Crap Streets & City Planning
A rant....
Sacramento has grown on me... allot. Its not a city conducive to tourism or people who don't know their way around. The bars, shops and restaurants are peppered around the city in a haphazard manner that I have yet to decode. There is a down town mall but even this is easy to totally by pass. It is inwards facing to itself - I know, crazy. And totally insular. With the street system the way it is you can totally miss the mall/shopping centre.
As I have learned more about the city I've found the good stuff bit by bit. Parks, delightful coffee shops and bars. You name it Sacramento has it. But there really doesn't seem to be a logic to it.
My main gripe however, now living in the down town of the city is the roads, streets etc. Sacramento actually has round-a-bouts (or "rotary's" as some yanks call 'em), but they have stop signs on 2 of the 4 entrances to it. This is absurd based on the logic of a round a bout where giving way is king and enables the traffic to flow freely. There is no logic to the stop signs which appear haphazard and random. There are 2 way streets where one of the lanes entering the street is blocked off (often when you come at it form the other direction off of a one way street) which I totally fail to see the logic for. This lack of logic isn't surprising as it seems to extend to the one way system which isn't simply up and down, up and down like many one way systems are - its not even like that in chunks. Again random!
Picture this 5 one way lanes, turns into 4 one way lanes. One lane comes at you from the opposite direction. No barrier, just arrows on the ground forcing that lane to go left (from the 5 system) and right (from the opposite direction). And all this happening in the light rail lane.
In summary: Arnie, or whoever is responsible for it: Sort out the streets in Sacramento. Whoever's bright idea it was to confuse drivers to try slow them down (the only logic, surely?) should be sacked and the streets re purposed. Add some sense to it. Confusing drivers can only add to a lack of safety.
FAKE FACT: Taxi drivers (the few of them that exist - there are not many in Sacto, oh I wonder why...) in Sacramento live, on average, 10 years less than your average Taxi driver because the stress they get in their day to day job takes many years off of their lives.
P.S.> Sacramento's city planning is rubbish in general so I'm not that surprised about the streets - commercial peppered with residential with the occasional industrial bit... whoa. Easy now Mr. City Planner.
posted by Matthew Woodget @ 9:09 AM
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