or sometimes a bike ride, since self-isolating (no, I’m not sick). The only thing I have to touch in the outside world, other than my door knob when exiting and my door knob when returning, is beg buttons. Of course I don’t touch them. I cross when it is safe; I don’t waste my time waiting to see if this is one of those required, or simply decorative buttons. Because I won’t touch the button, I have to assume that every signalized intersection is broken, not accessible to pedestrians, and I therefore have a right to cross during gaps in traffic, no matter what the pedestrian signal says.
Fix this, city. Now.
This evening, while walking across Q St at 12th, with the light, a driver in a SacRT police vehicle drove directly at me, stopping just short of the crosswalk, and just short of hitting me. His comment was: “I didn’t hit you, did I?” in a smart-alecky tone. He was clearly being belligerent and trying to intimidate me with his vehicle.
Way to gain public support and trust, SacRT. Please do a better job of screening your officers. SacRT knows where its police vehicles are at all times, and who is driving them. I would hope that this person is severely disciplined. He attempted to intimidate me with his vehicle, which is assault.
From the City of Sacramento City Express blog: https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2019/11/18/traffic-and-parking-enforcement-begins-for-shared-e-scooters-e-bikes-on-nov-19/.
The city will be enforcing both parking and traffic for the electric assist bike share JUMP, and the JUMP and Lime electric scooters. Many people are still riding the scooters on sidewalks, so I would expect citations for that. Under state law, not Sacramento law, scooters must be ridden on the street. The amount of parking that endangers or impedes walkers has fallen off over time, so there should be much less of that, but it will be interesting to see how exactly that will be enforced. The city still does not have sufficient bike parking, particularly in neighborhoods but even in commercial and mixed areas, and though it has installed a few bicycle and scooter corrals, they are far from enough.
From Councilmember Steve Hansen’s newsletter:
Please join Councilmember Hansen, SCUSD Trustee Lisa Murawski, Sacramento Police Department, and City employees for a community discussion where the main topics include traffic safety and traffic enforcement. Our office will provide pizza and water (while supplies last). Please RSVP through the Eventbrite link pasted below. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Please click here to RSVP for the Community Meeting.
If you have any questions, please contact our office and ask for Morris Thomas (916) 808-7004.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/safe-routes-to-school-community-meeting-tickets-79253157327
Mark your calendars for October 26th. The award-winning, inspirational, crowd-sourced cargo bike documentary is screening in Sacramento at the Hacker Lab (2533 R st. Ste 120, Sacramento, CA 95816)!
We’ll have bike valet parking thanks SABA and a discussion panel after. Bring your cargo bikes to show off! Sacramento Kidical Mass is hosting a bike ride to the event from the Coloma Community Center (meet at the playground around the back of the building at 1pm, rollout happens at 1:30pm). A huge thank you goes out to the Sacramento Bicycle Kitchen for funding this event!
Here is the story, as best I understand it. The JUMP app and the Uber app use the same login database. If you have or have ever had an Uber login, it is linked to a specific telephone number, and it assumes that you want those login credentials. There is no way to bypass this by using an email, it is phone number only. So, I had a JUMP account with a phone number and an email, and had at one time an Uber account with the same phone number and a different email. The JUMP app logged me into the Uber account, with which I of course had no credit and no membership.
Tech support walked me through over several days, with many back-and-forths, how to get back my credit and membership. It involved merging the two accounts. The user cannot accomplish all the steps, it requires tech support action at one or more points in the process.
So, if you have the same issue as I did, you will need to contact tech support to get it straightened out. Hopefully you will get one of the competent tech support people, which I did. I have been using the JUMP app for about a week now, and it correctly handles my membership and credits. Though I can’t see how much credit I have in the app, I can go to http://app.jumpbikes.com to see it.
When I look at the online portal, I notice that I am now a member of every single bike and scooter program that JUMP offers, both those I had joined before (San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles) and all the others.
On a related topic, the new JUMP app has some issues. It is very slow to zoom in and zoom out, and sometimes but less often slow to scroll. On the other hand, it seems to work better than the Uber app, even though they are both the same underlying technology. Last evening I was talking to a group of people frustrated by their inability to rent available bikes through the Uber app. They had been trying for quite a while, on a number of bikes. I suggested the try the JUMP app. They had it downloaded and were riding within a minute. I’ve come across a number of other people cussing at the Uber app. I think having cars in the mix messes things up, as the app is alway trying to move you to a car rather than bike or scooter. After trying the Uber app for a while, I deleted it.
When you are zoomed way out in the JUMP app, the Sacramento area is replaced by an icon, the ziggurat. For San Francisco, it is the Golden Gate Bridge, for Santa Cruz the lighthouse, for Los Angeles (Santa Monica) the ferris wheel from Santa Monica Pier, for San Diego a paraglider. The Tower Bridge would be a better icon for Sacramento, but that might lead to confusion with the Golden Gate Bridge.
If you use JUMP bikes, do NOT upgrade the app. You will lose your membership and any credit you had. It is now a pay-as-you-go system. Uber has killed JUMP.
I hope that you found the series of posts on Walkable Sacramento useful. The posts received some comments, but not as many as I’d hoped. I’d ask you to go back to them and make comments. Though comments are few, I know that this blog is read by a number of transportation professionals and a few politicians, who could have a major impact in making Sacramento more walkable. Many of them don’t or can’t comment because of their job position, but they do read the posts and do read your comments, so your comments are valuable. The ideas and comments will also be considered as advocacy groups in the city and region develop their own, most likely milder, recommendations for policies and action to enhance walkability and safety for walkers.
I did not address bicyclist concerns and bikeability. That is not because it is not important to me. I bicycle a lot in the city, and do want to improve our streets for bicycling. Though the data is not in yet, I suspect that bike share has increased the rate of bicycling far above that for walking and other modes in the central city. However, the city has done better on providing bicycling facilities, and addressing specific areas of concern, for bicycling, relative to walking. I am also not unconcerned with the safety of people in motor vehicles, but there are plenty of people to advocate for that. As always, the greatest need for improvement in our transportation system is in the low-income neighborhoods which have been traditionally underinvested, and continue to be so.
So, get out there walking, and get out there advocating. Our streets will not get safer unless we all work to force the government to make them safer. The drivers will not help us, except for those more enlightened ones who remember that they walk also, and that the value of a place is determined by its walkability and not its driveability.
Getting Around Sacramento 