What Wal*Mart dreams of

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Neighbors gathering in the street… gabled houses and picket fences sheltered by trees… striped awnings shading corner stores… this was life before Wal*Mart paved it all over for a 50-acre Supercenter, right? Oddly enough, this mistily maudlin illustration of idyllic small-town bliss appeared in a propaganda advertisement placed by Wal*Mart in the New York Review of Books in April.

80% of Americans would probably never allow their children to walk the dog in the street out of a well-founded fear of traffic, but Brobdignagian corporations like Wal*Mart continue to use the visual vocabulary of walkable American neighborhoods (a way of life that said corporations bulldozed decades ago en route to greater profit) to cloak themselves in a comfortably gauzy veneer of Pax Americana. Yet Wal*Mart is the exemplar of the economy that has “progressed” and “expanded” to the point where the friendliness and comfort of this scene have been deemed insufficiently enticing of consumer desire, and therefore un-American. After all, where in this scene could one find a GM Hummer H3, or 20-pound box of America’s Value Choice from Sam’s Club fish sticks, or a $3,000 Weber grill? Disgusting.

One really neat new Google Maps add-on, for others who plan route maps (e.g., walking tours): Pedometer, a tool that allows you not only to create connect-the-dots route outlines (just click on the intersections) but also gives distances and perhaps even calories burned, and gives a one-click TinyURL to the finished result. Way cool, and really damn easy.

This new Traffic Management Authority is now officially way, way out of hand. Fran Spielman and Lisa Donovan of the Sun-Times report that the authority has stolen 26% of the crossing time from pedestrians at State & Washington, one of the city’s flagship pedestrian intersections — and given that time to right-turning cars.

We’re moving completely in the wrong direction here. Other cities like New York and San Francisco are embracing signal timing solutions that benefit pedestrians: scramble signals (all traffic stops, all pedestrians go), Leading Pedestrian Intervals, and, in New York, “thru streets” where all turns are banned to improve pedestrian flow. In fact, Washington Street is designated in the zoning ordinance as a “mobility street,” where new development should “promote safe and efficient pedestrian flows” (sec. 17-4-0604). And here city officials are stepping in to demote safe and efficient pedestrian flows — all in the name of adding a little bit of convenience to THREE drivers per light cycle. Three!

I would be willing to bet that people in private cars are no more than 20% of the PEOPLE who move down State Street every day. Cars on State Street are vastly outnumbered by people walking, riding buses or trains, or on bicycles.

IIRC, the city received a substantial CMAQ grant a few years back to coordinate the pedestrian signals downtown — someone walking at a brisk pace across the Loop can make all green lights. Reducing pedestrian timing would mess up this existing system, frustrating pedestrians — although that seems to be the point here.

The gauntlet has been set. Gridlockers, let’s meet at the Campaign for a Free & Clear Lakefront’s “God Save the Queen’s Landing” rally tomorrow (4pm, Buckingham Fountain) and strategize for how to defeat the “slay those pesky pedestrians, all hail almighty car” attitude of this new Traffic Authority. The “traffic problem” downtown is entirely the fault of there being too many cars — not because of pedestrians or buses or trains or bicycles. Downtown would thrive with fewer cars; it would die with fewer pedestrians, but the blind bureaucrats don’t understand that. They’d rather demolish everything and just pave it over: then we’d have no traffic because there’d be nowhere to go to! How amazing!