What do we need as a city? Signs telling us how to use the sidewalk!
It’s been a year and a half since the city’s sit/lie ordinance was thrown out as unconstitutional and replaced with the “sidewalk management plan” that designates six to eight feet of downtown sidewalks as the “pedestrian zone”—allowing the other space (if there is any) for protests, gutterpunks, and general squatting.
I looked last month at who’s been ticketed under the new sidewalk plan—tickets and warnings mostly target homeless people, but an increasing number of non-homeless people have been getting warnings in recent months.
Now, on downtown streets with high rates of illegal lingering, the city is planning to install these sidewalk markers every 50 feet to denote the “pedestrian zone.”
On the narrow sidewalks of East West Burnside west of Broadway and 1st Avenue from SW Oak to Burnside (map!), where the entire sidewalk is a pedestrian zone and “where there is a heightened threat to the life or safety of non-pedestrian sidewalk users,” the city will put up signs every 100 feet saying that no sitting and/or lying is allowed. The cost of this whole education endeavor clocks in at just over $19,000, with the money coming from the transportation bureau.
Might be easier to just paint the loiterable zone a different color, maybe with little bullseyes for the widest, driest spots to plant your butt. Not these metal markers that might trip somebody.
In a few years there’ll be tiny, stinging drones to police this, we just have to figure out what to do until then.
Is it just me, or do these things look like the back end of a bullet?
@tommyspoon: Shhhhhhhh. That’s “Phase 2.”
Much better use for the money than light rail.