A couple of weeks before our wedding, work crews set up shop in front of our house and on the corner down the block. Their insane racket started early and continued late, and to add insult to the injuries of noise, smell, and huge holes in the street, they plunked one of their orange signs right in the middle of one of my flower beds.
They didn't finish until the day before the wedding, roughly 2 hours before 100-some-odd people were schedule to arrive at our house for a barbecue. The end result was a colossal waste of taxpayer money that has become a daily irritation to us: a heeeeyoooooge speed bump right in front of our house and a traffic "island" at the corner. Each of these appears to have been located so as to serve the least possible traffic-control utility while creating the maximum possible annoyance.
We have no idea why these obstacles were installed. Our street gets pretty minimal traffic, certainly not enough to warrant such an enormous, bone-jarring speed bump. While the corner now marred by the island can be a little confusing, its now-removed stop sign seemed more than adequate to prevent problems. Plus, the island has the effect of reducing visibility for cars coming around the curve without requiring them to stop, making the turn more dangerous for other motorists and (especially) pedestrians than it was pre-island. And so we began to bitch about these new features of our street and joke about the Speed Bump Allocation Officer whose job it must be to build a certain number of speed bumps and traffic islands around the city each year.
It was all sort of funny. Until tonight, when, for the first time since the arrival of That Damn Speed Bump and That Stupid Island On The Corner (as they are known in our house), it was well after dark by the time I was walking home from the bus stop. After we moved into our house last October (happy housaversary, sweetie!), it took me several months to get used to the dark part of my walk home, and I'd finally achieved total comfort with it before the days grew long again.
For the most part, my way is well-lit, but the final two-hundred meters or so are very, very dark. In the past, I was able to walk in the street, near the sidewalk, which offered me a little more wiggle room to navigate and afforded a slightly more visible angle on the curve that represents the darkest part of my route. But now, the Stupid Island both blocks the bit of lamplight that used to illuminate the curve and creates a narrow path between itself and the sidewalk that makes both sidewalk and street extremely challenging to navigate blind. Tonight, I had to walk very, very slowly and sort of shimmy my left foot against the curb to make it around the curve without crashing into my neighbor's bushes or tripping over either the island or the sidewalk.
Once I'd survived that obstacle, I could see ahead the lovely lights Steve installed along our front walkway, and I made it home safely. Still, I was rattled and frustrated and pissed off. I know I have to call the City and try to push them to change something. Perhaps they will add a light on or over the island, or additional streetlamps - surely Ms. Speed Bump Allocator will forbid the outright removal of the offending island. Given that Boulder has strict restricitions against "light pollution," however, I'm not optimistic that my request will be quickly or easily addressed. So in the meantime, I have to relearn my walk home all over again.
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