I live next a six lane highway. I am deeply resentful of it. The county I live in is one of the wealthiest in the country. My neighbors are mostly working and middle class and immigrants. The highway is maintained by the state (of Maryland) but the sidewalks on either side are the responsibility of the county. Except for when it snows, when it’s the responsibility of the individual home owners. Except for the bus stops, which might fall under the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Or maybe the county. It’s unclear.
I’m an average homeowner and resident but I know more about those inner workings of the roads because living at the intersection of a county road and a state highway necessitates it. When we first moved in here, there was no sidewalk in front of our house in spite of the fact that it’s right next to a bus stop. I spend a lot of time emailing and on the phone with various people trying to get a sidewalk installed. Representatives of the county tried very hard to dissuade me. I kept sending pictures of elderly people walking in the road to get to the bus stop. One of my neighbors was a wheelchair user at the time and I told anyone who would listen about the time that he called for a ride share because the medical building he needed to go to was inaccessible to him in spite of the fact that he can see said facility from his front porch.
A man was killed when he was struck by a driver crossing the highway (at a crosswalk) about a mile up the road. The audit of the intersection resulted in removing a small section of fence that stood between the sidewalk and the crosswalk button.
A driver ran her car off the road and hit the fence around my property. My children were playing on the other side at the time. Needless to say, a sidewalk with an appropriate curb would have stopped her.
Eventually they installed the sidewalk. It was one of my greatest victories. A few more crosswalks were put in where neighbors and I had requested them, mostly near the parks and schools. But not much was done to actually slow drivers on the highway on our surrounding residential streets.
But I was still emailing and calling and tweeting (this was back in the days when I was still using that site), trying to get the speed limit lowered on the highway or at least some speed cameras and enforcement. On many nights, I could lie in my bed and all I would hear was cars (many with modified mufflers) drag racing up and down the highway outside my house. I’d call the non emergency police number many nights. Little changed.
The highway we live on connects outer ring suburbs to downtown Washington, DC where the streets are largely laid out on a grid, except for these wider roads, which shoot out from the center of the city likes spokes on a wheel. The highway I live next to is one of these spokes. The next spoke over would potentially be just as inviting to drag racers, but the residents along that spoke are wealthy enough that they have their own private security force replete with speed cameras. So the drag racers converge on spokes like ours where the residents rely on the county and state for safety and security.
A little girl died two blocks from my house in a car crash that was a result of this drag racing.
Some time after that, the speed limit was lowered. Some time after that, speed cameras were installed.
Too late.
Once upon a time, this place might have been the American dream of the suburbs. Single family homes, green lawns all the way from the front door to the street. No need for sidewalks when Dad can just hop into the car and drive into the city for work! Hey! The developers even left out the curbs so that homeowners can decide where exactly to place the driveway! No need to think about the messiness of women and children or oh, I don’t know, poor people? (You know the people who build and care and clean to maintain these beautiful homes and offices and the roads that connect them?)
My six year old loves nothing more than to punt a ball as hard and as high as he can. (Ok, maybe he loves lego slightly more.) The problem is that the ball often ends up over the fence and in the street. We take him to the park a few blocks away from time to time. It’s just a big open field and a large parking lot. There’s no playground (in spite of promises made by the county that one would be coming). Sometimes there are a few neighborhood kids there but mostly it seems that people use it as a spot to pull off from the highway. I see people eating or sleeping in there cars there. Sometimes people are working on their cars. Once after a recent snow, three pick up truck drivers used the parking lot to film themselves spinning doughnuts. That was nice (/s).
I’m always tense walking there. In spite of the crosswalk, I still worry about drivers coming off the highway too fast. We have strict rules about where the kids can and cannot bounce the ball to minimize them ending up in the middle of one of the more dangerous streets.
The other evening, as we approached, we could hear music. Soon, a man sitting at one of the benches playing a saxophone came into view.
My son turned to me. “How does he play so good?” he asked. I didn’t know.
The sky was moody above us. We could see dark clouds gathering next to the field. And the man kept playing. The wind was picking up a bit. And the kept playing. And my son booted the ball to himself and kept chasing after it. And I tried to pause to listen to the music but also my son kept asking me to play with him, to kick the ball or throw it to him. And so sometimes I did. And the man kept playing his saxophone. And the clouds kept clustering. And the wind kept doing its thing. And it was a maybe a jazzy tune but maybe all saxophone sounds like jazz to me. And my son kept playing. And the wind blew the man’s sheet music about and he got up to collect it and we started to leave. And he shouted something at us. And I couldn’t hear him and maybe he said “Rhena!” But he smiled. So I did too. And the traffic didn’t slow. No one came back to life. The drivers didn’t stop and exit their cars and pick up litter or even stop to listen. And he kept playing even as we walked away and even through the first drops of rain.
Rhena Writes 