Scott,
Thanks for your advocacy on this. We got your last message to Jeanne Hoffman (in the mayor's office) on Friday evening. She was nothing short of outraged by this.
Hopefully, the city engineers will quit passing the buck and get off their asses.
Keep hammering!!!!
Here's an update:
I went by there about two hours ago, and a walkway had been fenced off away from traffic, but only on the east side of Charter, so people trying to avoid crossing Charter twice were still walking in traffic. The one walkway does now have narrow gravel approaches, so a wheelchair could probably negotiate it. It's much too narrow for pedestrians and bikes to share, so bikers have to either dismount and walk, or take their chances in traffic in the narrow gravel lane. On my last crossing, even the narrow walkway was partly obstructed by parts of some barricades and some fallen fencing, which I asked one of the workers to clear. (He was working on it as I left.)
So, they're making some effort, though still a pretty minimal one. Though they took the trouble to open a second lane for vehicles, it doesn't help cyclists much, as the two separated lanes are still very narrow. Experienced cyclists will realize that they have to take the whole lane to prevent drivers from trying to pass unsafely, but not all campus cyclists understand that. My preference would have been to use one of those lanes for bicycles, and the other for two-way motor vehicle traffic. That would have been safer for cyclists, but no doubt the inconvenience to drivers was considered unacceptable.
Similar arrangements exist at the Mills St. crossing, the only other one I checked out. Needless to say, all the intersections with Johnson St. need to have safe pedestrian and bicycle crossings.
Scott -- Scott Ellington Madison, Wisconsin USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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