Crosswalk Follies

I love you, Dover, but you’re killing me. Well, you haven’t killed me yet, but as someone who mostly gets around town on foot, the odds of me getting smashed by a car are pretty good and getting better. Just last week, another pedestrian got smacked by a car in downtown Dover. The pedestrian in question got off lucky–a broken leg, as opposed to say, death, a fate suffered by one pedestrian in 2008, another in 2007 and yet another in 2006. This is apart from the dozen or so other incidences of car vs. pedestrian accidents on city streets.

Being a pedestrian in Dover sucks. There’s no need to gussy up the language or wax too eloquently on the state of walking around through Dover – it is quite simply a hazardous experience that, in the four years I’ve lived here, has only gotten worse. It’s particularly bad in the winter, when city sidewalks are left unplowed for days on end and ice and snow and snowbanks pile up to dizzying heights. In most cases, it’s safer to walk in the street than to wade through knee-deep snow on sidewalks hemmed in on all sides by giant snowbanks. Snow removal budgets are tight, and the city’s Community Services department is probably as overworked and underpaid as everyone else, but the general state of Dover’s sidewalks in the winter is about as bad as it gets.

Sadly, that’s not even the worst part. If, like me, you live just outside of downtown and make it through the hazardous sidewalks and into downtown proper, your chances of getting hammered by one of the thousands of inattentive motorists speeding through Dover each day increases by about a 1,000 percent. Dover’s main drag–Central Avenue and Main Street–resembles a race track, a one-way loop that encourages motorists in both directions to careen through as fast as they can in order to avoid the all-too-frequent traffic jams caused by a seemingly random array of traffic lights and crosswalks that seem to make getting through Dover much less safe than necessary. It’s a NASCAR arena with the added attraction of parked cars and moving targets. Last Thursday’s pedestrian accident is no surprise–the crosswalk at the intersection of Second Street and Central Ave. is poorly marked and motorists never pay attention to it, anyway. On more than a few occasions, I’ve had angry drivers honk and curse (and nearly run me over) at me for interrupting their speedy escape out of a Central Ave. traffic jam. The situation a few blocks up, at the intersection of Broadway, Central Ave. and Third Street, is even worse, with motorists going on and off of Third Street ignoring crosswalks, walk signals and hapless pedestrians with equal aplomb. The traffic lights at this already dangerous intersection were out of order on Sunday afternoon and still weren’t working as of 9:45 a.m. this morning.

The Dover Police Department has stepped up crosswalk patrols in the last year, and while the DPD does a fine job, it’s not enough. The layout of Dover’s downtown encourages this sort of behavior from drivers – and, for that matter, pedestrians. Dover’s pedestrians are by no means blameless, but getting around by crosswalk is no piece of cake. While there are four crosswalks in a four-block stretch on Central Ave. (from the intersection of Broadway/Third Street down to the intersection of Washington Street), there are only two crosswalks on Main Street and relatively few as you head north on Central Ave. There aren’t enough crosswalks, and the crosswalks we do have are just poorly placed. And those walk signals synced up with the traffic lights? Also fairly useless. They last all of 15 seconds–that is, when they’re actually working; if you want to (legally) cross the street at Broadway and Central when a big ‘ol freight train is coming through town, you might as well find a seat and wait it out.

There are improvements to be made–in fact, the city paid for a detailed traffic study a few years ago, but few changes have been made. Our fearless City Council instead devotes much of its time to shenanigans like this: “educational resolutions” that are little more than thinly-veiled personal conflicts between counselors. Local politics are always full of such nonsense, but Dover’s council is more egregious than most, with council business overwhelmingly taken up with discussions of Byzantine email policies and minute details about procedural questions that the average citizen doesn’t give a damn about. Some members of the council recognize this, at least (dubbing the whole motley group “collectively dysfunctional”), but that does little to change the fact the council does little of consequence. It’s not glamorous, but local politics is near about the only area where one can make decisions that have a discernible impact on citizens’ daily lives – an opportunity the majority of council members sees fit to squander in favor of petty political games.

Some progress might be made if City Council members were forced to be downtown pedestrians for a day. Climbing over snowbanks only to get mowed down by some angry driver might put counselors more in touch with the city’s actual problems. More likely, though, they’ll get hung up arguing about who crosses the street first and never make it off the sidewalk.