Streets are meant to be shared
You can’t really be a kid on my street.
When my 11-year-old wants to bike to his friend’s house a halfmile away, it should be an easy answer. We know the family, it’s close by and they both need something to do. But we’re not going to let him do that anytime soon.
The road is too busy. It’s too narrow, cars go too fast and drivers don’t always pay attention. It’s just not safe. So if two sixth-graders want to hang out after school, we need to arrange pickups and drop-offs with parents involved and all the complications that entails.
Trips like that are a small part of the reason why Connecticut is on track to miss its goals for reducing carbon emissions. There’s too often no alternative for driving, even on short trips. There ought to be an easier way.
Obviously, no one forced me to live on this street. When you’re buying a house — especially before there are kids — it’s easy to imagine potential complications will take care of themselves. Yes, it’s a busy road that’s not ideal for raising children, but who even knows if we’ll be here when they’re riding bikes, etc. It’s the same way you convince yourself a steep driveway is no big deal (winter only lasts a few months!).
But now the kids are here and we’re not leaving in the near term. The kind of road we live on is common in Connecticut. As bikers, runners, dog walkers and drivers, we’ve had to find a way to live on a street that was designed with only one of those uses in mind and puts safety at risk every time you do anything else.
Connecticut has, in its own small way, realized this situation is less than ideal. A law passed in the most recent session that takes effect Oct. 1 will create new safety rules aimed at protecting pedestrians and bikers, and it’s a welcome change, as far as it goes. But we ought to be going much further.
The new law would make drivers subject to a $500 fine for failing to yield to pedestrians at crosswalks, among other changes. That’s something they’re already supposed to do, but maybe the increased fines will help.
There are also opportunities to make changes at higher levels. Congress is talking about various iterations of infrastructure bills that could improve road safety and make real progress on climate change. Unfortunately, a lot of it is held up because a guy who got less than 300,000 votes in West Virginia last time around enjoys attention, and so is making the rest of the country play to his whims. That’s how things go in Washington.
On the state level, there’s the Transportation & Climate Initiative Program, which would add a little to the price of gasoline and fund some environmentally friendly alternatives to driving. Republicans (and a few Democrats)
like to call it a gas tax, apparently in hopes of scaring people away from it, and those tactics have so far proven successful.
Anyone looking to make sense of the anti-TCI arguments, though, will be disappointed. Once and future gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski, for one, says, “If the governor has his way, you could be paying nearly $20 more than you did a year ago each time you fill up your tank.” Even at the high end of the projected price increases from TCI, numbers like that would require filling a gas tank that’s something like 120 gallons, which raises a serious question — what exactly is Bob Stefanowski driving around our state?
Not that the other party matters here. Democrats hold all the power to pass or not pass TCI. After missing an opportunity last session and forgoing a chance to bring it up this fall, Democrats now say it will come up next year at the earliest. If they consider action on climate change to be urgent, they have a weird way of showing it.
This is a state, after all, that within the past decade was looking at widening I-95 from Greenwich to Stonington as its big transportation initiative. The current administration wanted to spend a potential tolls windfall in large part on more and bigger roads. We may be a blue state, but our transportation priorities are stuck deep in the past.
We need to rethink those priorities. Think smaller. Give us some sidewalks. Some bike lanes. I’d settle for a shoulder on my street. We’re not going to build our way out of congestion, but small fixes can make a difference.
It’s not just quality of life. The savings in emissions from biking a half-mile down the street rather than driving won’t save the planet, but add enough of those together and you start to see something real.